Yuck. My feeling is that I want all entities granted with special authority (Government, employer, school/teacher during my school-years) as far as possible from my personal life. I just do not want to pollute personal life where relations are (or should be) as symmetric as possible by mixing entities whose relations to you are by definition asymmetric. Structurally asymmetric.
This is (was?) the whole justification behind anti-harassment laws. And now you want to put companies back in your inner circle? Those are not friends, they never were and if anything, there are less and less so in the modern world. They are not even human.
The only exception is parents when I was a child, a relation both asymmetric and personal...which should be a recipe for very bad outcomes. It sometimes is, but fortunately most of the time our instincts and genetic altruism (Hamilton rule) makes it work.
> I’ve worked at 90%+ white places that didn’t care about diversity and those are the ones where there is no company loyalty or friendship and everyone is just trying to get as much money as possible before they’re pushed out.
It's perhaps at this point that we should remember Sturgeon's law: 99% of everything is shit.
If Wokism is the majority, then 99% of Woke companies is shit. If 1950s style mad men corporations is the majority, then 99% of 1950s style mad men is shit. When a society is religious, the 99% of all shit is the traditional pathologies and failure cases of religion, like discrimination against women and obsession with taboos. When a society is secular, 99% of all shit is the traditional pathologies and failure cases of secularism, like atomized individuals with no communal support networks and obsession with secular taboos.
The majority - simply by being a majority - incurs a penalty against itself: It's the default. All of its nakedness is visible like nothing else, all of its flaws amplified.
Yeah, I agree with something like that, although I think it might have started before Tumblr on real blogs.
A friend says they're hoping someone writes a real "Origins of Woke" which traces exactly how the ideas went from the small blogging ecosystem of ~2010 to NYT, etc.
See my comment above-- there's evidence of the ideas from the 50s, some very local takeover in the 80s, and I still have no idea how it became a major movement for the general public.
I have a notion that a lot of living in peace has to do with tacit accommodation, and because it's tacit, it's very vulnerable to verbal atack.
So, I don't think I'm qualified to write that book, and if anything I'm less qualified now than I was twelve years or so ago, since it's been a long while since I've brushed up on the source material. But I think I'm better versed in what went into it than most people, and I'm prepared to at least take a stab at a substack comment on the subject.
My impression, as of around 2009, before people identified "woke" as a thing, and before the social justice subculture that gave rise to the term had really solidified, but at a point when it was distinctly trending in that direction, is that the movement was essentially a result of academic ideas filtered through a specific, mostly online social context. While a lot of people, especially back then, would argue that the academic basis of the movement was sound, but often interpreted poorly by radical ideologues, my impression, as someone who read a lot more of the actual academic work than most, is that this was a mistaken interpretation, that the academic work actually *was* written largely by radical ideologues in the first place, and simply dressed up in language suited to an academic audience.
I still identify as much more left wing than right wing, and this was even more the case at the time, since the far left end hadn't moved nearly as far away from me at that point. But, my impression is that at least as far back as the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a balance between the left and right wings on issues of racial and gender justice etc. where both sides essentially held to the norms of trying to enact their desired changes via collective political action and measured civil disobedience, with the left wing making more or less continual progress against the right, until the left wing decided to defect first.
This began in academia, with writers who framed the issue of racial justice essentially in terms of existential warfare. Basically "we are opposed by a group of ideological enemies who are trying to destroy us and everything we represent. The mechanisms of gradual change collective political action and measured civil disobedience are fundamentally aligned against us in the favor of our ideological enemies, thus we have to break away from those and fight with tools which fundamentally favor our cause in order to be able to effectively defend ourselves." Because the writers in question were academics with cushy university positions, their actual mechanism of political action was writing books arguing people ought to do these things, which were mostly only read by other academics and ignored by the general populace. But when social justice started becoming a major component of the online subculture which was incubating in the mid to late 2000s, although only a minority of people actually read the work of actual academics on the subject, people who did were extremely influential in the movement, and ideas which originated in academia propagated to fixation through it.
In the earlier days of the social justice movement, there were separate strains which cooperated on object-level goals, but disagreed over big-picture questions like "should we frame social agendas in terms of Us vs. Them conflict drawn around identity groups, or in terms of alignment with philosophical goals?" and "should we attempt to move towards progressively more colorblind ideals of egalitarianism, or ones which consciously privilege minority groups?" The identitarian strain eventually became more or less hegemonic over the movement, partly I think because it's an easier sell based on ordinary patterns of human thought (we've been engaged in identitarian tribal conflict for the entirety of human history,) and partly because almost all the academic underpinning behind the movement actually argued in support of the identitarian strain.
I personally started to distance myself from the social justice movement around 2009, while remaining broadly aligned with its object-level goals, in large part because I started reading enough of the academic philosophy behind it to realize that the academics other people were treating as foundational figures (even if most of them didn't actually read their work) were essentially arguing that we needed to abandon the societal institution of liberalism because it was fundamentally aligned against the goals of social justice, while failing to acknowledge that the mechanisms of liberalism had been producing consistent incremental gains for social justice for the last several decades.
"The identitarian strain eventually became more or less hegemonic over the movement, partly I think because it's an easier sell based on ordinary patterns of human thought (we've been engaged in identitarian tribal conflict for the entirety of human history,)"
This doesn't explain why many white men in educated circles also support this identitarian wokeness; if anything, it would predict the opposite.
Although it doesn't entail equal treatment or respect, people of non-minority groups have always been at least able to achieve "ally" status within social justice communities. My impression is, participation from white men *did* go down as the social justice community became more identitarian, but it still has something of an "only game in town" advantage. If you genuinely want to achieve object-level goals in the sphere of racial/gender equality etc, you don't necessarily have any choice but to bite your tongue and cooperate with the social justice community.
Apart from that though, I think that a lot of people never really learn to critically analyze arguments from people they feel ideologically aligned with. Picking holes in the arguments of people we already disagree with comes naturally (although for a lot of people this essentially takes the form of "this thing you said is offensive and bad, therefore you're wrong.") But my impression is that a large proportion of people will just nod along and go "Yep, sounds right" to pretty much anything they hear from an identified cultural ally, unless it touches points they've learned to identify as offensive.
I spent years participating in the social justice community, and would often hear people say things which could be interpreted as misandrist, or prejudiced against white people, etc. But there was a standard set of arguments for why these things didn't reflect actual prejudice which jived with my experience. I didn't read the people around me as actually being hostile, I saw that as a bad-faith misinterpretation of the points they actually presented. But over time, I accumulated enough experiences contrary to that impression, and my sense of the intellectual underpinnings of the movement changed enough as I read more of the academic work behind it, that I stopped feeling that level of charity was warranted, and it really changed my personal experience of the emotional tone of the movement. It was kind of like a figure-ground perception shift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure%E2%80%93ground_(perception)) where everything took on a different meaning than before.
I think, as the social justice movement has become more identitarian, it's become more difficult for white men within it to maintain that non-hostile impression, but it's certainly not impossible, especially if the only alternative they see to being in it is to join another group they already identify as hostile.
Yeah, to my mind the most noteworthy thing about SJ is its *illiberalism*, and, in particular, how it made illiberals out of many former liberals. If I see a book titled "The Origins of Woke", I would expect it to talk about that!
(Of course you've touched on how it did that in your comment below -- most people just aren't used to thinking too critically by things said by those who seem to be on their side. That's how I fell into it. But like -- this is something worth very much talking about!)
>Yeah, to my mind the most noteworthy thing about SJ is its _illiberalism_
Agreed. One noteworthy facet of this is speech/language policing. There was an interesting analysis of language policing at a woke Canadian university (Waterloo) in a short video on YouTube recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2g2oE0Q6fc . It is rather Orwellian...
I mean, it’s not like it started out of nowhere in online communities of the early 2000s - but it’s antecedents before then are several separate movements, some of which had long been opposed to each other. Civil rights law is one important aspect (and the origin of the concept of intersectionality, which ironically was intended to specifically *undo* the idea that members of multiple oppressed groups were the victims of additive oppression, but ended up being interpreted as precisely its opposite).
Good look with the Something Awful reference. The first time I remember encountering these ideas was in 2007 on the anti-SA forum SASS (https://encyclopediadramatica.online/Something_Awful_Sycophant_Squad), which correctly pointed out that the entire SA moderation and admin team had drifted over time to super sensitive social justice warriors.
SA was one of the most popular sources of online culture during that time, so... the influence was wide.
I feel like that's basically what you're saying, except that what I'm (ignorantly) ascribing to Hanania here and what you're saying disagree on the cause. I guess in Hanania's framing, wokeness was inevitable once affirmative action existed in the legal framework; whereas in Dee's faming, wokeness was not inevitable once affirmative action existed, but is a separate phenomenon that then seized upon the tool. I'm probably doing both of them an injustice with that, mind.
(To be clear, I'm not in the US and avoid most social media, so I don't particularly have opinions on this either way, I just immediately thought 'the internet' when Scott referred to the cultural turn between 2010 and 2015 and asked "Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015?".)
I would say that while Civil Rights Law might not have spawned Woke, it did Midwife it. You say it was just a tool for woke to pick up, but without that took Woke could not have forced the capture of the institutions the way it did. The true cultural capture came from every major company hiring DEI departments which forced it to toe the line and put the weight of the company towards the side of Woke and be used as a tool to silence/purge the anti-woke in order to fully capture it.
If Woke was JUST a cultural thing it would be vexing as shit, but you could ignore it. When it is a required element of every large company, school, etc you have to pay attention to it.
Yeah. Once there is a big bludgeon id pol progressives can use to force their ideas on everyone, it doesn't matter all that much who came up with particular radical ideas. *Someone* was going to come up with them anyway.
For a liquid cooled below its freezing point to freeze over, it needs a nucleus around which further crystals can form. But in most circumstances there will be one, so it's reasonable to identify cooling below the freezing point as the cause of the freezing, rather than try to search for the nucleus. Quibbling about who invented the more radical woke ideas, rather than identifying civil rights law as the cause of wokeness, is like correcting someone who says a lake froze over because the temperature is -5°C.
Very much agreed! And the legally binding group identities from affirmative action boosted the divisive identity politics with direct financial incentives.
When did companies hire DEI departments? The woke inflection is clearly from the mid 2010s so your explanation needs to explain what changed around then. My opinion is that Twitter/Social Media led to the increased appearance of stories (with some real examples) and then corporations attempted to appease their employees with these policies (but not actually doing that much).
Her article at The American Conservative (https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tumblr-transformed-american-politics/) is decent length, as such things go, but it does leave a lot of unanswered questions- like why did people listen to Twitterati at all? Why did fandom adopt such virulently hateful concepts out of niche academia?
Oh come on, really? The idea that some people on internet forums took over half the world's social institutions just seems...a bit riduculous. I find Hanania's explanation slightly sensible but quite vacuous, the equivalent of saying the American Revolution led to the FDA: yes, the second wouldn't have happened without the first, and the first laid the groundwork for the second, but there was obviously a further major leap that had to happen.
The actual origin of wokeness seems to me so blindingly obvious, that I just assume it's obvious to everyone, and it kind of seems like everyone's in some conspiracy to avoid mentioning it. It's really bizzare.
I mean, look at the dates mentioned in this thread. It was just starting to solidify in 2009. It developed over 2010-2015. 2010. 2009 again.
What could *possibly* have happened to cause all this...?
As I recall, the most intellectual, eloquent, and fashionable white Democrats disproportionately supported Obama over Hillary in the primaries - by a larger margin than other upper-middle-class white Democrats did. (And they thought it was particularly cool that he was half-Kenyan.)
Does anyone's recollection differ? It would be almost impossible to find appropriate survey or donation data on a group I've defined in such a subjective way; my guess is that commentary from that era, as well as our own recollections, are the best we can do.
If I'm correct, then it seems the story started before Obama became president. I think it's a complex story, in which I would give civil rights law a supporting rather than a starring role.
Historical nitpick: it's less that Tumblr infected LiveJournal so much as LJ users were forced to move to Tumblr as LJ got increasingly difficult to use starting around 2009-2010. The migration had more or less completed by 2012. Tumblr being so much more of a "modern" social media platform where it was easy to repost content and you got a random jumble of posts instead of a carefully-curated set of friends made it much easier for social justice thinking to spread.
I think the whole shift to showing users a melange of content instead of a staid list of people the user chose to follow was a big driver of that sort of thinking. It allowed ideas to spread, upped controversy, and drives that sort of "we must purge this!" was of thinking.
> A book called Civil Rights Law Is Bad would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days.
I'm unable to parse this sentence. Is there a word missing after "would"? Or it referencing back to something I'm missing?
He's imitating a pause in speech where he changes his mind mid sentence, for rhetorical effect. Imagine the dash was a period and the first sentence was just left unfinished.
For Scott: if that was your intent, the way I do this is I make su-- well, I add the dash to a partially-completed word that's part of a natural sequence of words so that it's obvious I've stopped mid-thought and started anew.
So in this case, I might say "A book on Civil Rights Law is Bad would be a terrib-- okay, I admit...."
> the article links to another famous case, where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application
Does anyone have a link to this? I did some searching and couldn't find any concrete references/credible sources. Just some off-handed remarks but no actual case history.
Ain't it funny how these "travesties" are never quite as simple as they're portrayed by the anti-woke crowd? Yet hardly anyone is prepared to do the investigative work to arrive at something approximating truth when it's so much easier and more entertaining to just keep repeating anecdotes that make their way around the internet. Oy vey.
Relevant difference? Tricky question - we can factually say that Scott got the gender of the purported Hispanic female wrong, but the relevance would seem to be that it is a "famous" case that nobody seems to have a great link to, and so resists any sort of validation. Journalistic stealth edits make things a little tricky; easy to see that Scott has now dropped some of the editorializing and added that link to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, but I don't see the link from the previously-mentioned Washington Examiner article. Might've been there before, or maybe I'm just blind?
The McDonald's hot coffee case is a great example: turns out the coffee was literally scalding and caused third degree burns and the company had been warned about the problem hundreds of times!
Right. And, that most of the elderly plaintiff's damages award was thrown out by the judge anyway. She ended up actually getting her direct medical bills covered plus not much more.
Liebeck v. McDonald's has resulted in a fascinating "backlash to the backlash" phenomenon in which misleading and exaggerated claims about how the case was "frivolous" gave way to misleading and exaggerated claims about (e.g.,) how Liebeck's damages award "was thrown out by the judge." The plaintiff's damages award was not thrown out by the judge. The jury awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages, which is the total amount of what people think of as "actual damages" (medical bills, but also pain and suffering). That amount was reduced by 20% because the jury found Liebeck 20% at fault for her own damages. The judge did reduce the separate $2.7 million dollar punitive damages award against McDonald's to 3x the compensatory damages award, or $480,000. That amount was (as the law requires) added to the compensatory damages award for a total award of $640,000. This was a substantial award for the time. The parties ultimately entered into a confidential settlement while an appeal and cross-appeal were pending, but the important point is that neither the compensatory damages award nor the reduced punitive damages award was ever "thrown out by the judge."
"The judge did reduce the separate $2.7 million dollar punitive damages award against McDonald's to 3x the compensatory damages award, or $480,000."
I said that "most of" the jury's award was thrown out by the judge. A reduction from a total of $2.9M to a total of $640,000 fits comfortably into my personal definition of "most of". YMMV of course.
And then of course a third or so of the final amount goes to the plaintiff's attorneys, and then the punitive damages portion is fully taxable as income. Hence "she ended up actually getting her direct medical bills covered plus not much more."
It's a case where there are enough facts favorable to each side that one's opinion can potentially go back and forth like a tennis ball based on which facts you've encountered. Opinions can also differ depending on what ideological lens you're viewing the facts through.
The range of plausible possibilities a reasonable person would expect when getting a coffee is anywhere between room temperature and 100°C. And the question isn't the extent of the burns, but whether McDonald's should have been considered responsible for them. IMO no, and the tendency to impute this sort of not-explicitly-assumed responsibility for not-directly-caused harms has a lot of cost to society. The lawsuit may not have been frivolous in the existing legal system, but the existing legal system is too litigious.
McDonalds advertised how hot their coffee was, their customers wanted hot coffee, and the government shouldn't have the right to punish restaurants for producing things their customers want in the way that they want them which don't injure third parties.
Yes we can say "The Thin Skull standard means..." but I'm explicitly opposed to that standard.
We shouldn't have to have dull knives, lukewarm coffee, or any semi-functional product just because a few people can't use it correctly.
Of course coffee is scalding! It's coffee! It's made with boiling water! And yes, McDonalds had been warned about the "problem" of coffee being hot hundreds of times, just like they've probably gotten frivolous complaints about hundreds of other things hundreds of times.
If you order coffee at the drive-through, put it in your lap (!), and then try to open it by pulling the tab toward you (!!) while not making 100% sure you're holding it firm with the other hand (!!!), all the while knowing you have mobility problems...and then you sit in the spilled hot coffee for 90 seconds because of aforementioned mobility problems (!!!!), you don't get to blame McDonalds for your own carelessness. Yes, it sucks that that it happened, but Liebeck's lawsuit was frivolous. The initial public perception of the lawsuit was exaggerated, but not wrong.
All normal coffee is scalding and can cause third degree burns. McDonald's was holding their coffee at 180°-190°F, which is the temperature recommended by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. Liebeck's lawyers argued coffee should never be served hotter than 140°F (60°C), which is quite cool for serving coffee and I don't think any coffee chain serves coffee that cool.
If you ever poured boiling water into a teacup and given it to a friend, you've given them something hotter and more dangerous than McDonald's coffee. There are many dangerous activities we accept as normal and worth keeping and you shouldn't later get sued just for doing normal activities.
So your argument here is *literally* "everyone else was doing it"? Didn't your mom ever have the "if everyone else was jumping off a cliff" talk with you?
In all seriousness, though, what possible merit is there to serving a beverage hot enough to even burn the tongue, let alone melt skin and cause 3rd degree burns?!?
Because people don't want to drink 60°C coffee. It's not "everyone else is doing it". It's following the recommendation of coffee experts. Coffee chains don't serve 60°C coffee because they'd lose their customers.
What's the merit of having a kitchen knife sharp enough to slice your hand? Or sitting by a campfire that could cover you in burns if you trip? We do slightly dangerous things for our enjoyment and drinking hot beverages is one of them.
All that aside, even if society does one day decide that some now normal activity is actually too dangerous and must be stopped (say we decide kitchen knives must be replaced with safe scissors and food processors), the way to go about it is for the regulatory body to ban it and then penalize anyone who keeps doing it. You don't just randomly penalize one person/corporation for using kitchen knives without first announcing the new norm.
The merit is that the coffee stays hotter on your way to your destination, so it's at a good temp when you drink it. You can always ask them to put ice in it if you want to drink it sooner.
This is just one way of doing things, but that's the answer to your question.
At a quick skim, seems to be a standard case of the EEOC suing for the use of criminal and credit checks as it does - this particular case is allegedly built around an individual who was rejected on credit grounds that failed to match Freeman's explicit criteria.
Was this a game of telephone where the defendant's attorney makes an inflammatory statement about the sought relief that gets included in poorly-sourced blurbs, which Scott repeated as the focus of the whole case? The chain of attribution is pretty shaky here.
Story seems to be that as Step 1 in the suit is that the EEOC needs to establish a prima facie case of discrimination, and that it relied on an expert report to do so. Problem was, the expert report sucked really bad, was excluded by the trial court, and Freeman moved for a summary judgement that was ultimately granted. EEOC tried to submit an amended report but it sucked too. Case dies in the crib and any argument about the sympathetic Black applicant or the mis-aimed relief is irrelevant. EEOC appeals, appellate court narrowly holds that the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded the report, and that's whole ballgame.
(And Judge Agee concurrs specifically to say that the EEOC fucked up this case *extra* hard.)
So either way the entire story is nonsense and no one was compelled to (nor did the govt attempt to compel anyone to) ignore prior attempted murder when hiring.
So 1.5/2 of the examples tested from (former?) nazi Hannannia are made up.
Maybe Scott should reflect on the credibility of the source before doing a review.
The example was from Scott. I feel like Scott owes an explanation or a hyperlink for this example. the whole claim looks really extreme to not source: "Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application" I can't imagine making the claim without linking the source, there is no such claimed link in the article, or on the internet archive...
>Although the book provides lots of examples about how the laws here are unfair and outrageous, I can’t bring myself to care about college sports enough to give it the same subtopic status, as, say, the hiring process for all the corporations in America.
While I agree that it's not as widespread in effect, Title IX (especially during Obama and Biden years, with a brief hiatus during Trump) has/had much more widespread effects at colleges than just sports funding.
Obama Administration's Title IX guidance (the "Dear Colleague" letter) eviscerated what little due process there was regarding campus sexual assault and essentially removed presumption of innocence in favor of presumption of guilt. Also- why are colleges "investigating" in the first place and not, you know, police? When you hear complaints of "campus kangaroo courts," you have Title IX interpretation to thank. Related to the other civil rights topics, this Title IX guidance had massive disparate impact (https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2019/01/21/black_men_title_nine_and_the_disparate_impact_of_discipline_policies_110308.html) and that lead to a partial walkback even during the Obama years, but mostly wound up in a weird position of balancing special interests (no rights for the accused but also can't suspend too many black guys).
>Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument.
You cover it with the repetition of glaring omissions, but for the exclusion of the progressive's counterargument has at least two reasons: A) he's not writing to progressives, and B) only a certain kind of progressive will buy that particular brand of "solving racism with more racism is worth it" argument. I considered including Ezra Klein's support for the "completely terrible" (his words) Yes Means Yes law above (https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-terrible-bill-and-i-completely-support-it) but it fits here too.
Title IX is also why schools across the country are allowing self-identified transgender students to use whichever bathroom they would prefer and other related items. Even rural conservative schools are being told by the legal system that Title IX requires it, even beyond the guidance from the feds.
>Also- why are colleges "investigating" in the first place and not, you know, police?
Because the police investigate on whether or not to send someone to prison, and campuses investigate on whether or not to impose academic penalties.
The idea that groups other than the police investigate things is not weird. HR investigates employee complaints. Parents investigate stories where both children say the other one broke the vase. Investors investigate company's reports and statements to decide whether they have a strong future. Etc.
And we hopefully aren't surprised when campuses investigate plagiarism or cheating charges, or other matters of academic integrity.
Assuming campuses need to respond to one of their residents raping another resident, why shouldn't they investigate before making a decision? What should they do, make a ruling *without* investigating, just flip a coin?
Of course, police can *also* investigate if it is reported to them. Two organizations investigating the same thing for different reasons as pat of different processes using different methods of investigations and different standards of evidence and etc. is not at all weird, if they both have a reason for their own investigation to exist the way it does.
> What should they do, make a ruling *without* investigating, just flip a coin?
Rape is a crime. What they should do is stay out of the investigation of criminal matters and leave it to the criminal justice system, which is far more competent at it. This is a win-win for colleges: If the person is convicted, they don't need to impose additional "academic penalties," because they will get locked up and no longer be a student, and if the person is found not guilty, the school doesn't get egg on its face (and potentially expose themselves to lawsuits) by their incompetent investigation and punishment of a wrongfully accused student.
This just misunderstands or ignores reality in too many ways. Examples:
1. Criminal investigations of rape typically take 8 months to 2 years to go from initial report to final sentencing, and can go years longer if there's an appeal process. Should the aledged rapist stay on campus with their alleged victim for that whole time? If the aleged rapist finishes out their education and graduates during the 2-4 years the criminal investigation and trial process is ongoing, that's the same as the campus having *zero* response to sexual assault cases.
2. Not every victim wants to file a police report. Necessary evil or not, being the victim in a criminal prosecution significantly tears your life apart, for the months or years that the process is going through court. Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus. Police actually investigate only a small number of reported sexual assaults, and few of those investigation go to trial.
3. The goals of a campus investigation are different from a criminal investigation, and therefore follow different rules and use different standards. Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups. Many witnesses are more wiling to talk to campus investigators than police. Campus investigations are designed to protect students rather than punish offenders, and therefore use a different standard of evidence when making rulings. Campuses need fast resolutions to protect students, police can take years to make sure justice is done correctly. Campuses are just severing a business relationship with a client, police are a government wielding its power against its citizens, again this justifies different standards of evidence. Etc.
Why doesn't the same logic apply for rapes that occur OFF campus, where they are far more likely to occur? Isn't it still unjust for rapists to be in vicinity of their victims elsewhere? You've really come up with an argument for our criminal justice system to be much speedier.
If you lived on a commune where membership was determined by a contract that you signed which agreed to binding arbitration by members of the commune for things like assault, then yes, that would make perfect sense.
But as I said like 7 times in the post you're responding to, *the government* has to balance the benefits of speed and decisiveness against the dangers of abusing its power, threatening liberty in general, etc.
Basically we grant the government a monopoly on violence, in exchange for them being extremely restrained on when and how they are allowed to use that violence against citizens. The extremely meticulous trials with very high standards of evidence and very restrained court procedures are all part of that, and that's a general public good that's insanely dangerous to erode.
No, the delay is not a genuinely public good. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/ Innocent people plead guilty often because the process (lengthened in an attempt to be pro-defendant) takes so long that they actually lose less from the plea bargain. It's an unintended result that serves nobody other than lawyers billing more hours and even they likely wouldn't have endorsed it if they'd known what would happen.
> Criminal investigations of rape typically take 8 months to 2 years to go from initial report to final sentencing, and can go years longer if there's an appeal process.
OK, that one sounds like a legitimate problem. How about putting some effort into fixing it, rather than just making it someone else's problem, with all the attendant collateral damage?
> Not every victim wants to file a police report.
You can fix that one with better training. Teach girls that they need to report sexual assault immediately, teach them what not to do in the immediate aftermath that would ruin the evidence, etc. This is the reason we teach people about what to do in case of various other emergencies: our natural instincts are often wrong, so we drill the right course of action into their heads so they'll do the right thing rather than the instinctual thing when and if it ever happens to them.
> Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus.
Again, this is the instinctual-but-wrong thing, and is actually kind of a horrifically selfish attitude if you think about it and analyze it for a few moments. "I don't want to have to deal with this guy myself, even if it means letting him go free and be able to victimize other women down the line. At least it won't be my problem."
Most victims who think this way probably don't consciously think about it in such callous terms, and I'm not going to accuse them of doing so. But the effect is exactly equivalent to this level of callousness, which is why they need to be taught and trained beforehand to be aware of it and not make that mistake.
> The goals of a campus investigation are different from a criminal investigation
Yep. The goals of a criminal investigation are to find the truth and see justice done, while the goals of a campus investigation is *always* first and foremost to avoid embarrassment to the school.
We've been trying to get police reform, on this topic and many others, for decades (centuries? probably centuries.).
I'm still actively engaged in agitating for that. But it's a slow process, and there's not a lot of political will behind it today.
How long should campuses keep letting their students get raped while waiting for that reform to happen?
If the police process isn't sufficient to protect campuses *today*, then why shouldn't campuses do their own investigations *today*, and stop when they become unnecessary?
>You can fix that one with better training. Teach girls that they need to report sexual assault immediately,
See again about investigations and trials often being horrific for the victim and ruining their lives for years. This is perhaps an difference in beliefs about an empirical fact that is decisive here. All I can say is I've heard this to be the case from many many sources I trust over my life, I'm not interested in tracking them down for you today, and if it were to turn out that I'm wrong about this then yes the calculation would be different.
And yes, this is another police reform thing that is very very actively being worked on by police reform groups and feminist groups and etc. But not there yet.
>while the goals of a campus investigation is *always* first and foremost to avoid embarrassment to the school.
Man, you are getting too cynically brain-poisoned by Bryan Caplan or whoever. The world actually includes a lot of people who care about people in their immediate community not getting raped, and are very motivated by trying to stop that.
Bill Maher made a career out of this type of professional cynicism, and there's a reason he looks like an idiot today.
Another problem is the massive gap between what the campus calls rape and what the police call rape. Are we talking "he roofied me, tied me up, forced me" or are we talking "the sex was meh and he hasn't called back so I'm retroactively removing my enthusiastic consent a week later"?
I'm not saying that a campus should do *nothing*, but they tend to jump to extreme options, lacking any due process or consideration of the accused. I get that you, like Ezra Klein and the state of California, don't give a rat's ass about them, their life is a sacrifice you're willing to make. Replacing one injustice with another *systematized* injustice does not justice make.
Sort of amusing because I would've expected you to be on the side of the accused in pretty much any other case. Fascinating how this subset of activity throws a wrench into that.
>The world actually includes a lot of people who care about people in their immediate community not getting raped, and are very motivated by trying to stop that.
Used to be that's what pissed-off brothers were good at, but that has its own set of problems, yeah?
> Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups.
Title 9 explicitly doesn't apply to "private groups" but to colleges that are accepting public funding. If your little exclusive club wants to have no due process that's fine, but the vast majority of institutions of higher learning in the USA are public bodies.
>Campus investigations are designed to protect students rather than punish offenders, and therefore use a different standard of evidence when making rulings.
That's simply not true. If it were, the accused would be able to complete their courses online, or after the accuser completed their time there.
>"Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups."
Public universities, at least, are *not* private groups and therefore the good reasons for restricting police *do* apply to them.
Just wanted to let you know I'm happy to see you around again. I always used to enjoy your posts on reddit (and possibly ssc?) for being reasonable and arguing a position underrepresented around here.
I don’t see why you’re happy, given the atrocious quality of the comment you responded to. Unless you enjoy seeing trainwrecks and consider them an “underrepresented position”?
In 1920, Major League Baseball investigated whether eight members of the Chicago White Sox had colluded with gamblers to throw the World Series. It found that they had, and banned them permanently from baseball. Separately, a court was investigating whether the players had broken the law, and acquitted them. So the professional investigation resulted in professional penalties, while the criminal investigation did not result in criminal penalties. Should baseball have stayed out of the matter, and let the players continue playing since they were acquitted?
Charming as ever. Nice to see some things never change.
>Assuming campuses need to respond to one of their residents raping another resident, why shouldn't they investigate before making a decision?
Considering the Title IX guidelines for investigations are quite possibly *worse* than a coin-flip for the accused, seems like a good argument for returning to sex-segregated colleges.
Investigation of non-academic offenses should be handled by the appropriate authorities. If the problem is that an assumed victim doesn't want to live in the same room/floor/building as the assumed perpetrator, then whatever, move one of them, not a big deal. If the assumed victim doesn't want them on campus *at all*, that's a much more serious demand and beyond the scope of the university.
From below:
>Necessary evil or not, being the victim in a criminal prosecution significantly tears your life apart, for the months or years that the process is going through court. Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus.
And... getting long-term suspended or expelled from university *doesn't* tear someone's life apart? Not to the same degree as criminal charges, sure, but it's not exactly a slap on the wrist that might entail years worth of lost education and tuition.
>And... getting long-term suspended or expelled from university *doesn't* tear someone's life apart? Not to the same degree as criminal charges, sure, but it's not exactly a slap on the wrist that might entail years worth of lost education and tuition.
If I were factually innocent, I think I would rather be criminally charged and deal with all that entails, than have my entire college career exploded without recourse.
Sort of a tossup IMO and depends on the factors like the specific jurisdiction, but yeah, you would probably have more recourse in the justice system even if the whole process is tedious and miserable.
The actual reason (I suspect) is tied to the history of Universities (https://historyofphilosophy.net/medieval-universities). Universities have always had an aspect of protecting students from the law (e.g. underage drinking on Campus). This means the university has to investigate these crimes because they don't want police presence on campus.
Similar letters also eviscerated the discipline and safety structures at a lot of districts when they were basically instructed by the Obama DoE that any regime of behavior correction that didn't have racially proportionate outcomes would put them at grave danger of lawsuit.
> That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian.
Really? I'll just say, this is far from a universal experience, and "Asian" is every bit as made-up a category as AAPI.
My wife has a story from when she was at college, attending a course taught by a Chinese-American woman. When a Japanese-American student tried to take the class, the teacher strictly forbade him from being in the class and ordered him out of the room entirely, because he was Japanese and Chinese people have long memories of atrocities committed generations ago. And the teacher got away with it free and clear, for reasons that would be too doxxy if I were to elaborate here. Not a hint of "Asian solidarity" here!
> Like I said with What We Owe The Future, it’s probably unfair to review this book qua book.
I think you're right. I haven't read it myself (yet; you've piqued my interest now,) but from your description, it sounds a lot like a book that assumes a fair deal of context and is expanding on it. For example, a fair percentage of its target audience has likely read Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals." (Have you?) Sowell makes the explicit case that Hanania doesn't have to here (because Sowell already made it) that "Civil Rights Law (from 1964 on) Is Bad."
Sowell lays out the progress of African-Americans in assimilating into broader American society and closing various gaps in their standard of living compared to white Americans, aided at times by various civil rights laws. (The 1964 one was definitely not, as this article claims, the original!) And then the 1964 law happened, setting up a bunch of bureaucracy to help things along, and all that progress that black Americans were making suddenly hit a hard wall. By the 1980s, with the "help" of a lethal combination of bad policy and cocaine, they were "advancing" backwards, giving up decades of real progress.
Post-1964 Civil Rights Law Is Bad, because not only does it create all of the devastating knock-on effects described by Hanania in his book, *it does so while also doing harm to its own stated goals rather than advancing them!*
In terms of Asians, I think most Asians I know think of themselves as Asian to some degree. Obviously the Chinese and Japanese don't get along, but neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white".
The salience of "white" is not a constant over time. It's not true that "The Irish Became White", as they were always so legally, but intra-racial inter-ethnic differences were more salient in the US long ago.
I don't think South Asians previously lumped themselves together with East Asians. On the other hand, Middle Easterners are legally considered white, and previously they & Europeans wouldn't lump themselves together, and now Middle Easterners are politically mobilizing to get a separate category.
In my experience, 'feeling Asian' is a 2nd/3rd gen American construct.
2nd and 3rd generation Americans are sufficiently disconnected from their home culture, that they more so 'pick' their culture/race than grow up in it. They are told they're Asian, so they choose to be Asian. 1st gen immigrants or culturally integrated 2nd gen Americans never use blanket race identifiers.
They are honest in their belief in being East-Asian or South-Asian. But, a Japanese-American's sincere belief in East-Asian solidatrity is a manufactured belief veering on offensive to any person actually from East-Asia.
Imagine Germans speaking for Ashkenazi Jews because they're both white and eat Sauerkraut.
> neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white"
Which gets to what the categories really are : "To what degree can a random white American (majority demographic) tell you guys apart?" and "To what degree can you tolerate seeing yourself reflected in another person?".
Chinese, Arab and Indian immigration patterns are nothing alike. In the US, Chinese diaspora first came to the US as manual labor in the 1800s. Indians didn't arrive until the 1970s, and are actually in the midst of a massive tech-driven immigration wave unlike China, which seems past it. Arabs follow neither narrative. Their immigration stories are grounded in refuge or fleeing persecution. Japanese and Korean immigration worked very differently, as they both ended up as vassal states of the US immediately after WW2.
What common immigration patterns are you pointing to ?
> Imagine Germans speaking for Ashkenazi Jews because they're both white and eat Sauerkraut.
That… was the normal situation pre-Holocaust? Like, many people didn't know they were "Jews" for Nazis until they checked their grandparents' birth certificates.
Wasn't one of the biggest complaints against the Jews that they maintained a separate identity and refused to integrate into mainstream German society?
The _complaint_ was there, but it had seemingly stopped reflecting reality somewhere before WW1. I mean, there were always _some_ minorities on outskirts, but the integration was far bigger than propaganda would ever give credit for. For instance, obviously the integration was the reason they had to switch from religion to race: there didn't remain enough non-Christened Jews to have the wide-scale attack they did in the first place!
There's a more complete description for each country of Nazi-occupied Europe in the back of "Eichmann in Jerusalem", but I think the general trend was that rich urban Jews had a tendency to become indistinguishable from their neighbors, and in places intermarry frequently, and sometimes even convert to Christianity. While poor rural Jews were more culturally distinct and kept to themselves (probably often due to bigotry by poor rural locals). I hate to say this about Nazi domestic policy, but that book helped me make more sense of it, of the Nazi sense of Jews as a xenomorph-alien threat.
(Giger was Swiss-German , right? I bet someone could write an interesting essay tracing a line from pre-WWII antisemitism to chest bursters.)
> "If the most important event in the recent history of Jews hadn't happened, then things would be different.".
Yeah, duh. (the dismissiveness is mostly for effect. Sorry about that, I'm feeling edgy today)
_______________
Often, Immigrant's most serious concerns have to do with these exact neighbors. Forcing a large intra-continental identity onto immigrants, creates a false sense of unity. It makes it difficult to talk about inter community tensions.
The South-Asian-Commitee at Harvard is structually unable to comment on South Asian matters because the 2 main cohorts (Pakistanis and Indians) disagree on all policy goals. You'll hear platitutes like "India and Pakistan should strive to live together', which is the sort of naievete you expect from elementary schoolers.
The Arab-American-club will similarly talk about peace and cease-fires even with the Saudis and Yemenis want nothing to do with each other. Jordanian Americans and Egyptian Americans will lecture Israelis on 'fair treatment of Palestinians', because the Palestinaians are now part of the greater 'Arab American community'.
Uber drivers are my favorite people to talk to. They're usually 1st gen immigrants, far too overqualified for their current job and talkative. Their biggest complaints/policy goals always have to do with neighboring cultures that are part of the same 'race'.
If I (an Indian) had to make a list of what identities I feel, then Chinese and Pakistani would rank as my bottom 2, despite being the 2 other big umbrella identities in the Asian race.
Categories make sense when they share traits in common or have common interest. Other than appearances, what traits or interests do these racial grouping share in common ? Hell, in the Asian tent, even the appearances aren't shared.
I agree, but why club them together into Asians at all. Why not have unity among all americans?
If race is used as a tool for affirmative action, then we already have fine grained statistics to dole it out at the national level. Why the need for blanked categories ?
Which comes back to my original point. A random white american who dislikes Chinese people for appearances, also dislikes Taiwanese and Japanese people for the same reason. The categories are thrust upon them by racists. Not of their own choosing. That it is the main utility of race.
And if that is true, then you might as well create races accordingly. East-Asian, Brown, White, Arab, SEAsian, Black and Mixed.
As more people intermarry across races, Mixed will become a larger category. If your nation is already (many Mexicans, Brazillians) and were cool like that, then assimilate into the mixed category. You don't need your own special section.
This is directly relevant to the fact that groups are fractal. Of _course_ we have strongest feuds with those who are relatively close to us but differ in some important-to-us way (cf. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/). Serbs will hate Croats, not Chinese. But this doesn't mean that someone who notes the similarity between Croats and Serbs is wrong. Same, I'm afraid, is largely true of India and Pakistan: they are at each other's throats, but they do share similarities important for interacting with them.
Another example: probably the _most_ alienating identity for a New Yorker who wants to control all guns is your stereotypical Alabama redneck who says "six guns is the _minimum_ to hold in your house". But _both_ of them will care about gun control much more than most non-US citizens, so the statement "for Americans, gun control is a hot button issue in an unusual way" is (with all the usual caveats about stereotyping) true.
I think it’s interesting how much someone who is otherwise seen as “race realist” is also acknowledging the important points of racial constructionism, noting that “Asian” and “Hispanic” and “white” are very clearly artificially constructed around their edges - though it’s notable that he doesn’t seem to make the same observation about “black” (particularly given the major genetic differences between west and East Africans and many groups within each region, as well as the cultural differences between parts of Africa, and descendants of slaves in different parts of the Americas).
Also, I believe the 2030 census plans to move “Hispanic” to the “race” category and create “middle eastern/North African” as a sixth race, addressing some of the more notable divergences between the legal/official racial categories and the social racial categories that have grown up with them.
Vast majority of ADOS are of west African origin. And they make up the vast majority of the black population. Slave trade stopped in 1808, whatever distinction existed amongst the West African populations that they came from has blurred to the point where similarly whether one is English, German or French American is meaningless. Yes there are certainly large and growing Somali and Ethiopian diaspora communities but I don’t think omitting that distinction is as large an omission as the one Scott highlights, omitting that he’s a race realist in the first place.
The idea that the specific boundaries are socially constructed doesn't contradict in any way that race correlates with any particular genetically determined trait. The only reason it may seem remarkable that a "race realist" takes a social constructionist view is that social constructionism is sometimes pushed as a motte, with the bailey being that a particular genetic trait cannot correlate with race [when the social constructionists want to argue it doesn't], and in any case race is an obsolete, pseudoscientific, racist concept [when you talk about race in a way they don't like]—which don't actually follow from the motte.
Most people are "color realists" and would say that there is clear and significant difference between color green and color blue, despite the fact that it is impossible to draw a clear consensus boundary between green and blue on a rainbow or color wheel - the boundary (or the number of colors separated; e.g. the languages&people's which split what's blue in English into two separate concepts) is arbitrary and artificial, but that doesn't mean that the differences aren't there.
> but neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white".
Maybe in America they adopt this bizarre kind of self image, but definitely not in Europe. In Europe it sounds rather out of place. Yes they share multiple identities (Slavic, Ruthenian, Orthodox, Eastern European), and maybe even 'white' - but probably more in the sense of 'white' as opposed to 'Caucasian' (meaning Chechens, Dagestanians etc)
Sorry for honesty but such misguided and ignorant offhand race remarks from Americans annoy me immensely. I feel like you Americans are doing it all the time and thus forcing your ridiculous categories down the throats of Europeans, far outside the realm of those categories' applicability.
He even included "in America" as a caveat, and you still have a problem with his assertions, which as an American I can verify as true? He's not talking about Europe. He made that clear.
Japanese basically committed holocaust level atrocities on the Chinese. Chinese are taught from early age their war crimes in WWII. Jew, married to Chinese. Feel neutral/positive to present day Germans. If I had gotten her 'cultural education's likely would not.
Yes, I'm aware of this. There are good reasons why the Japanese Empire allied with Germany in World War II; the more you look at the "State Shinto" religion guiding them at the time, the more they look like natural allies of the Nazis.
But as you say, today's Jews (quite reasonably) don't look at today's Germans as Nazis. And today's Japanese are likewise not State Shinto-ists... but all too many Chinese people continue to look at them as if they were!
The big difference is that Germans are well versed in their WWII history. Japanese never learn from their government authorized schoolbooks about their country's escapades in China, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The official Japanese government response is to play down or deny atrocities. The information (eg about medical experiments and bio warfare) exists if people seek it out, though.
If you are interested, The Wages of Guilt by Ian Buruma, who speaks both Japanese and German, contrasts the responses of the two countries. Some Japanese people even believe that Jews and Japanese were the biggest victims in WWII. Yet more Chinese people died during the Nanjing Massacre than ever died of the impact of the atomic bomb, Buruma says. Of course, official Japanese believes that is an exaggeration too.
The elderly Korean women, former "comfort women" forced into prostitution, who sat outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul for so many years? They volunteered to be prostitutes or their claims for an apology or compensation were covered by the 1965 peace treaty with South Korean.
I was in Japan in 2018 when San Francisco erected a statue honoring comfort women from the Philippines, China and Korea. Sister city Osaka promptly broke off a 60-year relationship saying the claims were historically inaccurate. I recall when a Japanese history, maybe 20 years, found an imperial army document ordering round-ups.
I know about the massacres, but I've heard recently that most of the "comfort women" were hired employees, though academics who have written as much got cancelled.
The last time I looked at this (20-ish years ago, so this may well be out of date), the majority of the women were forced, but most of them were only used for a short time - a few weeks, often. The long-term permanent organisations tended to use hired employees who did have a choice. And they did the majority of the work.
It is simply not true that the Japanese do not learn about Japanese war crimes during school. And yes Japan did settle all reparations claims with both China and South Korea.
>Japanese never learn from their government authorized schoolbooks about their country's escapades in China
I never know what to make about these claims because I was also repeatedly told US schools didn't teach the truth about slavery or the civil war or the native expropriation, and yet in my really actual school in the 1980s and 1990s those were the two MAIN topics my history books covered.
So much of the justification for CRT is sold to me as an antidote to a form of schooling that in my school district probably hasn't existed since the 70s or maybe earlier. I am positive my 1980s history textbooks would be CRT approved, with an effort to make black Americans ~40% of the content and natives another ~20%.
FWIW the Japanese people I have personally known seem well aware of their WWII history, and that makes sense since there are themes pointing to it in much of their media as well (those references wouldn't make sense if people didn't get them).
Matt Yglesias likes to say that the frequent claims that people weren't taught certain things in school is just people not remembering their schooling.
I remember walking through Sproul Plaza at Berkeley years ago when a group of Japanese teenage girls came off a tour bus and waited around for their tour to begin. An Asian-American student walked up to one of them and said "My family is Korean. Do you know what your people did to my people?" The Japanese girl looked like a deer in the headlights. I walked on so I didn't hear the whole list of (admittedly true) atrocities.
I would be a deer in the headlights too if a random person in a foreign country started speaking to me in a language I (likely) didn't speak particularly well about something that happened decades before I was born.
Even if I was reasonably familiar with the history that would be a challenging and uncomfortable situation to navigate as an adult let alone as a teenager.
I mean, the Chinese _also_ committed holocaust-level atrocities on the Chinese, multiple times and notably more recently. Not quite sure how that fits in, though.
There have always been tyrants, since the beginning of human history. But they didn't always have automatic weapons, artillery, and the like, and they also didn't have modern agricultural techniques that enabled the sort of massive population base that you need, by definition, to kill off a massive population.
Germany was kind of special in how the next generation was handling the crimes of their parent generation in the 1960s. The latter generation won that culture war eventually. Acknowledgement of the crimes committed by Germans in the Nazi era is totally mainstream. High school covers the Nazis and their crimes at least twice in history. On the 27th January, of course the German chancellor visits Auschwitz and asks for forgiveness. The bigger KZs in Germany have long been turned into sites of documentation and remembrance.
There is not a lot of stuff I like about being German, but the Erinnerungskultur is one of the things I like about Germany. Being rightfully ashamed of its past was also what was required to sever ties with Prussian militarism, which went quite well for Europe.
I am not an expert on Japan, but I think that it is not as open acknowledgment of their crimes may not be as common as in Germany. (OTOH, they also seem to have left their military expansionist phase mostly behind.)
Of course, post-war Japan was not exactly an ally to mainland China in the way Germany turned into an ally of Israel. So the framing of "this was the past, and the current generation is not likely to repeat their father's crimes" is probably stronger in Israel wrt Germany than it is in China wrt Japan.
I've thought, since I first heard that "Oriental" was offensive and to be replaced with "Asian" that it was far less descriptive, lumping together Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian, Iranian, Russian, and many more, all together. Yet it commonly still refers basically to Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Who would call a Russian "Asian"?
It varies quite a bit by region. I've heard that when Americans say "Asian," we think of East Asians: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, etc., but when British people say "Asian," they tend to think of *South* Asians: Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, etc., because the British Empire used to have some pretty significant colonies there so that's where their strongest cultural ties to Asia lie.
Yeah, this is correct, indeed British people tend to avoid saying "Asian" for East Asians, which is why you'll hear Brits say "Oriental" more often than Americans - either because the particular Brit in question is older and hasn't updated their language (it was acceptable more recently here than there), or because they are fishing for "East Asian" and not finding the right phrase.
Because of the colonial history, there are far more people of South Asian origin living in the UK than people of East Asian origin: about 7% of the UK population is in the census categories "Asian (Indian)", "Asian (Pakistani)", "Asian (Bangladeshi)" and "Mixed (White and Asian)". About 1% are "Asian (Chinese)". About 1.5% are "Asian (Other)", of whom rather more are South Asian (Sri Lankan, Afghan, Nepali/Gurkha, Tamil, Kashmiri, Sikh) than East Asian (Filipino, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian).
I've literally heard a Brit saying "I mean, obviously Japan is in Asia, but the Japanese aren't really Asians, are they?" - which is clearly just to say that they're not the prototype of Asianness in Britain.
If you were ranking parts of Asia on how obvious it is that they're geographically located in Asia, Japan would be near the bottom of the list. It's literally outside the continent.
I use 'Far Eastern' to avoid the 'Asian' problem here. Though, I don't use it much because it's rare that I'm not talking individually about Japan, HK, China etc. Same for Pakistan, I'll specifically refer to it as it's very different to e.g. India and makes up the vast majority of our 'Asian' population.
Yeah, if you know enough to realise that "East Asian" or "Far Eastern" is a better term, you are probably having a conversation on a level where you're breaking it down in more detail anyway.
Pakistan + Bangladesh + Indian Muslims (quite a few of whom emigrated to the UK instead of going through partition and tend to have difficulty describing themselves in terms of the post-1947 states) form a majority of all Asians in the UK, but Pakistan alone doesn't at all. Bangladeshis in particular really resent the assumption that all South Asian Muslims are Pakistani, especially if they / their families emigrated after the War of Independence.
There are an awful lot of people of Indian descent in the UK, ie people who tick "Asian (Indian)" - these are mostly Hindus and Sikhs. The population is very concentrated in certain areas and if you don't go to those areas, it's very easy to think that the prominent people like Rishi Sunak are from a much smaller minority than they actually are.
> because the British Empire used to have some pretty significant colonies there so that's where their strongest cultural ties to Asia lie.
That's not why. (Well, not directly.) It's because that's who's in Britain. The reason they're there is that the cultural ties made it easy for them to migrate, but the cultural ties aren't an independent reason.
Not a Slavic Russian, but many citizens of Russia are Turkic by appearance and Turkic or Mongolic by language (see Buryat, Kalmyk, Tuvin, Yakut…). Coincidentally (not), the Turkic peoples are more widespread in the Asian part of Russia, while European Russians are, well, colonists there. And, of course, those Turkic peoples would be included in Asian.
I don't mean to nitpick on this, but Siberian and Far Eastern peoples in the Russian Federation are *by far* not limited to Turkic or Mongolic peoples, with peoples exhibiting characteristics most Americans would find "Asian" speaking Tungusic, Uralic, and Yeniseian languages, among others. I would be reticent to describe these groups as Turkic by appearance.
The only reason I go in on this is because Pan-Turkists also like to make overrepresented claims about their connections to these people groups. Sometimes this even extends to native Americans.
"You are technically correct. The best kind of correct" (c).
Uralic situation is more complex though, both in terms of geographical Europe/Asia (much of Uralic spread is west of Ural!) and in terms of typical facial anatomy, so I went for the more obvious examples. As for Yeniseian, those quickly near extinction: the only living language is Ket, and there are ~1100 Ket people and 153 Ket speakers by the last census.
True enough that most of these languages aren't putting up the numbers of e.g. Bashkirs, though the Turkic languages as well as Buryats and Kalmyks are seeing declines in fluency as well. If it were just race we were talking about, linguistic decline wouldn't be a relevant factor.
I wonder how edge cases like Bashkirs are considered in the US demographic system (if at all?). Striding the Urals, many looking more European, many looking more Asian. In the end I suppose it comes down to whichever the immigrant chose to identify with - I have Filipino friends who identify as Asian, Pacific Islander (when they are split), Hispanic, and White. Turkic ethnicities are one of the hundreds of glaring cases revealing the lack of reality of those categories, with the "Turk-ness" generally being tracked by language more than blood.
Well, as someone who actually lived in Russia and looked at all this, you are definitely more likely to lump together a Turkic-/Tungusic-/Mongolic-looking person with Chinese and Japanese than with anyone else. For instance, we have both Uzbeks and Tajiks as gastarbeiters (immigrant workers, often illegal or quazi-legal), and, well, the difference is striking once you start to look for it: Tajiks are Iranian, they look like Iranians and Indians; Uzbeks wouldn't look too out of place in China. Not to deny that there still are significant differences (population groups are fractal!) and certain intersections, but in the widest sense, there is a relatively clear (but see below) divide. That may explain why in Russia, the term "Mongoloid" still remains popular: there just isn't a short alternative handle for "indigenous Siberian and non-Iranian Central Asian peoples, Chinese, Japanese, Corean, and Native American, who all look similar with their narrow eyes and glistening skin" (Pacific Islanders would also belong here, but, of course, they are rarely seen in Russia _or_ in the media usually available in Russia).
And then, of course, many of Russia-dwelling peoples are actually what would be called "mixed-race" in American context: some of their ancestors are Turkic or adjacent, some are Slavic (and in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, there would similarly be mixed children of Turkic and Iranian peoples).
>By the classical definitions of evolutionary fitness, Genghis Khan is among history's elite. The Mongolian ruler reportedly sired hundreds of children with a great variety of women—a feat of genetic propagation which echoes even today in the 8% of Asian men who still retain a nearly identical version of Genghis's Y chromosome.
Speaking as someone who is ethnically-Chinese, I completely disagree that we view ourselves as being a separate race to Japanese people. I see myself as East Asian, and I get the same impression from the other East Asians I know. The really artificial grouping comes when you combine South Asians, East Asians and Pacific Islanders into the same group.
Vietnamese would be Southeast Asians in modern terminology, or Indochinese (meaning exactly the same thing, the region between India and China) in older terminology.
Historically they were heavily Sinicized in a way that the rest of Southeast Asia wasn't, but they were still obviously part of a cultural grouping with the rest of Southeast Asia.
There's the Sinicization you mention. There's also Mahayana Buddhism historically predominating in Vietnam and China, while the rest of mainland Southeast Asia was predominantly Theravada.
What important things does Vietnamese culture have in common with all or much of the rest of Southeast Asia? I think of the language family and the European-colonization-to-civil-war trajectory, but I take your comment to imply longstanding similarities in social behavior, and I simply know too little about this region to identify them.
It varies, but in my experience younger Asian-Americans, specifically second+ generation, do identify with "Asian" as a group. The Chinese hostility towards the Japanese is definitely real, but I think it's a much smaller factor for more Americanized Asians.
Gardens are a source of interest in this way. We have a sunken garden here, the whim of a single parks department chief and a couple of assistants and some convicts circa WW1, created out of a disused quarry when, uh, Asian style was fashionable as part of I guess the Arts and Crafts movement. It's kinda cool if not perfectly successful, it being hard or impossible to grow things and create shade out of bedrock
It was called the Japanese Tea Garden and they managed to locate a Japanese guy who worked at the US Army base and installed him and his family to run the tea house concession.
By WW2 sentiment apparently dictated that these incumbents leave and be replaced by a Chinese family.* The name of the garden was changed to "Chinese Sunken Garden".
In the 80s with feeling about identity politics shifting to the treatment of Japanese the original name was restored - although the sign over the entry remains "Chinese Sunken Garden" because it was executed in an entirely local Mexican variant of "faux-bois" born of all the quarrying hereabouts, examples of which craft are fiercely preserved.
The name was perhaps less important than that it had been allowed to deteriorate, but a big fundraising campaign spruced it up.
The best feature is a shade pavilion thatched in palm, probably when originally done, from the state's only native palm.
I thought of all this when I visited the wonderful Bellingrath Gardens and found that one of their more recent additions was one of these gardens - what used to be called either a Japanese or an "oriental garden" - and it less successful than other parts of the garden, which goes to show that it's best not to try for everything, perhaps; but what was funny was that they had met the dilemma of what to call it, with utter panic, and settled on "Asian-American Garden" lol.
*We are very changeable and hot-tempered down here. For instance, when Robert E. Lee rode through town, having left his post at Fort Mason, in order to resign his commission, the locals stripped him of his uniform. I can't remember if they did so just because he was still Union-garbed and they were already Confederate sympathizers - but I doubt it, rather, there being a lot of federal troops here and to the west, and otherwise mostly Germans and a few Mexicans; or if they did so because they were mad at the sight of him, knowing what he was about to do. I'm sure these facts are known but the takeaway is always the same, it's a quarrelsome, rather stupid breed.
My problem with "Asian" is that everyone seems to think of East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) when it often means Indian and in my experience that's rarely what people think about.
South Asian at least should be its own category, even if we're being extremely broad.
I try to avoid un-modified "Asian", except when talking about US Census-type stuff. East, South, Southeast, and Central all seem to work as modifiers. Not sure what to do about the islands between Asia and Australia, though.
There’s a good case to be made, in terms of both continents and cultural regions, that Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia are five separate subcontinents attached to Central Asia.
Culturally speaking, the islands between Asia and Australia are nearly all populated by speakers of austronesian languages (as is the southern tip of mainland Southeast Asia), though there are major cultural differences between the Philippines, Malaysia/indonesia, New Guinea, and the rest of the pacific islands.
Great point, I strongly agree with that five-"continent" framing. Notably, all the other continents have around 0.5-1 billion people, and Asia has 4.6 billion.
And also, that model almost perfectly coincides with historical religion as well, respectively Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism.
For what it's worth, last month there was a post on Moly’s Substack (https://weibo.substack.com/p/040624-you-know-how-expensive-it) where the US Govt's decision to split the "Asian" category into more distinct ones was interpreted by many Chinese-American commenters as a prelude to a planned genocide, no less.
Borrowing descriptivist words, I think Asian as someone from the continent really isn't useful anymore (or ever been), because it tries to unite too much people that have nothing to do with each other. It's like "African" trying to unite people from Tunis, Nigeria, and South Africa, but even worse. So, Asian meaning East Asian (or South Asian as someone from UK said), is the most appropriate meaning it can has, and tons of people have unconsciously use it like so.
The idea that companies don't hire based on merit is ludicrous. Every person we hire spends 8 hours being interviewed and quizzed. This was true at my last five companies. Two of them had more than 20k employees and four were U.S. owned and based. Even before my post-college career, it was clear that hiring was based either on ability or potential. If you aren't being hired based on ability then you are applying for a job that requires none.
What kind of engineering? I didn't say that it was 8 hours of quizzing for all STEM positions. I said it was 8 hours of quizzing for all Semiconductor Engineering positions I have familiarity with. I did not say that anecdotes are useless. If your position is that "X is true everywhere" and I can show you that "X is not true here," then you should consider that "X is not, in fact true everywhere."
Scotts post suggested that it was no longer possible to hire based on merit. One counterfactual should make you question that claim. I was providing that. I do not believe that every company works the way I have described. The later post where I was objecting to anecdotes was objecting to using them establish a universal theory.
I think you haven't quite digested Scott's statement of Hanania's point the way it was intended. Neither is trying to say that nobody hires based on merit anymore. The point is that, since it can be construed as technically illegal to hire on merit, the regulators have a broad ability to prosecute anybody they want. So, in fact, everybody is still hiring based on merit, mostly, but also doing as much supposed woke signaling and under-the-table discrimination as they can, to try and avoid the prosecution that everybody is vulnerable to.
Showing that organizations still hire based on merit reinforces their point, rather than weakening it.
Unlike many of Scott's posts, I found it somewhat difficult to determine where he actually stands on the issue. He did say, "It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit." This was what I was objecting to. I think it is at least an overstatement and possibly completely false. We have had a substantial part of the commenters state that their company hires based on merit. Are all those companies just playing Russian roulette with enforcement? Seems unlikely. My _suspicion_ is that the same people who especially dislike DEI also distrust the government and are thus assuming that it is government and not corporate decisions that are driving many DEI hiring decisions. This isn't to say that enforcement has no effect. And, it is just a suspicion.
EEOC only filed 25 systemic discrimination suits last year (and 13 in 2022). This does not seem like much of a deterrent.
Semiconductor, specifically design but hiring process is pretty similar for the other technical positions as well. I have not been involved in hiring administrative or other nontechnical staff.
There definitely used to be a tech industry exception - or rather the tech industry was flagrantly violating CR hiring rules and getting away with it because it was so new and shiny and prestigious. Google's famous interview questions were thinly disguised IQ tests and other companies had similar practices. Of course the result was massive disparate impact. However, Griggs vs Duke Power Co does allow employers to use tests narrowly tailored for the job, and possibly EEOC bureaucrats could not figure out how to argue that coding-based tests like Google's are not legitimate or that hiring good software engineers is not a compelling enough business interest to set aside disparate impact requirements.
I don't think the EEOC is being disingenuous when they think a company is discriminating. Their perspective is coming from the side that sees actual discrimination, often hidden behind convenient stories. Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
That said, I don't think the EEOC has an actual problem with merit tests like Google having someone write code for a coding job. They have a real problem with mission-creep tests (like requiring that coding test for lower level employees) or anything that might be a hidden way to discriminate.
I think they also have some true-believer "woke" types that really think that any disparate impact is hidden discrimination, but for legal reasons this is significantly less prevalent than in other "woke-adjacent" contexts.
> Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
...which was quite adequately remedied at the appeals court level. The plaintiffs got everything they could have reasonably wanted. But the EEOC didn't want to fix the problem they were ostensibly suing over; they wanted to use it as a premise to push their social agenda, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, and we ended up with one of the most damaging rulings in history.
Also, if tech hiring is biased in any direction then it's primarily away from white people (and towards Asian/Indian people) so EEOC doesn't care so much.
The old Microsoft and Google questions (The IQ Brain Teasers) were bad interview questions. The switch to normal testing of skills that happened in the industry was better.
At least at that time, nothing like that kind of IQ Brain Teaser questions were ever used. It was pretty much 100% coding tasks.
The fact that the exact same questions were attributed to Microsoft earlier makes me pretty sure this is a viral myth that spreads because it's good story, not because it's true.
Oh, did you mean questions like "how many marbles fit inside a whale"? I meant exactly the coding quiz. Develop a priority heap on a blackboard, leetcode problems using twisted dynamic programming and other tricks, stuff like that. Speaking from experience, in practical software work you need to solve problems like that maybe once a year. Most often you just get an existing solution from the virtual shelf, or at worst implement an algorithm from a book.
I heard (at Samsung, from people fleeing Intel) that Samsung was still meritocratic in this way / the nepotism was all pro-Korean nationals in a way that totally ignored American racial categories, but that Intel had 'gone woke' in its hiring / promotion.
Because at the American fab, approximately none of the local hiring pool is Koreans, and so it's only relevant if you're trying to get very high up the corporate ladder.
Also because if some foreign-headquartered companies discriminate in favor of the nationality of their origin, that results in discrimination at various different directions at different companies, and (even if there is more such discrimination in favor of some groups than others, which is likely) yet other companies, such as domestic ones, practice no such discrimination, and (if they weren't incentivized to practice affirmation either) they would provide employment opportunities to whoever isn't favored at any of the foreign companies. That has much less overall effect on anyone's employment prospects than government-incentivized affirmative action all in favor of the same groups everywhere.
Ah, yes, the infallible Hanania “golden gut”. The anti-empiricism in the book is the tell-he is just writing another propaganda piece, designed to advance his priors. Sort of like Chris Rico, without the smarts or glibness.
Seems like one of those phenomena like Bullshit Jobs where everyone is certain it's happening, just not in their own job or anything they have direct experience with, but someone out there definitely
You can believe me or not, but I just got an email from someone in a pretty important field saying that affirmative actions and de facto quotas definitely happen there but they're too scared to post it publicly even under a pseudonym.
I used to work for a major DoD agency where the recruiters bragged about how many minority candidates they were able to attract … way beyond what would be proportionate.
There were obvious pressure and incentives to do well at that, and merely having the proportionate minimum would make one less competitive for promotions and such. Gotta exceed the standard!
There’s a whole little industry of recruiting companies that specialize in helping minority candidates land great tech jobs by finding and coaching them (veterans are also a legal minority here.) The companies really want qualified minorities for legal reasons if nothing else.
There are both material incentives and ideological motivations in play here for both any given org’s leadership and HR types. But those aren’t entirely separate variables because they feed off each other.
Do you really find an email from a random person to be convincing here? The people I see complaining about affirmative action at work are people who see less experienced/competent minorities doing better than them. However, the reason they, themselves, don't excel tends to be some mix of laziness, unreliability and antisocial behaviors. Their vehemence in objecting to affirmative action seems to be mostly a means to downplay their own shortcomings.
I think you're doing the bulverizing thing again - I've heard this from lots of different people, including hiring directors, and the person who sent the email seemed pretty successful. See also all the comments on this post; the above comment seems like an outlier.
The pattern you describe would also be present if there was a real, widely-known problem, but the people with more social skills and better impulse control were being proportionately more careful not to admit it anywhere a snitch might overhear. What sort of experiment would effectively distinguish those hypotheses?
I can vouch for that happening at a small federal contractor. We were told to track race of applicants and present that information upon demand. The implications were clear, even if not spelled out, and we followed through on hiring racial minorities as much as we were able.
Oh it is definitely happening in my world where I provide subcontractor consulting for the federal government a lot (for larger firms) and get involved in a lot of hiring at cities and states and to some extent the federal civil service.
I don't doubt you that someone said that. But as it doesn't match my own experience I have to doubt whether that person is reporting accurately, or whether their experience reflects general prevalence
The general problem with arguments that there's a large group of people who would agree but aren't saying anything is that they're unfalsifiable. Like false consciousness or a silent majority. The same evidence can be equally explained by a small number of people reporting who assume their experience generalizes.
It's obviously hard to definitively prove one way or the other of people are unwilling to speak publicly. Maybe a sufficiently anonymized survey would get at that? I imagine someone must have done one on a relevant question given how much of a hot political topic it has been
Sadly, there's rampant gaslighting going on on the subject of political topics these days, *and also* a very broad diversity of personal experiences, so either one is plausible and consistent with the facts.
Doesn't reflect my experience in either government or private sector. Though I'm not in California, which is plausibly an outlier on this given wider cultural trends. Also just general random selection, it's hard to get a sense of prevalence when we're just trading n=1 anecdotes.
When you say you see it everywhere what specifically are you seeing? I
I'm seeing extremely obvious and not-at-all-veiled hints that females, blacks, and latinos should be prioritised for hiring.
I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.
If me hearing about this sort of thing in all those places still somehow is so distant from your own personal experience that you'd qualify it as bullshit that people are making up... I just don't know what to say.
Admittedly, it seems they all have an oversized presence in California, and if somehow this phenomenon is 90% CA, and you've somehow never spoken to anyone who's ever experienced CA, I could see your ignorance of this being a distant possibility. But I also struggle to think that something that's nearly ubiquitous in CA is completely absent in the rest of the USA.
You're missing a gigantic chunk of what's happening to something like 90% of the populace. You might consider getting some information from outside your filter bubble, or talking to someone in one of those megacorps.
It really seems weird to me that he didn’t list academia as another example where people are so dedicated to getting their first choice rather than the second choice that they are willing to pay hugely for it. The prevalence of H1B visas and major international recruitment is a major sign.
There is huge racial and gender bias towards favored groups (racial minorities except Asians; women) in hiring in academia. International hiring is a sign that it's a global market, not that it's cut-throat meritocracy.
There’s a lot of people that people like to classify as bullshit jobs. Many people think of their own job as bullshit. But this is just Marx’s phenomenon of alienation, happening to white collar jobs now rather than just blue collar ones. Marx noted that step 17 of the assembly line for widgets doesn’t feel meaningful, and the same is true for email 346 in the compliance process. But that’s just because assembly lines and compliance processes are designed to get the job done, not to make the people doing the job (or the people around them) understand that what they’re doing matters.
Only the top 0.1% of society can derive “meaning” from their work because they’re the only ones who have enough money to cover every need imaginable. The other 99.9% have to give up on meaning or find it in a different area, such as spirituality.
This was true for the past 10 thousand years and will stay true as long as we have something resembling our current society.
Rather than announce “Mission accomplished” and go find other work, the triumphant forces of the civil rights bureaucracy became instead the scourge of ever more esoteric forms of discrimination, such as disparate impact, hostile environment due to mean speech, sexual harassment, and disability access. They increasingly intervened in the American workplace in favor of complaining members of protected groups, which cultivated a culture of complaint.
Meanwhile, center-right judges, such as Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell in the 1978 Bakke decision, banned simple, obvious methods to promote now-privileged groups such as outright quotas in favor of more occluded “goals,” with enforcement largely by lawsuits, public and private. This had the unintended result of making affirmative action, almost always a political loser for Democrats, less politically salient. Hanania notes:
Only when civil rights law cannot stealthily prefer some groups over others does it do so openly.
Over time, Democrats figured out that it was in their interest for corporations to be uncertain what exactly the governments’ rules are regarding race and sex. This avoided making clear to voters, who, even in California remain strongly opposed to racial preferences, how much of a thumb the government was putting on the scale.
The government tries to keep the public confused. For example, Hanania writes:
"The “EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] Is the Law” poster that a firm is required to place in a conspicuous place informs its workers, among other things, that “Executive Order 11246, as amended, prohibits job discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and requires affirmative action to ensure equality of opportunity in all aspects of employment.” In other words, major American institutions are required to declare within the same sentence both that they do not discriminate and that they practice affirmative action…. To do business with the federal government, one must participate in rituals that both legitimize the goals of the state while hiding the nature of the project."
Likewise, while the press constantly reprints plaintiff attorney’s arguments alleging discrimination against blacks based on dubious disparate impact allegations, the media mostly only reports on institutionalized racial discrimination against whites every five or ten years when a college admissions lawsuit makes it to the Supreme Court. So it is easy for the average American to remain oblivious to how the system works.
I was about to reply: "This needs to be a top-level post somewhere." Then I noticed your name. You probably did make this a top-level post somewhere. If not, I can't wait to see your post on this topic in the near future!
My view also. Also, I work in civil service and the idea that hiring is not based on merit is laughable. In fact, I have never witnessed a racial preference occurring in action.
I’m in the federal civil service (US), and hiring is on merit. Ive never seen anyone hired who wasn’t deemed qualified at the point of hire. Not everyone works out, of course. Just like the private sector.
My former agency was extremely concerned about imbalances in its minority and gender status and took specific steps to try fixing it. Having recruiters disproportionately focus on hiring minorities is a form of racial preference.
Some parts of government, like the Foreign Service, still have a testing regime similar to the classic one. Of course, so did the FAA and that didn’t turn out well.
Getting rid of the civil service exams lowered the ability to select on people good at testing. Inasmuch as you believe the well-established correlations between standardized testing, general intelligence, and job performance, you’ll be proportionately concerned.
It’s usually not the case that any given employer blatantly jettisons merit. The problem being alleged is more subtle than that.
The more difficult but more defensible options include actively advertising where you believe black applicants may see it, and ensuring (sometimes explicitly as policy, usually not) that black applicants make it to the interview.
Legally and morally, that's much better than an actual quota system, but it will put pressure on everyone involved to nudge a qualified-but-perhaps-not-as-much candidate over someone else. Whether this is a problem depends on your perspective, but it appears Hanania thinks so.
IDK, going from "Civil Rights laws indirectly cause companies to inefficiently allocate HR money advertising at HBCU" to "Civil Rights legislation undermined hiring for merit" seems like a motte and bailey to me.
Both have absolutely happened, though. The more straightforward is just to tell your hiring managers to select black applicants, but that's often too obvious. The less obvious way is to try to influence the candidate pool, but it takes a lot more work and may not actually result in additional qualified black applicants, so some companies don't rest their laurels on that approach.
From my view from slightly outside the civil service this claim is just laughably silly at several federal departments. I don't know maybe you work at a different one, the federal government is a big place. But in my area the diversity hiring/promotion is extremely noticeable, to the extent that the small number of white male staff often end up leaving.
Merit is important, but other factors are clearly taken into consideration. I used to interview candidates for software engineering roles. Usually I would do an interview with another colleague, and at the end we'd give our manager a thumbs up or thumbs down for a candidate.
I recall one case where we interviewed a guy from an underrepresented group, and both of us gave a thumbs down. The next week I was surprised to see him sitting at a desk because he'd been hired. I approached the manager just to make sure there wasn't a miscommunication in our interview feedback, and he just sort of shrugged it off and said he thought the guy was a good fit. It wasn't a meritless hire--he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed.
I can't really say I blame the manager. We were in a client-facing consultancy group, and some potential clients do like to see diversity on a team.
I think cases like this are much more common than either completely ignoring race or merit. Assuming your interview process matches my experience of software interviews, it's not that surprising that the manager might review the feedback with more detail especially since you use the awkward phrase "he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed" and if I were the hiring manager and that was in the feedback I'd definitely consider collecting more information before passing on that candidate (this is based on both existing EEOC law as well as my personal morality opinions on diversity).
I said 20k employees in my comment. One was 30K when I started but only 6k when I left (19 years later). The other was actually closer to 18K when I started and trimmed down to maybe 16k before it was acquired.
In most government service, your vita won't even be considered if you don't have the professional background required for the post. This is why some who work in civil service are annoyed when politicians make appointments based solely on one's racial or ethnic or otherwise privileged identity -- with little regard for qualifications.
President Biden has dissed the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding so-called 'affirmative action', and has made cabinet appointments clearly based on social identity, rather than competence. Whether his choice to hire staff whose identity is more important than their qualifications remains to be seen. But voters do notice.
Well, the big obvious one is the Secretary of Transportation, who had no relevant experience in transportation, and proved it by sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing while a significant transportation disaster contaminated an American town.
Ones who had relevant experience but notably proved their utter unfitness for the role during the past few years include the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, and the Attorney General.
I think that the argument that representational concerns have eroded merit considerations for hiring on the margins in some fields is plausible, but I agree with you that the widespread persistence of test-like screening and interview processes in a lot of major industries at least somewhat undermines a lot of arguments about the scale of the impact of Griggs v Duke. Now, as Scott notes, a lot of firms that do this are in high revenue-per-employee industries and can afford to lawyer up, but it’s worth noting that their lucrativeness also increases the potential financial rewards for successful litigation. The fact that the sources of the biggest potential anti-discrimination lawsuit jackpots aren’t really worried about this should probably lead us to update.
How widespread? I've been in the tech industry for a good long time, and changed jobs rather frequently, as is standard practice in this industry, and not once have I been given an IQ-style test as a part of the interview process, even in the one sector that's been specifically called out as an outlier where these things allegedly do still happen. (Even more specific coding-skill tests are relatively rare in my experience.)
Weird-- literally every technical-flavored job I've ever applied for has made me do some sort of coding or math assessment-- sometimes an interview where you answer brainteasers, sometimes a timed programming test, sometimes a technical interview, sometimes a homework assignment which involves a more complex task. These don't necessarily look like an IQ-style test, but the tasks involved are generally difficult enough to impose an effective IQ floor in practice. (Intelligence alone isn't sufficient to get through, but it usually is necessary.) I work in finance, but my friends who work as software engineers at large tech companies universally report having gone through similar assessment processes-- at least as long as they're applying for individual contributor rather than management-level jobs.
This is because giving an IQ test would be a terrible way to interview software engineers compared to the normal suite of coding/design interviews (the current suite is not the best possible and I expect changes as both the technologies involved change and people game the interview system but I'd much rather have a random SWE conduct a random LEET code whiteboard problem than have a IQ test administered by the best tester when choosing which engineer to hire)
This seems like a valid take. Also, I know nothing about EEOC, but the fact that they only filed suit against 25 companies last year ( for systemic discrimination) suggests that fear of lawsuits may be overstated as the cause for the trends we are seeing.
I have had to do two "test like" things for a job ever. Once where they gave us a paid for two week training course and then tested everyone to see how much they learned (I think just about everyone passed), and once where it was literally a "can you use excel at a basic level" test.
How do you explain the fact that certain large teams at big American companies somehow wind up getting staffed entirely by Indians or Chinese?
Employment discrimination surely _is_ a thing, which various merit-based assessments attempt to lessen but do not eradicate. Plenty of places for bias, whether subconscious or overt, to sneak in.
Employment discrimination is a thing. On the other hand, Fully staffing Chinese and/or Indians would violate DEI. You are supposed to mimic the makeup of the general population and having enough protected groups is usually the concern. Neither East Indian nor Chinese are protected. Like my company (which hires outsized although still less than 5% from both groups), they are hired because they are cheap and capable of doing the job (which in our case involves an EE degree and solid technical skills)
Employment discrimination is a thing. On the other hand, Fully staffing Chinese and/or Indians would violate DEI. You are supposed to mimic the makeup of the general population and having enough protected groups is usually the concern. Neither East Indian nor Chinese are protected. Like my company (which hires outsized although still less than 5% from both groups), they are hired because they are cheap and capable of doing the job (which in our case involves an EE degree and solid technical skills)
I've been waiting for a review of this, and it really sounds like a rehash of Christopher Caldwell's "The Age of Entitlement" - although in that book, Caldwell goes into detail about the judicial decisions and city/state policies that progressive legal activists just sort of made up.
That was also my impression, and I believe Hanania said that only people who haven't actually read Caldwell's book think that, which is fair enough in my case.
I just read it like a month ago 🤷♂️ but haven't read Hanania's new book yet. His one about foreign policy was a pretty good read, and I'm likely to pick this one up.
I'm curious about that foreign policy book. It was my impression that it was a kind of critical public choice approach but in recent months he's warmed up to Pax Americana and intervention
Yes, I found it especially weird how he was mocking social science as a bunch of fakery dressing up lefty biases and now accepts the exact sort of study he used to mock.
> I don’t think there is any doubt that the country would have been better off surrendering a good chunk of territory and pledging not to join NATO in order to avoid a war.
Is this guy living on the same planet? Last time I checked, it was the ex-Soviet countries which joined NATO that avoided a war, and the ones who didn't join NATO (including those who never even had such ambition in the first place) that have various degrees of military conflict with Russia.
Anyway, later in the article he goes "Do I Believe All This? I’m not fully convinced by this argument." So what was the point?
To me the entire article seems like a rhetorical exercise. "Look here, I can steelman the argument of my opponents... I even admit that it has a few good points such as 'respecting existing borders is a good rule in general'... but ultimately it is unconvincing." He signals that he can be charitable, it's just that in his opinion his opponents do not really have a strong point to make.
(Which is a consequence of how he constructed the steelman. Steelmaning is different from passing an ideological Turing test.)
Thanks for writing this. It captures one of my greatest frustrations with Hanania's thesis, which is how it gets the causality completely the wrong way round, i.e. mistakes cause for effect. Everything in the book refutes his basic point. Civil rights law so clearly emerged out of the broader ideological context of America at that time, and is in fact the legal, formal manifestation of the ideology. The law had to be made in racially neutral way for political reasons, but the rationale/premise for Civil Rights law was always rooted in a deeper and specifically pro-black ideology, which neatly dictated the way the law was actually implemented by activist judges and bureaucrats irl. Idea created law, not the other way round.
Hanania even explains this to the reader himself!
“When faced with undeniable evidence in the plain text of the law and historical record, judges have appealed to the higher purpose of the statute. By passing the Civil Rights Act, Congress meant to help black people, so the “purpose” of the law can supposedly allow disparate treatment by race in order to achieve equal results.”
And “Laws are not supposed to be blank checks for courts and bureaucrats to seek out their preferred policy outcomes. Alfred Blumrosen, an official who worked for the EEOC in its early days, wrote with unusual candor about how the agency sought to get around the plain meaning of the law, as he and his allies preferred to see civil rights statutes more as broad “charters for equality” than explicit rules about what government can and cannot do.”
Yeah it seems to me that woke is basically a cultural identity version of marxism based on darwinistic assumptions of life as a zero-sum battleground for competing groups, starting from the level of DNA and going all the way up
Postmodernism dissolved previous systems of understanding the world within universities leaving the petri dish wide open for the woke memetic complex to run rampant
Rather than simply ban critical race theory from 5th grade math classrooms we should carefully design a rich and balanced examination of the concept for high schools, where the arguments against critical theory are carefully constructed and focus group tested for being satisfying and convincing
Marxism = workers controlling the means of production, and I don't think civil rights law gives black people the ownership of the companies that they work for.
Marxism is a totalizing moral framework built on axioms of atheism and philosophical materialism, designed to oppose and compete with the traditional Judeo-Christian moral worldview. Communism is an economic system that Marx built on top of these views on morality, but there's far more to Marxism than simply economics.
Philosophical materialism and atheism are compatible with _many_ different sets of preferences and (where applicable) moral or ethical systems. Ayn Rand would have been quite surprised to see Marxism singled out.
Rand was a Soviet emigrant who brought all her cultural baggage along with her. She stridently fought against communist economics while uncritically accepting virtually all of its philosophical underpinnings. Objectivism is very thoroughly Marxist at its core; all it really does is take a few highly specific points, such as communism and the need to subvert the needs of the individual to the greater good of the collective group, and turn them on their head in a mirror-image extreme.
Rand is anti-Marxist like antimatter is anti-matter or woke leftists are anti-racist and anti-fascist: exactly the same in every way, except for a few specific properties, where they're exactly the same except for being oriented in the polar opposite direction.
They're clearly moving in that direction with the drive for "equity" over "equality." California's even passed laws seeking to require that private companies have certain racial and sexual quotas for their boards of directors.
Racial and sexual quotas in boardrooms have nothing to do with worker control of the means of production. Marxism would be if every employee was a member of the board of directors.
I think that woke and Marxism are very opposed in some central ways. Marxism is a materialist philosophy that believes that social class is determined by relationship to the means of production, and that it is morally important for the workers to be in charge because they produce the value. Wokeness believes that social class is just one of many aspects of identity, and that all are interlocked in distinctive struggles and oppressions, with ideology and culture much more central than anything material.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this sub-topic, what you're describing is communism, which is an economic system built atop the foundation of Marxism. Wokeness takes the basic concepts of communism as a struggle between the oppressed class and the oppressor class, and applies them to identitarian categories rather than communism's categories of employers and employees, but it's all the same Marxist philosophy underneath.
It is heavily inspired by it, but it’s diametrically opposed in many ways. It’s not one oppressor/oppressed dynamic through history, it’s now multiple intersecting and interacting ones. Economic oppression is no longer primary. Saying these are the same is like saying that Marxism is the same as hegelianism, or that Georgism is the same as capitalism, or that Islam is the same as Christianity.
The dyed-in-the-wool communists hate wokism precisely because it replaces class struggle with something else. Wokism and Marxism are not the same, as you say, but they burn the same fuel and, in that sense, are quite similar
As an aside, I suspect Hanania's take is pretty clearly motivated by his libertarianism, which biases him towards identifying government as the culprit for the thing he doesn't like.
I think his point is that Idea > Law > Push to the broader culture. That Push portion is what he seems to be calling Woke, rather than the underlying ideology. Using Civil Rights laws, the left that already believed in it was able to get corporate buy in and enforcement.
I think thats the strongman of his point, but thats not at all the way Hanania presents it, as noted by Scott himself: "The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”"
That sounds to me that Hanania does present it as Mr Doolittle suggests: ‘the cultural package of Woke’ doesn’t mean ‘some people have Woke ideas’, it means ‘the culture has Woke elements that people fit in with whether they themselves have Woke ideas or not.’
It seems like instead of The Origins of Woke, the title should be The Origins of Woke HR Departments. The ideas were already in the groundwater by the 1960s through a long winding road of political, cultural and religious influences. Civil rights law doesn't seem to address how activists and intellectuals constructed these ideas, but why companies and college admissions offices pretend to care more about it than they really do.
>The ideas were already in the groundwater by the 1960s
A peripherally related chronological question:
I have dim memories from childhood that affirmative action was sold as a _temporary_ measure on the route to a colorblind society - and then it never went away. Does anyone else know if I'm remembering correctly or incorrectly?
The 1979 case United Steelworkers v. Weber case judged whether it was constitutional to implement a quota where 50% of workers admitted to a training program had to be black. The holding declared that "the plan is a temporary measure, not intended to maintain racial balance, but simply to eliminate a manifest racial imbalance."
~25 years later, in 2003, Sandra Day O'Conner argued that race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time" and that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today."
That's like saying the Soviet Union wasn't communist in 1985 because the government persecuted opposition to communism, but because Marx invented communism in the 1800s. Partly true, but uninteresting. The reason the USSR had anywhere near as many communists for anywhere near as long as it did was that the government enforced it. And the best way to make the USSR less communist was to have the government stop forcing people to profess to be communists.
If we are talking about cause and effect, there is definitely causation in both directions. Ideas → law → more ideas → more law (or stricter enforcement thereof) → more ideas...
If we are talking about origins (as the book's title does), you have more of a point. But even then, if we define wokeness as the more recent and extreme excesses, rather than any racially progressive ideology, it's quite plausible that those wouldn't have gained any significant traction without the culture partly created by the laws.
One model for this: a small number of motivated people can get laws passed. These laws then have broader practical and cultural effects across society. The intent of the book under review is to assemble a coalition of individuals willing to push to overturn the law, and (presumably) undo the broader impacts.
This is crudely similar to how we might think about e.g. laws that impose tariffs to protect small numbers of producers.
>Transgender people in particular weren’t covered under civil rights law until 2020, and they still don’t get some of the most-sought benefits like affirmative action.
What sort of affirmative-action applies to some groups but not to transgender people? Is the assumption that identifying as transgender doesn't up ones chances of e.g. admission into a college?
I think, though I'm not sure, that companies are required to report their percent black, Asian, female etc, and will get sued if it's so low that the EEOC thinks it's worth accusing them of discrimination. But they're not required to report percent trans.
This: "will get sued" is obviously not true. The EEOC filed exactly 143 discrimination lawsuits last year. Only 25 of them are systemic. Are you contending that there are only 25 (or 143) companies in the U.S. without population-equal racial distributions? I find it puzzling that your usual skepticism seems so diminished on some topics.
Are Americans so used now to ordinary crime such as open-air drug use, vehicle break-ins or shoplifting going unpunished that they find it difficult to imagine certain punishment for white-collar crime such as discriminatory hiring? Good heavens. Are you aware that companies have legal departments and/or retain legal services to tell them exactly what they must be doing to avoid getting sued by EEOC (among other agencies)? They pay big money for this. Of course there won't be many suits.
Actually, the logic is here is that a company can't guarantee they avoid getting sued. They are all constantly competing with other companies not to be the ones that the EEOC aims its limited enforcement resources at.
Indeed, but that was not REF's point above. EEOC suits being largely randomly distributed and limited by its resources is completely consistent with what I wrote.
There are 33M businesses in the U.S. So you are 100x more likely to be hit by lightning than to have your business sued by the EEOC. There are no businesses whose racial makeup matches the demographics of the U.S. Some companies are obviously making an effort towards racial makeup. Others are obviously not. That the EEOC is only suing 25 companies (up 50% from the year before), essentially guarantees that _it_ is not the reason why.
Businesses with under 100 employees are not subject to most EEOC rules (which is why hire-by-startup-acquisition is a thing) so your number is actively misleading.
Thank you for making my point for me. So, 99.8% of companies hire somewhat diverse staffs with absolutely non fear of EEOC reprisal (because EEOC cannot sue them) and the remainder (~166K companies) also have no fear of reprisal because the chance of being sued is only 3x higher than the chance of being struck by lightning.
The gist of your (Candide III) point is correct, although the threshold for the application of Title VII is 15 employees. Keep in mind that most states have anti-discrimination laws modeled on Title VII (often with more protected categories) that apply to much smaller employers. The "systemic" pressure on employers is not from EEOC-plaintiff lawsuits but from the many thousands of discrimination lawsuits filed by others, in federal and state court.
HR exists as legal protection for employers, and their jobs are incentivized to limit legal liability even when it doesn't make cost-benefit sense. Hearing that another employer got sued for exactly what you are doing has a chilling effect, even if it's unlikely you will actually be sued.
Trans prople weren't a "protected class" (or alternatively they were a protected class since 1964 and nobody noticed) until this case to my understanding.
Before being a protected class it was legally impossible for trans people to be discriminated against, much like it's only possible to experience age discrimination if you're over 40.
Possibly, for some time before the Supreme Court ruled on it, company's lawyers were advising them that any litigation would likely end up with that ruling ... and their lawyer might be saying, you don't want to be the one who sets the precedent by losing in court, as that would likely be very expensive.
So it may have been widely assumed that the law meant that before it came be£ire the Supreme Court.
I'd expect there to be less pressure for affirmative action in favor of gay or trans people than other woke-favored groups because they don't tend to be underrepresented in prestigious positions. It does exist in some places though.
Anyway, I would argue that "woke" does not begin with civil rights law, but rather that both are the result of the same intellectual tradition. "Woke" attitudes are basically analogous to what was called "cultural Marxism" decades ago (see e.g. Weiner's (1981) "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology"), but since "Cultural Marxism" has been retconned as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, people needed a different name for it. The linguistic treadmill is merciless, especially when dealing with political movements attempting to escape accountability for their past failures (or successes).
> The linguistic treadmill is merciless, especially when dealing with political movements attempting to escape accountability for their past failures (or successes).
> The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare.
I don't think that's actually true. I can't find it now but there was a study done on what happened after the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act which found little difference, I believe in the Customs office.
> I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason
It also seems in tension with the Vaclav Havel argument about the indignity of a dishonest society (perhaps that's more a Solzhenitsyn argument).
I found it weird that Hanania seemed to endorse the ban on patronage-based civil service hiring because, as far as I understand, it's part of what prevents Republicans from hiring politically loyal civil servants, which would be the only way to hire civil servants they can trust not to try to sabotage them.
I actually expected the discussion of the civil service act to be the opposite! I was thinking that the civil service act is precisely like affirmative action, where personalized and human hiring practices were replaced by paperwork and process oriented ones to repress the human prejudices but also accidentally repress human ability to notice what matters.
If you could find that article on the effect of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act it would really, meaningfully make my day (or at least meaningfully change my opinion of Chester Arthur)
"Although we find that the reform indeed improved targeted employees’ professional backgrounds and reduced turnover, we show that these changes did not translate into higher cost‐effectiveness in customs revenue collection."
Coincidentally a couple days ago I saw news that Biden is trying to shift some of the civil service jobs you mention back to skills - based hiring, and away from mandatory degrees.
“"We need to do the work to make sure that the process is set up so that we are evaluating those skills, rather than using shortcuts or proxies for skills, things like college degrees, for jobs that don’t require them,” Shriver said. "
I'm curious how he could possibly get away with this but maybe, as you imply, the only people safe to do this sort of thing at scale is the executive branch itself.
> Coincidentally a couple days ago I saw news that Biden is trying to shift some of the civil service jobs you mention back to skills - based hiring, and away from mandatory degrees.
A lot of people are doing that these days. Look up how many different states are doing away with mandatory degree requirements for various positions. It doesn't seem to be a partisan thing either; I just checked and the list includes far-right Utah, extreme-left California, and plenty of more moderate states such as New Jersey and Virginia.
If I had to guess, I'd say a lot of people across the board are just staring to wake up to the reality of eduflation.
Or perhaps it has started dawning on people that in a static or shrinking demographic situation they can no longer afford the luxury of letting promising young people fritter away four to six years at college earning signaling brownie points.
Many states have explicitly been doing this for several years, and trying to pressure businesses to do it too. I believe this has been driven as much by republicans that believe higher education has too much of a stranglehold on the economy as by democrats that think this is one more thing opposing social mobility.
I think wokeness is continuous with political correctness in the 90s, and I even think it's continuous with the broader moral struggle the left feels towards helping African Americans that is hundreds of years old. Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa (1819) included a black person as the protagonist (lets just accept it makes sense to talk about paintings having protagonists) of the painting, which was controversial at the time. The felt moral duty to increase the status and dignity of black people is quite old especially on the political left.
Yes there are many complications and contingencies of why wokeness looks like it does now. But that there is a morally motivated group of people that feel sacredly bounded to end racial inequality shouldn't be surprising given that this has been a feature of our civilization for a very long time. Also it shouldn't be surprising given how sacralized figures like MLK have become in our culture.
I'm not sure if I can track it down again, but Mencken found he liked southern blacks quite a bit and was helpful to them. When I first read him saying that he liked blacks better than southern whites, I thought he was trolling, but now I'm sure he was sincere.
I wanted to make the same point. The previous incarnation of woke was called "political correctness" and it existed in late 80s-early 90s. That's when Alan Bloom's book came out. PC suffered a setback when Bill Clinton really wanted to win the election in 1992 and, needing the white vote, came down on Sister Souljah. A period of return to normalcy followed, until the recrudescence of PC as woke in late 00s. It stands to reason that it took about a generation after the original civil rights law/judicial decisions for the first effects to be felt, as new rules and most importantly new hires worked themselves through the system, gaining seniority and influence as their careers progressed. That works out to the mid-80s. The difference between PC/woke movement based on incentives created by civil rights law/judicial decisions and the heady atmosphere that led to "woke judges" in the first place is that the former is largely composed of the beneficiaries of civil rights law/judicial decisions (see: bioleninism), whereas the latter was an extremely white elite phenomenon. Some of those judges doubtless believed sincerely in the inherent equality of all human subgroups on all socially desirable characteristics (an easy extension of Christian spiritual equality), some wanted to finish the Solid South, etc. I'd love to read a good book about that.
I disagree that Bill Clinton vs Sister Souljah was a major setback for PC, I think PC continued to advance through the 1990s across a hundred different fronts.
Due respect, thinking that woke is merely PC on steroids is completely wrong.
The reactions on university campuses after Hamas’ brutal murderous rapist hostage taking terror rampage of Oct 7th demonstrates this conclusively.
Woke is about oppressor-oppressed ideology in our zero-sum power world and the biPoC oppressed being allowed by ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY to over throw their evil rich white capitalist Christian/Jewish patriarchal oppressors.
This illiberal, immoral, evil ideology is not just PC on steroids.
Yes. Highly educated people have been relentlessly indoctrinated with the view that all racial disparities that are unfavorable to blacks are the result of racism. The civil rights laws did not eliminate these disparities. 50 years of affirmative action did not eliminate them. So the woke concluded that it was time to eliminate them by what amounts to brute force. Logical next step.
> The civil rights laws did not eliminate these disparities. 50 years of affirmative action did not eliminate them.
To put it mildly! In his book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," black scholar Thomas Sowell makes the case that such laws and policies have caused real harm to black Americans and actually worsened made the very disparities that they sought to diminish.
So it seems you don't actually have much basis for your belief as of now. But I can give some: Sowell shows that things had been improving for African-Americans prior to the CRA. The reason for this is because of the Great Migration northward where industrializing cities were paying more than the agricultural economy of the south. There is a natural limit to what percentage of the population can relocate from south to north, so the same progress could not necessarily have been expected to continue indefinitely.
>Aside from this, Hanania doesn’t have much to support his claimed thesis - that civil rights laws are upstream of the cultural package of wokeness. He mostly goes with vague, zoomed-out arguments.
What sort of evidence would you expect to find for a zoomed-out phenomenon regarding broad cultural shifts, if not zoomed-out arguments?
>Even the book’s own history of the civil rights movement seems to undermine its thesis. This history, remember, is that Congress tried to pass reasonable and limited laws, and then woke activist judges and bureaucrats kept expanding them into unreasonable power grabs. And that (he says) was the origin of wokeness. But if a movement has already captured the judicial branch and the civil service, it seems like it must have already originated before then.
If the thesis is to explain a broad cultural shift including the acceptance of certain ideas, then proving that those ideas existed before the proposed shift doesn't challenge the hypothesis. Lots of ideas exist. And academia, judges, or other subsets of the population can have sets of ideas that differ markedly from the distribution of ideas in the population as a whole. But that doesn't explain why particular ideas cause broad cultural shifts.
I'm not sure I'm following your point. I'm familiar with Rufo tracing the evolution of the ideas through philosophers and academies, but if I understood correctly, that's largely orthogonal to Hanania's thesis regarding a broad cultural shift. He briefly discusses the relationship between his book and Rufo's book here: https://www.richardhanania.com/i/134512424/crt-and-civil-rights-law.
It seems like the obvious solution to most of the problems Hanania describes would be to just implement racial quotas so as to get rid of all the kludgey civil rights law stuff. Unless he thinks blacks and other minorities are inherently inferior, in which case the solution would be to maintain a system of white supremacy into the indefinite future. Which of those would he prefer?
But one might argue that if some minorities are lower achieving than whites, it's not because they're *inherently* inferior, but due to the long legacy of historical discrimination, so a third option might be to create a very generous welfare state, maybe through UBI or something, so that the current generation would have a reasonable opportunity to overcome whatever legacy of historical racism still exists without doing the institutional harm that Hanania frets about. But I have a feeling he wouldn't be a fan of that solution.
"Unless he thinks blacks and other minorities are inherently inferior, in which case the solution would be to maintain a system of white supremacy into the indefinite future"
How about race-blind meritocracy, is that a system of white supremacy? Or Asian supremacy?
"a very generous welfare state"
All those countries with generous welfare states like Sweden or France surely have no racial gaps. UBI would possibly be the best demonstration of hereditarianism one can imagine.
Race-blind meritocracy, in a society where a certain racial group has an inherited disadvantage, would perpetuate that disadvantage to the next generation, ad infinitum. ("Merit" is not like a condition of one's soul; it's a function in part of the opportunities one has been granted in life.)
That's why I suggested a welfare state as a possible way to address the problem: you could theoretically sand off a lot of the inherited disadvantage through heavy redistribution. I don't think any country has like solved the problem of racial inequality; but that's different from just being content to let it perpetuate.
No country has solved inequality period, why is racial inequality something to pay particular attention to, over all other kinds of groups one could compare? Is the idea that within-race inequality is merit-based, but not between-race inequality?
Ok, so why care if race-blind meritocracy results in different results for different groups as long as individuals are all judged by the same standards?
"inequalities based on race are going to feel less fair than inequalities based on things like skills that people can exercise some control over."
What do you mean by "based on race"? What if skills differ by race, is that an inequality based on race or based on skills?
>Race-blind meritocracy, in a society where a certain racial group has an inherited disadvantage, would perpetuate that disadvantage to the next generation, ad infinitum.
Race-blind meritocracy, in a society where subgroups of a racial group have created subcultures with varying dysfunctional elements, creates an incentive for dropping the dysfunctional elements of the culture, or adopting one of the subcultures that is less dysfunctional. If, in one subculture,
>trying hard at school gets condemned as “acting white”
then let that subculture fall on its face and let another subculture succeed.
> Race-blind meritocracy, in a society where a certain racial group has an inherited disadvantage, would perpetuate that disadvantage to the next generation, ad infinitum.
You'd expect these to fade on their own over time due to diminishing returns, like with the Irish (who used to be a disfavored minority but do just fine for themselves now).
As Scott noted in the article, "inherited, racially disparate, merit" is taboo as an argument for right wing policy, but mainstream as an argument for left wing policy (as seen above)
Why would the solution to unequal abilities be to maintain a system of white supremacy? It seems like the obvious solution to unequal average abilities by group is to hire based on individual ability and interest, and accept that this will sometimes end up with many fields that have different racial/gender mixes than the population. And indeed, as far as I can tell, this is the policy that just about everyone who talks about unequal average abilities proposes.
Woke is a winning political coalition. It gives intellectual cover for minorities to take other people's stuff, and confers elite philanthropy status on the mostly white middle class women who support it.
The counter proposals you suggest are probably winning in a world where they are allowed. Hence the aggressive legal action and cancelation of anyone promoting them as a key tenant of woke.
Yeah, I think it's actually pretty fair to want companies to be rough microcosms of their communities, especially in terms of race and gender. But it would be much less painful to just mandate the outcomes we want to see and then let companies figure out the best way to do it for the individual cases.
Obviously there's no objective answer to this sort of question. It's something that democratic institutions would have to hash out on an ongoing basis. Realistically you'd end up with a bunch of hairy rules, they'd get outdated, then someone would come through and clean it up / rationalize it, then it would get messy again, repeat forever.
And like any regulation, you can make a pretty good libertarian argument that it'd be easier and better for everyone to just scrap it and let people do as they please. But I think sone regulations to in fact manage to protect important values from being eroded entirely, even if they're messy and inefficient.
The representation argument cuts in more ways than one. Classically, European antisemites argued that there's too many Jewish doctors relative to Jews in the general population.
I think freedom of association is the better concept.
I agree the book should have been framed and titled as something more like “the origin of woke power” and not wokeness itself.
Cofnas, you, and others rightly point out the woke urge to abuse civil rights law preexisted the law, since it happened so rapidly after it passed. But I think Hanania is right that the legal stick forced corporations to play woke games, in both rhetoric and substance, which strengthened and mainstreamed the power of woke such that it came to dominate polite society even outside any formal connection to employment. In other words, the radicals who had woke ideology in the 60s and beyond were able to have power and influence through the law such that they could establish norms far beyond actual popularity of these views and policies.
Kind of surprised “cancel culture” didn’t come up as something clearly related.
If Hanania wrote “on the origin of communism” and focused on the communist revolution in Russia and the Soviet Union, then he’d be right about what made communism such a big deal, but missing the whole ideological origin story of Marx -> Lenin.
Magness is focused on academic citations of Marx's writings (he could not seriously claim Marx was "unpopular" in the socialist and labor movements before then), but even then you had influential figures like Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Thorstein Veblen who prior to 1917 were reckoning with Marx's work.
It's also rather bizarre that the article doesn't mention the Great Depression and the introduction of five-year plans in the Soviet Union. The Depression caused many academics to believe that capitalism's end was nigh (whether they welcomed this prospect or not), whereas Soviet planning interested a great many people who thought the USSR offered a viable—or at least instructive—alternative to an ostensibly doomed capitalist system.
Magness' argument is that Marx was one of many socialist thinkers prior to 1917, and only became much more prominent than his rival socialist intellectuals afterward.
As for Weber, Marx doesn't even appear in the index of his most famous work from the decade before the Bolshevik revolution, and instead his only mention is in a footnote:
Marx has always been "one of many socialist thinkers." By itself that tells us nothing of his significance. Of the many figures associated with socialism in the 1840s that Marx critiqued (such as Victor Considerant and Étienne Cabet), all of them had been reduced to historical curiosities long before 1917. The October Revolution was bound to increase Marx's stature, but I cannot think of any figure associated with socialism who was more globally influential than Marx by the time World War I broke out.
Magness' article is silly. He admits that "Weber was certainly aware of Karl Marx and engaged him in both direct and indirect ways," yet he triumphantly declares that because Weber's most famous work addresses Marx in an "indirect way" rather than as "the central figure" then this must be evidence that Marx was "comparatively obscure" (even though Sombart, whom Magness writes was the man Weber was mainly responding to in his book, is also described by him as a "quasi-Marxist.")
If we're going to go from academic citations to beyond academia, then Magness' argument *really* suffers. The existence of the SPD in Germany would be enough to discredit him, given the palpable influence of Marxist doctrines on the theories of the SPD's leading lights such as Kautsky, Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, etc. (even Bernstein claimed his revisionism took the form of opposing the "residue of Utopianism in the Marxist system" so as to retain "what is worthy to live in Marx.")
One could extend this same point to other countries, e.g. if one examines the publications of figures associated with the Socialist Party of America in the decade leading up to World War I the impact of Marxism on the thinking and rhetoric of figures like Eugene Debs, John Spargo, Morris Hillquit, Louis Boudin, and innumerable others is clear, whatever one may say about their interpretation of Marx's doctrines.
As for the press, no doubt periodicals like the New York Times weren't very interested in the merits (or lack thereof) of Marx's historical materialism or what have you. But they sure were discussed in such theoretical journals as Die Neue Zeit (of the SPD) and the International Socialist Review (of the Socialist Party of America.) Magness writes in his article that Marx was mentioned in "debates from the socialist far-left" as if such things don't count, but that's silly; these were not the debates of isolated sects.
To be sure, Marxism did have opponents who were avowed socialists. The Fabian Society in Britain is probably the most prominent example. Yet the influence of such reformist individuals and organizations were largely confined to single countries. There was no socialist figure as of 1916 whose theories had such global reach as Marx did.
I do think Marx still qualifies as "comparatively obscure" if people are engaging with a distinctive follower of his but not citing him. Frank Knight is known to specialists in the history of economic thought, but he's comparatively obscure relative to his more famous students Milton Friedman & James Buchanan.
Magness didn't just look at the NYT, he looked at German language publications as well. And he found that the SPD didn't seem to boost Marx's citations that much.
You do have a valid point at the end: Magness used different authors to compare to Marx in different countries, since figures like Rodbertus & Lasalle weren't notable outside Germany and Blanc wasn't notable outside France. It happens that I just recently read "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers and he discusses how after WW1 he was convinced capitalist society was doomed. He sought answers from various non-Marxist socialists at first, but those were mostly English-speakers rather than the German/French socialists I just mentioned. He became convinced of Marxism after reading Lenin about how the Soviets worked in practice, so score another one for the influence of the Bolshevik revolution.
I wouldn't consider Henry George a socialist though (he himself certainly didn't as far as I know), a better example would be Edward Bellamy, but even his foreign appeal (which wasn't inconsiderable, see "Edward Bellamy Abroad" by Sylvia Bowman) doesn't seem to approximate to Marx's. Neither Georgists nor Bellamy's fans had an equivalent to the SPD or SFIO. As for Kropotkin, he was of course an anarchist; by 1900 "anarchist" and "socialist" were generally quite distinct in what they were referring to.
I'd also wager that far more individuals in the 1900s-10s would be aware that Sombart was influenced by Marx than individuals in the 1960s-80s would be aware that Friedman was influenced by Knight. After all, Knight hadn't been a leading figure in the First International, nor a man whose theories influenced the founders of the Second International. Knight was "merely" an economics professor (which isn't meant as an insult), whereas Marx was known to practically anyone who considered themselves a socialist (or anarchist!) by 1917, whether they endorsed his theories or not.
I can't comment to what extent SPD authors cited Marx in their propaganda and other mass-oriented publications, but a perusal of English-language books of the 1900s-10s by individuals associated with the Socialist Party of America often did invoke Marx as an authority, even if their own conception of socialism mixed bits of Marx with appeals to the Gospels or reformism or what have you. As an advertisement in the July 1916 issue of the International Socialist Review claimed: "You can be a Socialist without reading CAPITAL, but you cannot talk or write about Socialism, nor hold your own in debates with old-party politicians, without a clear understanding of the principles and theories which are explained in this book."
I still think that as far as historical socialist thinkers go, Marx was indeed already the most significant prior to 1917. Within the left, anarchists posed the most important international challenge to avowed Marxists in the years leading up to World War I, but even then Bakunin and Kropotkin's reach seem inferior to that of Marx, even if in certain countries anarchists established a powerful presence (e.g. in Spain and France.)
If we are to bring up individual narratives, I could note that while in prison in the 1890s Debs was given the three volumes of Marx's "Capital" and Kautsky's popular expositions of Marxism to read, and these (along with texts by Bellamy and a few other non-Marxians) made him decide to become a socialist. Samuel Gompers, though he later became a foe of radicalism, wrote in his autobiography of the influence exerted on him as a young man by Marx's writings. Again, while October did much to boost Marx's standing (as did the Great Depression and often idealized portrayals of Soviet planning), Marx was by no means obscure on the left and within the European and North American working-class movements by 1917.
>There is a masculine alternative to H.R. It is called a union. In any given workplace, H.R. ladies and union reps perform many of the same functions. If you have a conflict that needs adjudicating, you want to make sure the company gives you all the vacation days you’re entitled to, or you have a complaint about workplace conditions, you go to them. Underneath this functional similarity, however, the two models of workplace relations rest on very different assumptions.
>The idea behind unions is that workers and bosses are fundamentally in conflict. They don’t have to hate each other, by any means, but their interests diverge, and the best way for them to reach agreement is to have a fair fight by clearly defined rules. This is the opposite of H.R.’s ethos, which is all about denying that conflict exists and finding win–win solutions—or at least solutions that everyone will pretend are win–win after they have been badgered into accepting the consensus.
I am more in favor than she is of pursuing some of the goods of civil rights law, but I agree strongly with her about the benefits of openly acknowledging that workers and bosses have conflicting interests and need to negotiate the middle ground. I really really dislike the "only fight obliquely"/doublethinky mode that she and Hannania identify. I think it does create a culture against truthspeaking.
Is he anti-union, or is he anti-"union shop"? While this is far from a universal opinion, I know plenty of staunch conservatives (mostly older) who are also proud union men. The big point of contention seems to be with forcing people to unionize as a condition of employment, whether they want to or not.
Seems to me virtually all of the problems with unions could be solved by a law grounding the entire concept in radical voluntarism. Five simple principles:
1. Every employee of a private company has an absolute right to join any union that will have them, or to organize a union. (Union-busting is completely illegal.)
2. The right to organize a union is absolute, and is not abridged by the presence of any existing union in the employee's workplace. (If you don't like how your union operates, but you want union representation, feel free to set up your own.)
3. Every employee has a right to refuse to join a union, or to leave one that they are already a member of. Any employee has zero obligations to any union that they are not a member of. (Union shops are illegal, and no forced dues collection from non-members.)
4. No employer is under any obligation to deal with any employee under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement negotiated by a union that that employee is not a member of. (No free-riding. If you want the benefits of union membership, join the union and pay your dues.)
5. Public-sector unions are banned entirely. (FDR understood why they are a horrible idea; why don't modern-day leftists?)
Pass that law — and make sure to vigorously enforce it! — and most of the problems with unions in this country would vanish.
What is the legal difference between this and right to work states? In right to work states people can voluntarily unionize and the company cannot bust them, but the employees generally don't.
Aside: how did European countries manage to set it up so there are multiple unions for an industry, an employer can employ multiple unions at one time, and the unions compete?
Even in right-to-work states, people don't unionize so much as companies or job sites do. My difference is, if workers want to form a union, they should be able to do so, period. The workers who want it get together, say, "we're a union now," and perhaps fill out some registration paperwork with the local authorities to make it all official, and then those people are a union and any employees who don't want to join the union aren't in it.
This is a very different proposal from the current process of "organizing," which involves all the employees voting on whether they want their employer to be unionized or not. If someone wants to be in a union, and their coworkers don't, why should their coworkers prevent them from having a union, and vice versa?
Just because it doesn't happen that way doesn't mean the law precludes it. I believe it is very possible for people to organize this way in Texas. But it generally doesn't happen (if at all).
How would you restructure right-to-work laws that actually causes the creation of your preferred outcome?
How about saying any given company can fire employees for any reason they like, but they have to spell out their own list of valid causes in advance, apply it with some reasonable degree of consistency, and provide prospective new hires with the list ranked by frequency of application? Similar to the ingredients list on food.
That way, a company which fires everyone at once for trying to join a union, or too many people in general for capricious bullshit reasons, will face difficulty finding replacements and broader reputational costs, but openings for third-party meddling are greatly reduced.
As for improving the employee's negotiating position, my preferred approach is UBI funded by a Georgist land value tax, since it ensures that losing a job won't be a death sentence without putting new burdens on anyone productive.
"apply it with some reasonable degree of consistency"
No good as that's a subjective standard and can thus be challenged in court. But sure, it would be fair if they had to disclose what % of employees got fired in the past 5 years or so. That's an objective metric that's very hard to dispute.
"Consistency" is potentially subjective, but if so challenged, a company would have the recourse of simply rewriting their own policies to be less ambiguous, more precisely aligned between letter and spirit and actual practice, rather than being stuck as dancing monkeys trying to guess someone else's muddled tune.
Of course, there'd still be some room for trickery, things like:
"No, your honor, I didn't fire them for unionizing - just called an all-hands meeting to discuss the subject, with refreshments, and time-and-a-half pay for attendance since it was after regular hours. Then I added a small amount of alcohol to the punch, and fired everyone who took a sip for drinking on the job."
But at least it might be the fun kind of trickery, a devil's bargain where exact-words compliance actually means something. Any weird spike in "drinking on the job" cases, or concomitant fine-print loopholes to enable other contrived pretexts, would still show up in the mandatory disclosures.
Demanding consistency also serves as a check against abuse through selective enforcement on the company's part. Boss who fired unionizers for drinking barely-alcoholic punch needs to spend the rest of his career worrying about radicalized interns smuggling measurable amounts of ethanol into his morning coffee, now that the precedent has been set, and no one to blame but himself.
Meanwhile, places which were actually trying to be fair and honest could hammer out standard terms and policies through something similar to open-source software development, without putting the national legislature in charge of version control.
The power of a union comes from its ability to coordinate and shut down work. Splintered groups of employees that all try to negotiate separately are not going to accomplish anything. Might as well negotiate by yourself, the company would give you the same level of respect.
Well then, you better make sure your union runs on principles that are attractive to enough of the workforce that you end up with that level of power, and that it remains true to them. Ending up with an ineffective union if the workers don't like what it stands for is a feature, not a bug.
It's not just the workforce, it's the people who will be replacing the workforce when the company tries to fire them all for striking. So now you've got to broadcast your union across the general populace to try to stop them looking for work here when you strike.
If you can generate that level of power, you don't need a union at all. Just walk into your boss's office and demand things.
I never understand why people think cogs in the machine employees shouldn't be treated like cogs? If they don't want to be treated like cogs they should increase their skillset. If they cannot that is literally what the social safety net is for, to ensure some baseline standard of living.
I don't know if this is a real disagreement with you or Helen, but I think it's a mistake to think of HR modus operandi as a motivating ethos, as though HR departments really are trying to find compromise between the interests of employees and management, rather than being a means by which management advances its own interests, an "alternative" to unions that represents their near-total defeat in the conflict.
I think that's often true in practice, while not always being HR's own understanding of it's role.
And I've seen bad bosses who genuinely don't conceive of boss-worker conflicts "because I'm a good person!" so they're not operating tactically, but still see conflict as nastiness on the workers' part, because why would there be conflict with smol bean me?
Again, I like union-mindset because your boss doesn't need to be a bad boss for *both* sides to have some conflicting goals and need to hash them out.
I think HR departments were created to benefit the employer, but once they exist HR workers have their own agency, and will do things like mobilize for more regulations requiring HR.
"There is a masculine alternative to H.R. It is called a union. In any given workplace, H.R. ladies and union reps perform many of the same functions. If you have a conflict that needs adjudicating ... you go to them."
The difference is that HR is on the side of the company, whereas unions are on the side of the workers.
Bosses and workers do not have conflicting interests except to the extent that both are being dishonest. The entire concept of a job is a win-win exchange, based on comparative advantage: worker gets money, boss gets money resulting from worker's work. This only fails when one party or the other is being dishonest about things like how much one gets paid, how hard one is working, and so on.
Management in generica and workers in general do not have identical interests. While both would like the company to succeed, thrive, etc - workers don't get paid if the company blows up - there are a number of areas where they diverge. For one, management is more willing to take risks, since they are working for the shareholders (who have a diversified portfolio, so a 1% risk of bankruptcy/mass layoffs is worth an EV of +1.5% stock price), whereas workers generally suffer a much larger downside than shareholders when the company goes bankrupt. You also see companies which just willingly accept enormous churn in order to treat their workers like shit (e.g. Amazon warehouses), which no worker would ever agree to if they were on the Board of Directors. Etc.
It's the other way around. Despite the cliches, the average company is not part of a diversified portfolio, it's usually owned by a single person or small group with an outsized interest in the companies success since they lose their entire investment. On the other hand, employees can simply walk out and get a different job if the company implodes, not even necessarily with a significant pay cut. In most countries, less than 1/3 of employees are working at a publicly traded company (and remember, even publicly traded companies often are majority-owned by a small group, such as the original founders).
Interesting, but then why do worker cooperatives show an overall more risk-averse profile (and successfully risk-averse, since they do better in economic recessions) compared to traditional companies?
This comment should have been banned simply for the writing. I don't care if they're typing on their phone, write like an adult, not with "ppl" and "Cuz".
> With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.
AAPI groups have become more common in larger companies, at least in tech for the past few years. I've heard and seen many use the concept in that context.
The section about workplace personal relationships becoming more formal doesn't seem right to me, we've had the same trend in the UK without any civil rights law. Unless we do actually have the hidden de facto affirmative action mentioned at the beginning and I just don't know about it.
True, although it definitely feels like workplace relationships are seen as more scandalous (and more likely to lead to disciplinary issues) in the US than the UK
100%. Technically "positive discrimination" is illegal in hiring in the UK. But "positive action" is perfectly legal.
The typical example given is that you can't hire a black person *because* they are black (if say, they were worse qualified than a white candidate). But you absolutely can use "positive action" to hire someone to address a perceived imbalance (level the playing field) if two candidates are equally qualified.
You can also legally have women only management hiring workshops if there is a perceived imbalance in senior leadership (i.e you'd like more women). But you can't then roll that out as a blanket policy at every level of an organisation.
In reality, the line between these things are blurred- no two candidates are ever equally qualified, and there are always trade offs involved. The fiction that you can use race or gender as a tie breaker is useful for organisations to maintain. On the other hand, it definitely doesn't seem to be as bad as in the US- University admissions is still relatively meritocratic, with UK universities aiming to up the numbers of underrepresented groups via extensive outreach, coaching, mentoring etc. rather than workarounds like non-academic credentials. If a minority candidate doesn't get the grades/pass the entrance exam, they probably won't get in. Although, I do note that there are black only (financial) scholarships- not sure how those fit in.
Yes I agree with your analysis, internship programmes are particularly bad for this, whereby you have racially or gender specific ones, like only for blacks or women or something. Regarding university admissions, this is probably the case. Anecdotally, I’m a straight conservative white guy at Oxford, I imagine affirmative action and campus politics in the US means they wouldn’t look very favourably upon an applicant like myself. I hope to apply to the US next year so I suppose I will find out the admissions differences.
Same trend in Japan as well, though minus the racial stuff, since there just aren't enough racial minorities in the first place for people to care about them. Interestingly, they don't call (self-)censoring as a result of these trends "political correctness", they call it "compliance".
"Hanania explains the origins of a thing he calls woke which is different in form but similar in flavor to the thing that we in our corner of the internet have been calling woke, while laying out his reasoning for why his definition of woke is better than our definition of woke."
I interviewed Hanania about his book a few weeks back (https://mankind.substack.com/p/a-chat-with-richard-hanania), so let me clarify one point: Hanania is, as I understood it, extremely optimistic about race relations in the US, more so than most Americans I know. He made the point that he thinks not even the divisive US civil rights legislation has done much to drive a wedge among races, with one exception: blacks. For various reasons, black Americans remain separate, distinct, and hard to make part of the American mainstream. I thought it was an important point, and one that will help many understand why racial issues are almost always framed on a white vs black axis, even though blacks are, at 13%, a much smaller share of Americans than Latins are. Also, as a recognized Latin in America (a resident, not an American citizen), everyone please stop writing Latinx. We all hate & despise the term, except professional race grifters.
When I first read the book, I had a hard time tracing Hanania's source for the "great view" and "walk-up" claims you quoted. As far as I can tell, it goes back to a 1995 memo by Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (pages 33 to 36, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf) that specifically gives these phrases as examples of information that "does not violate the Act". Sine then, they have consistently been cited as examples of acceptable language in various sources. Hanania's description might not be strictly false — maybe Achtenberg was referring to some earlier example where somebody cited those phrases as exclusionary — but it is definitely misleading.
EDIT: It looks like I goofed on this. There is a correct citation in the book. See Hanania's response below.
"But every now and then a claim goes by rather quickly that I wasn’t sure about. For instance, the book cites a statistic that Yale now has as many administrators as it does students; but this is because many employees at Yale’s hospital count as administrators for bookkeeping purposes."
I remember spot-checking a few other claims and finding them all to be exaggerated or distorted.
> "But every now and then a claim goes by rather quickly that I wasn’t sure about. For instance, the book cites a statistic that Yale now has as many administrators as it does students; but this is because many employees at Yale’s hospital count as administrators for bookkeeping purposes."
This could be true, but at the same time it's kind of telling. There are over 15,000 students at Yale. If a few hundred hospital employees (staff of a typical hospital) is what tips it over from "not quite more administrators than students" to "technically more administrators than students," that's still a massive number of school-staff administrators, and far more than the school should need for any legitimate administrative purposes!
I looked into this briefly. The actual claim is "more administrators than undergrads", and there are only 6600 undergrads. Yale New Haven hospital has 14000 employees. I don't know how many are admins, but it could be a pretty sizeable fraction.
What the heck?!? How in the world does a hospital, even a big one, need that many employees? I just looked it up, and YNH has about 1500 beds. Do they *really* need 10 people for every patient, particularly given that most hospitals don't run at full capacity most of the time anyway?
The largest employer in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite what the name may suggest, UPMC is a massive healthcare network that controls some 40 hospitals and 800 or so medical offices throughout the US and provides research and consultation services worldwide.
Point being that yes, don't put too much stock in a name for something like this.
> Do they *really* need 10 people for every patient, particularly given that most hospitals don't run at full capacity most of the time anyway?
Remember that hospitals also have outpatient clinics and emergency rooms and the like, they're not just treating the people who are admitted to hospital at any given time.
I looked up a few other hospitals I know and 10-1 is a pretty normal staff-to-bed ratio for a big prestigious hospital.
The citation is right there. It's from David Bernstein, "You Can't Say That." I even cited the chapter, which is in the introduction. Here's his quote:
"There are a number of other phrases that did not make the Oregon list, but that some realtors avoid nonetheless for fear of liability, including the following: master bedroom (either sexist or purportedly evocative of slavery and therefore insulting to African Americans), great view (allegedly expresses preference for the nonblind), and walk-up (supposedly discourages the disabled)."
I didn't say that they violated the law. My exact quote was "even terms like 'great view' and 'walk-up' have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs." I didn't say that these terms were ever found to violate the law. It's in keeping with one of the main arguments from the book, which is that stuff that is technically legal might still be thought to be problematic, creating a chilling effect. So what realtors think you're allowed to say or not say is relevant to the discussion. And the fact that government has to cite them as ok tells you far the restrictions on speech go. If these are your border cases, the civil rights regime is a massive infringement on liberty.
As for the Yale claim, Traldi doesn't provide a link, so I don't know how much the hospital staff affects things. But this article says that there's a 45% increase in administrators in less than two decades, and it doesn't appear to count hospital staff. It pegs number of administrators as about 80% of the number of students without counting the hospital.
So the statement ends up technically true, and also not very misleading unless you think that hospital administrators shouldn't count (which is arguable) and you think there's some massive difference between a huge increase in administrators that leads to them being 80% as large as the student body or 101%. Hospital staff are also doing a lot of DEI stuff too, so I don't know why you should exclude them if they're part of a larger story of bureaucratic bloat.
Do you know if these laws have ever been upheld against a First Amendment challenge by the SCOTUS? They don't fall into any well-known exceptions. If not, somebody should try to challenge them.
Thanks for clarifying: I think I had looked at the US News article in the same footnote, but you are correct. My apologies, I shouldn't have commented without checking again.
For the Yale issue, it looks like the article you cite does count hospital staff: See the quote from President Salovey ("He reiterated that the growth in the Yale School of Medicine’s clinical practice has been a significant and worthwhile cause of the administration’s increased size"). Since there's nowhere that they break it out by hospital vs. non-hospital, it's hard to say.
>Many hiring managers have told me— I’m not making this up — that people cut and paste from the job description into the resume and don't even reformat it. They don't change a single word, and they go to the top of the hiring list, even if it's completely obvious that it's a cut and paste.
>Jack Cable won the Hack the Pentagon contest several years ago, genius programmer. By definition, he’s one of the most qualified people possible to work on the Pentagon’s cybersecurity. He then submitted a resume for a job at the Defense Digital Service, but instead of cutting and pasting from the generic job description, he included a list of the programming languages he knows.
>And he was rejected something like five times. They told him, “If you want to get a job here, you could go work at Best Buy selling computers for a year and then reapply, and then you'll qualify.” So there's this insane down-select: whose resume most closely matches the job description?
>The second down-select is a self assessment where they send those candidates a form to fill out that says, “Here are the characteristics we're looking for. How would you rate yourself?” The way to get through that down-select is to rate yourself as “master” on every single one.
>So you’ve down-selected twice. Let's say we now have 100 resumes. Then you can apply “veterans preference” to that candidate pool. And that's your slate. Technically you have done everything right, but you have not given the hiring manager anybody competent in anything but cutting and pasting – and lying.
>The second down-select is a self assessment where they send those candidates a form to fill out that says, “Here are the characteristics we're looking for. How would you rate yourself?” The way to get through that down-select is to rate yourself as “master” on every single one.
When people think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, they typically think "incompetent people tend to think they're more competent than they are." But there's a second, complimentary half to Dunning and Kruger's research on the subject: because of their high degree of expertise, *actual* masters are painfully aware of their own flaws and imperfections — they know just how much they do not know! — and so are more likely to not consider themselves masters. So this "down-select" is basically a perfectly-calibrated mechanism for hiring arrogant twits and driving away the best of the best.
One clear example of the second variety that I've seen is fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. He's "kind of a big deal" in the world of epic fantasy, and has been for over a decade now, but the guy is ridiculously humble about it. If the subject ever comes up, he commonly downplays his massive success, saying that the true "big names" in contemporary fantasy are George R. R. Martin and Pat Rothfuss. (Before certain recent controversies, he would typically add J. K. Rowling to the list.) This despite the simple fact that none of these authors have produced anything in years, and they *certainly* don't draw in fandoms so massive that the only reasonable way to do a release event for the new books they aren't producing is to literally hold a convention, the way Sanderson does.
But somehow he seems to consistently underestimate just how big and influential he is. (Tongue-in-cheek "B-Money" antics notwithstanding.) I think this might be the second half of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. His writing is far from perfect, but he's still a top-tier elite author and he consistently seems to fail to realize this.
I don't know. This is Sanderson's claim, not my own.
If I had to guess, based on several years of context following these remarks and his career in general, I think he's measuring "bigness" or "success" by Hollywood. Rowling got a series of movies based on her books. Martin got a massive cultural phenomenon of a TV show. Rothfuss was going to get a Game Of Thrones-style show of his own, though I haven't heard much about that recently. (Is it still happening?)
Meanwhile, for all the significant effort that he's put into it over many years now, Sanderson has never *quite* managed to get anything greenlit.
While I do enjoy Brandon's own writing a lot, I was never a huge fan of his takes on what *other* authors were good. I distinctly remember an interview he had in which he was asked if he had anyone in mind to continue Cosmere series were he to unexpectedly die, and and he said he considered Brent Weeks. Yeah.
You don't like Brent Weeks? I have some minor quibbles with his writing but I thought the Lightbringer series was great. Genuinely curious why you don't think he is a good author.
Look, I think it is *possible* to write a good plot where the main plot device is memory erasure, but it can in fact get to the point where it is too chaotic. Also the entire thing with atemporal fallen immortals Abaddon/Belial plot point that never got anywhere was quite out of place. I just feel like Brent Weeks has a tendency to add flashy stuff that's unnecessary.
And that's with Lightbringer being his best series; I'd say that much. There's even more of that in Night Angel.
I had personal experience with when I was a college student trying to get a summer job at a National Park. It was entry level stuff, just taking people's money when they came in. My brother managed to get a job there previously, and he warned me: "you have to apply on this one website, they'll ask you how much experience you have in a lot of different categories, just pick the most experienced option for all of them. If you don't then you won't even end up on the list of possible candidates to interview."
So I did that, but I felt bad about it. Still feel bad about it. Lying just to get a low level summer job. It's terrible that honest people are filtered out.
The discussion about federal civil service hiring (not clear from context whether this is Richard or Scott) is pretty accurate to my experience, though I would characterize it as a focus on minimizing risk vs maximizing the correct selection. The primary affirmative action is for veterans, which arguably has had a greater impact on shaping the composition of the federal workforce than anything else (7% of US pop are vets; federal workforce is 30% vet).
A brief sketch of the federal hiring process:
1. HR evaluates all candidates to see if they meet the minimum qualifications of the job. To minimize discrimination, this evaluation is generally limited to seeing if the candidate meets or exceeds the years of experience required.
2. If too many candidates remain after step 1, HR defines a "Best Qualified" pool. While many means of doing this are available, typically only years of experience and education are evaluated (sometimes occupational certificates/licenses). Veterans' preference (veterans affirmative action) is applied here.
3. Best Qualified candidates resumes' are forwarded to the HM. Resume reviews are required to follow a standardized rubric that must be approved by HR/Legal.
4. Interviews are done by a three-member panel. Interviews are done via a structured format; all candidates are asked the same questions, with no follow-up questions allowed. Interview questions must be approved by HR/Legal. Panel members rate the quality of each response on a numerical scale.
5. Top candidate is selected based on a combination of resume and interview scores. If a non-veteran is selected over a veteran in the BQ pool, HM must fill out additional paperwork justifying why.
And the hiring preference for veterans isn't some "HR gone crazy" thing, it's the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998 being applied as it was written.
Agreed. (I'm taking no position on whether vet preference is a good or a bad thing - just pointing out that this is another category of legal, widely practiced affirmative action that isn't talked about much.)
Because when it benefits us or people we like, it's normal good, pro-social and improves the world. When it benefits people we don't like, then it's abnormal, bad, anti-social and makes the world worse.
>How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots? The George Floyd protests?
Admittedly, I didn't read the book (to taste the sea one need only a gulp) but I could imagine the reason behind each of these being largely due to a sense of inviolability created in no small part by civil rights law, such that if a private individual or entity merely looks askance at a minority person, (even if they're acting very badly) they're begging to get roto-rootered by lawyers. You could even be railroaded by a corrupt prosecutor and 12 terrified jurors if you're a cop because a junkie career criminal you've been trying to restrain for half an hour dies of a heart attack while in your custody.
Hence, even law enforcement agencies and elected officials are afraid to challenge obvious wrongdoing for fear of what's coming next:
>Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice (and his black female vice president)? Drag queen story hours? Gay pride parades? If it doesn’t explain any of those things, what’s left of it explaining “wokeness”?
People and institutions respond to incentives. Civil Rights law largely gives allegedly aggrieved minorities the whip hand over the majority in these sorts of frictive encounters and thus it empowers more adventurous norm-violators to claim that their particular status requires protection/normalization and that if somebody dares to say "hey, its kind of disgusting for nearly nude men to ride a purple, phallic-shaped float down the street for a gay pride parade" it's a basically a crime.
This bleeds into other aspects of life as well - imagine the outcry if Biden had promised to nominate a white, Irish-Catholic man instead of a Ketanji Brown-Jackson, as he did. Only conservatives cried foul over his obviously racist hiring criteria, but the incentive structures that have been created around how we treat minorities (and essentially codified) practically guarantee this ludicrous double standard.
It is striking that the Jim Crow south wasn't the part of the country with lots of riots during the Great Sixties Freakout. Another piece of evidence against what Fabio Rojas calls "deprivation theory".
> You could even be railroaded by a corrupt prosecutor and 12 terrified jurors if you're a cop because a junkie career criminal you've been trying to restrain for half an hour dies of a heart attack while in your custody.
See also: Michael Dunn, the police officer who shot a man with a long criminal record, who was in the act of trying to run Dunn down in a truck he had stolen. About as clear-cut a case of self-defense as you can possibly find... and Dunn got charged with murder over it.
The name "Michael Dunn" must be cursed because the first results I saw were of a guy in Florida who was convicted of a 2012 killing of a teenager at a gas station, in what seemed like a reasonably just conviction.
The Police Officer Dunn however was not convicted, despite being run through the wringer for 4 years:
> The Police Officer Dunn however was not convicted, despite being run through the wringer for 4 years
The process is the punishment. Running him through the wringer, as you put it, makes an example out of him, puts immense emotional and financial stress on him and his family, and makes other officers less-inclined to shoot violent criminals who are badly in need of being shot. Whether he wins or loses his case is far less important to the people who charged him with murder; they already got what they wanted.
I completely agree, obviously - the incentives are aligned against police being proactive in all but the most obvious and life threatening situations. Still rather judged by 12 than carried by 6 however.
What the video shows is that Juan Moreno pulled out of a parking spot and drove around the officer Michael Dunn. Dunn shot Moreno through the driver side window as the vehicle was going by. As far as I can tell, Dunn was never in danger of being run over.
You claim that Moreno was trying to run Dunn down. Do you have any evidence to support that claim?
Office Dunn didn’t have the luxury of viewing the video multiple times before deciding whether he was in danger, so I don’t question the judge’s decision to acquit him. However, if no one was attempting to harm Dunn and Dunn was not actually in danger, I don’t think you can call this a “clear-cut case of self-defense.”
> You could even be railroaded by a corrupt prosecutor and 12 terrified jurors if you're a cop because a junkie career criminal you've been trying to restrain for half an hour dies of a heart attack while in your custody.
It would be pretty crazy if that had happened. Even crazier, though, would be if you slowly applied pressure to a prone, restrained individual's back, causing positional asphyxia, in defiance of your own department's standards (which make it very clear you shouldn't keep people on their bellies for long, precisely because of this risk), were recorded doing this, those recordings horrified pretty much everyone who watched them - right and left - and then somehow people on the right rewrote history to defend you.
Yes, there was absolutely no controversy over whether or not Chauvin followed procedures, and a fascinating lack of evidence of actual trauma caused by the aforementioned technique but a wealth of evidence that lethal levels of fentanyl were present in the subject in addition to a host of other illegal substances.
This would form the core of what constitutes "reasonable doubt" but clearly the jurors disagreed. Having watched the entire arrest video, allow me to express my opinion that there is sufficient reason to believe that Floyd's death was at least as attributable to his own resistance to arrest as it was to anything Chauvin did.
> allow me to express my opinion that there is sufficient reason to believe that Floyd's death was at least as attributable to his own resistance to arrest as it was to anything Chauvin did.
Your opinion is simply, objectively wrong. Chauvin applied pressure to George Floyd's back and neck AFTER the man was handcuffed. There is no reason to do that, and, in fact, guidelines say specifically that once a person is restrained, you should not only NOT be kneeling on their neck, but you should MAKE SURE THEY ARE NO LONGER IN THE PRONE POSITION (https://lawofselfdefense.com/statute/minneapolis-pd-use-of-force-policies/):
> 1. As soon as reasonably possible, any person restrained using the MRT who is in the prone position shall be placed in the following positions based on the type of restraint used:
> a. If the hobble restraint device is used, the person shall be placed in the side recovery position.
Derek Chauvin violated explicit department policy on how to restrain people, policy that was written to prevent position asphyxia ("Burking"), and his lawyers could not point to any part of his training where he was taught to kneel on suspects' necks, because no such part existed.
(The levels of fentanyl in George Floyd's body at the time of death were not lethal to a regular user. That is why he was alive and energetic prior to Derek Chauvin murdering him.)
What about the Chinese robber logic? If you need to, say, hire 100 chemistry teachers, and there are 1000 qualified applicants, 300 of whom are black and 700 of whom are white (because whites are more likely to study chemistry than blacks) — then surely affirmative action demanding that 50 of the chemistry teachers be black, and 50 be white, should be at worst neutral on net. Even if blacks perform more poorly on average, the 90th percentile of blacks will still be as good as the 90th percentiles of whites. Is it really the case that for qualified positions like airplane pilots etc., there are so *few* good minority candidates that this is inapplicable?
I think the difference between you and people who disagree with you is that you think of "qualified" as a pass-fail bar, and they think of a rank order of candidates, such that a non-affirmative-action company would hire the 100 best, and an affirmative-action company might hire the 100 best blacks (who are randomly distributed across the 1000).
...although I also know of people who complain that affirmative action causes the hiring of literally unqualified employees, but the book didn't touch on this and I don't know how common it is.
That last thing is what seems mystifying to me, yes. And I still get the sense that Hanania, and people who are mad about the airplane story, think the national crisis is "we're hiring a bunch of incompetents on specious grounds", not "we're hiring the merely competent and passing over the *best*". The former is a civilization-killer, the latter seems like the kind of dumb thing which governments do all the time already and which aren't in danger of causing the end of the West as we know it.
The former does appear to be have been the case with WMATA preferentially hiring people right out of prison, but those are subways rather than air travel. I do however think that preferentially hiring people whose worst subject was science is aiming for less competence (on the other hand, some people were told to give that answer and could just be lying).
> The former is a civilization-killer, the latter seems like the kind of dumb thing which governments do all the time already and which aren't in danger of causing the end of the West as we know it.
Perhaps, but when we're facing serious rivalries with civilizations such as China who *do* care about strict meritocracy, and have a larger applicant pool to chose from, it may well prove to be a civilization-killer too, just over a slightly longer time period.
More competence is almost always better, few jobs are so repetitive or well-defined that they can't be done more smoothly, the cracks don't need to be papered over, etc. You casually assume that government always does dumb things as if it was a given, but it's actually not. The US government is uniquely incompetent.
However, it's possible that's actually the greatest comparative advantage of the US. The incompetence of our government since the destruction of meritocratic hiring has prevented it from being expanded by popular demand. Seems likely that this is what prevented us from becoming "expert regulators" like Europe.
I wasn't saying government incompetence was an inevitability or not worth trying to fix, the point is more that singling out AA as some particular, pressing crisis might be missing the forest for the trees if we reframe it as just being a special case of the general "the system guarantees an ungainly basic-competence across the board, at the cost of actively hindering the unusually clever/talented" thing (whether we're talking about hiring people or selecting policies). Or at least that Hanania and other vocal opponents singling it out might give an overblown sense of its specialness/importance.
It's both. Because whatever test or determination the company is doing to determine whose competent in the hiring process does not correlate 100% to competency.
So maybe without affirmative action the company would only hire people who score above 90 on some test (or on some other metric) and with affirmative action they would hire people who score 80.
And maybe people who score 90 are competent 90% of the time and people who score 80 are only competent 80% of the time, so with affirmative action you get more incompetent people, even though you are still only hiring people you expect to be competent.
I think it is more likely that AA cases cause the _removal of qualification tests_ or the redefinition of 'qualified' or 'merit' or so on. (See all the people in the comments here insisting that federal hiring is on 'merit', which--sure, it's merit_2024 and that's different from merit_1954.) And then this loops back in to dishonesty and spiritual decay.
(Whenever the SAT-IQ comparisons come up, I bring up the renorming in 1994 that clipped the upper end of the bell curve. Why do that, except to make it impossible to talk about high levels of qualification using the test?)
Oh for sure there has been a huge dumbing down in *some* hiring of the "qualified" to just the barest on paper qualifications. So do you have the right degree and right years of experience and then in the interview are you personable (and/or meet right identity characteristics). Versus actually trying to identify the best candidate.
Sadly it's not possible to rank order candidates and hire only the best 100 and lots of unqualified people are hired for reasons that don't include affirmative action (lots of cases without malice)/
For a lot of jobs, there aren't really qualifications, beyond what a hiring manager (who can be easily influenced by HR, law, societal vibes, whatever) decides. Many of these jobs are wordcels (versus shape rotators) for those familiar with the terminology.
Example - person who writes a communication piece for our daily newsletter. Can someone be more qualified? Sorta. But a masters doesn't make someone a better writer than a bachelors, necessarily. Is two years of experience important for hiring a new newsletter writer? Or five? You can ask for writing samples, but whatever "better" means is going to be very subjective. So basically, the organization can hire anyone they want and say they're qualified.
How many jobs are like this? I'd say it's a spectrum, between hiring a rocket scientist like Werner von Braun (who was skilled enough he got hired despite the rightful US bias against literal nazis), and my real example of our newsletter writer.
A big organization can have a lot of people without real qualifications (who might be really good at their jobs!). But if they're not good at their jobs, they can also be moved or sidelined to something less important.
We would also call this newsletter qualified, in that before hiring him, we would draw up a list of qualifications and then assess him against them. So yes, he's qualified, but we set the qualifications to whatever we want. And often we include the qualification of "good judgement" or "reliable".
I'm in Canada, and here we also expressly include race as a qualification in the federal government. "Member of an employment equity group - visible minority." If a hiring manager decides to list this qualification, by definition no white person can be qualified.
Sure, but even if the qualifications are hard to pin down, I think we can all agree that some newletter writers are better than others. Yes, your readership might disagree on what constitutes the best newsletter writer, but they disagree about who's qualified as well.
One thing that separates the great newsletters from the adequate is that the former have great writers, and the latter have qualified writers.
Oh yes, not all newsletter writers are the same. But to pose a question like, "is that newsletter writer qualified?" leads to some pretty nonsense responses. Yes, he's qualified because he can write? Yes he's qualified because he has a bachelors of English? In some sense everyone is qualified, and instead you have to either pick the "best" rather, or you set some arbitrary qualifications and you say, "two years of experience newsletter writing is the bar to be considered 'qualified'"
1. Why do you assume the 90th percentile of Blacks would be as good as the 90th percentile of Whites? If you admit that the Black group here has a lower average performance, then its 90th percentile would likely also have a lower average performance than the 90th percentile of Whites. I am also one of those whom Scott mentioned that think the firm should simply hire the best applicants regardless of race.
2. This hypothetical looks only at the situation at a single firm/school. But when expanded to the whole economy, affirmative action means that a few firms get all the most qualified AA-applicants while other less prestigious firms/schools, who also feel the social and legal pressures to engage in AA, must draw from ever less-qualified AA-applicants.
Regarding 1., that was meant as a different statement from my broader point; I agree the two propositions are independent.
But I think it's at best nontrivial that the top-achieving blacks would be lower on average than the top-achieving whites. Whether we think of black under-performance in terms of social setbacks (cultural/economic/etc.), or even in terms of differences in genetic distribution, you should still expect a percentage of blacks at the top who through luck of the draw lack any of these setbacks, and thus reach the same heights as their white counterparts -- shouldn't you? To my knowledge, even people who are much more bullish on HBD than Scott or even Hanania don't hold that black IQ is *capped* lower than white IQ -- that the smartest black man is always going to be dumber than the smartest white man. That's just nuts. And short of asserting that, I don't see why you *shouldn't* expect the top-achievers clustered at the top to be about equal in each population, with blacks' lower overall average being caused by an overabundance of under-achievers at the bottom?
2. is a fair point, but while I can see why it would apply to something like the American civil service, I'm just surprised it would become a problem with comparatively nicher jobs like airline pilots. I would have expected that there were *many* more "sufficiently competent" applicants than positions, so that you should still be able to fill them satisfactorily even if you added a selection handicap like AA quotas. I suppose "how many people of [minority y] are theoretically smart enough to be airline pilots" is a different question than "how many of those theoretically-passable people are actually applying to be pilots", but then doesn't that mean that AA-defenders saying we need to 'change the culture' so that qualified POCs apply to these kinds of job kind of have a point, of sorts?
I should clarify that none of this is me saying AA/hiring quotas/etc. are good. It just seems mysterious to me that it is seen (claimed?) to cash out in "companies are sometimes forced to pass over competent applicants and hire *incompetent* applicants" rather than "companies are sometimes forced to pass over *the best* applicants in favor of competent applicants who are just okay".
The standard view is that there are overlapping distributions. So there will be some blacks at most percentiles of the white distribution, but in different numbers. So, going back to Maximilian, the 90th percentile of whites might be the 99th percentile for blacks (these are just made up numbers to serve as an example). And an issue often brought up with selective college admissions is that the supply of blacks at the upper end is limited and they tend to get hoovered up by the most elite universities, resulting in the lowest black percentage at the moderately selective ones.
And this is where the steelman for "race and IQ should not be discussed in public" lies. Most people, including most journalists, lots of judges, and nearly all voters, absolutely do not think in terms of overlapping bell curves, don't know the difference between a distribution, the mean of the distribution, and an individual drawn from that distribution, and will round the correct statement about average IQ differences by race to "blacks are dumb, whites are average, Asians are smart."
I don't find this convincing (you can't discuss anything important if you're afraid to use facts or ideas that dumb people will not understand), but it's not a crazy issue to be worried about. Most people have zero understanding of statistics, and will usually do a poor job reasoning about them.
Meanwhile, not discussing it results in people assuming discrimination between all outcome disparities, and applying opposite discrimination in an attempt to remedy it. Or rather, not discussing the possibility of outcome disparities not resulting from discrimination results in that—but tabooing discussion of any other specific possible cause of outcome disparities puts a thumb on the scale in favor of those automatically inferring discrimination, who are already way too common, much more these days than people assuming all whites are smarter than all blacks.
The problem is people perpetually worried about the specter of discrimination against black people, but not at all about discrimination against white people and Asians resulting from attempts to correct for mistakenly assumed discrimination against blacks.
Well to be fair, part of the fear is that giving anti-black sentiment an inch would rekindle the fire of *historical* levels of discrimination against black people, i.e. enslavement, lynching, etc., which isn't a concern with whites. That is, some people might think discrimination against blacks wouldn't be that big of a deal in itself, but needs to be nipped in the bud lest it lead to much worse things. I'm not saying this is a very rational fear to have in the 21st century (at least to the extent of worrying about a return to slavery -- in some places a backslide into mid-20th-century-South levels of oppression doesn't feel far off), but if you accept the premise, then worrying that some whites will get worse job opportunities, *end of story*, feels paltry in comparison.
If, say, the abilities of two populations are distributed along normal distributions (bell curves) with the same standard deviation and different means, then the ratio of the number of people from the population with the higher mean who are above some cutoff point to the number of the population with the lower mean above the cutoff point increases with the cutoff point, exponentially. (The ratio of the probability density functions of two such distributions is an exponential function.) At the same time, neither distribution has a hard upper limit.
Regarding point one: your intuitions about normal distribution are off. If the “chemistry ability” is normally distributed (which it most likely is) then *small difference in average ability will be massively amplified at the extremes - eg if you have two populations, A, B, of equal size, with A 0.5 standard deviation above B in expectation, then the fraction of A among total population 2 SD above the average of B is ~88% (and it tends to 100% very very quickly).
Taking your numbers as given for the sake of argument: There are not ten times as many qualified chemistry teachers as chemistry-teacher jobs. So the only way you get there is if every wannabe chemistry teacher applies to ten jobs. What happens next is, you send out your job offers to fifty white and fifty black guys, and forty-five of the black guys say, "sorry, I got a better offer". But you need fifty black guys to insulate yourself from lawsuits and bad PR. So you send out offers to all 300 qualified black applicants, and all but thirty of them say "sorry, I got a better offer". You still need fifty.
If your organization is above average in terms of cash available to incentivize potential employers, you can *be* everybody's better offer. But then your qualified black employees will be getting paid more than your qualified white employees, which is unfair and will cause morale problems when they figure it out. And, more importantly, not everybody can be above average. The local market needs 500 black chemistry teachers, and there are only 300 qualified applicants to go around.
So you're going to be hiring twenty unqualified black chemistry teachers. And two hundred fully qualified white chemistry teachers won't be able to find work anywhere, This, also, is unfair and will cause morale problems in society at large. Plus the bit where 40% of your chemistry *students* have unqualified teachers.
> There are not ten times as many qualified chemistry teachers as chemistry-teacher jobs.
I guess this is what I find difficult to believe. Surely there *are* many more people intelligent/gifted enough to be chemistry teachers than there are available jobs! I don't mean high-level experts, just ordinary teachers. Surely there are many more such people *in any given major ethnic group* than you'd ever need. Most intelligent people could do hundreds of different necessary jobs in theory! They just aren't applying to them all. But that's an organization problem.
Don't mistake me, these people might not have the necessary training yet, and they might not have ever considered a career as a chemistry teacher -- but they could do it if desired. If it's a case where there are indeed 300 black guys who could do the job in theory, but they've not had the training/haven't thought to apply, then as I said elsewhere in this comment thread, doesn't that support AA-proponents' narrative that we just need more training programs and awareness campaigns to lure minorities into these fields, and then the system will work perfectly fine?
(Of course, if we don't care about the vaunted benefits of AA, then it's obvious that having the campaigns but not the quotas, and then hiring on ability alone once the work's been done, would cut to the chase and be fairer with equally good results. But the point is that in this light, AA shouldn't be *dysfunctonial*.)
If we stipulate that there's demand for fifty competent black chemistry teachers, then in an otherwise-free market their salaries should rise until the jobs *are* attractive to the cheapest acceptable candidate, no? So it's just a matter of making sure good quality screening is being done at the hiring stage on *top* of the stipulated diversity quota.
Or do you really think there's such a lack of qualified minorities at the scale of the overall economy that you could *never* fill 50% of needed positions with qualified minority applicants, even with optimal allocation?
(I say "stipulate" because, just to keep that in mind, this is a discussion about whether an AA system can stabilize into one where necessary jobs get done by qualified people; not about whether AA is a *beneficial* constraint to impose upon the system.)
"Never" is a long time, and if whites continue shrinking as a fraction then every racial group will be a "minority". Under the status quo, there are preferences for hiring CERTAIN minorities and thus it's difficult to find qualified minority hires even if you want them. This is less of a problem for a smaller number of needed hires, like VP or SCOTUS spots, as Yglesias discusses a way down in this post https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-progressive-organizations-have
> Or do you really think there's such a lack of qualified minorities at the scale of the overall economy that you could *never* fill 50% of needed positions with qualified minority applicants, even with optimal allocation?
That conclusion immediately follows from the difference in average IQs by race (equal IQ broadly representing equal qualification for any sort of job that is not physical labor), the demographic proportions, and the normal distribution. The best writer on this remains La Griffe du Lion [http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com].
I'll look into this, but prima facie I find it hard to grasp how you could jump to that conclusion without also having a solid number on *how many people above a certain IQ you absolutely need overall* for all the jobs to get done? Otherwise how does anything follow?
And in our society they'd need special chemistry and teaching credentials which aren't worth the bother of obtaining if you don't expect to get a chemistry-teacher job. Or, from the other side, not worth the bother of setting up a school to give out more credentials if there's already enough chemistry teachers to fill all the jobs.
So the number of credentialed candidates is unlikely to much exceed the number of jobs, and the really qualified candidates are a subset of that.
If you're taking people "with the potential to someday become qualified," from the group you want more of, and giving them free or heavily-subsidized training, while the group you want less of is expected to already be fully trained coming in the door, that still amounts to a mix of hiring unqualified people and paying them lots more.
I would think the 90th percentile of black chemists would be working at e.g. Exxon or Monsanto or a pharma company? Not teaching school.
In fact, I think a lack of minority schoolteachers is a problem for those would prefer for minority children to be taught by members of their own group, which idea to be clear I have heard from the left. I am not sure how serious they are about it or if it is meant primarily as a means of criticizing the teachers that exist.
the issue in that example, I would think is the assumption that the applicant pool is so much larger (10times larger) than what they are hiring.
I know that in theory it's true that say companies can post a job opening and get tons of applicants but realistically
1 Not everyone who applies would accept the offer
2. Not everyone who applies is actually component.
I mean, sanity check: people who have the skills to be a chemistry teacher don't have a 90% unemployment rate. So clearly there aren't just an endless supply of available applicants such that you can guarantee always finding some in whatever race you are looking for.
The conclusion comparing it to a missile manual was perfect. One additional consideration is, if those laws go away, would it really change anything? Given the existence of social media, pervasive canceling of companies and people, and broad social sympathies for perceived victimized groups, I would imagine “that company doesn’t hire minorities” to be much more damaging from a customer and relationship perspective in 2024 than the 60s and 70s when those laws were passed. If that’s true (which I’m unsure of), in a sense the civil rights advocates have already won.
One thing I forgot to mention was that Hanania correctly points out that nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?) etc. He thinks the reason racial discrimination has become so much more talked about than these other superficially-equally-interesting questions is that the government makes all companies keep racial statistics and talk about things in those terms. If there were no AA, companies wouldn't keep the statistics and people might forget about it the same way they've forgotten about religious discrimination.
The classic "religious discrimination" test case for most of the Western world has always been Jews, though not so much in America. While some degree of antisemitism has always been a thing in the USA, it was never a particularly powerful cultural phenomenon until the past six months or so.
I'd be interested in seeing some statistics on how and if hiring discrimination in America today affects the two groups that *have* historically seen severe discrimination: Catholics and Mormons.
Absolutely. He deserves a pat on the back just for that. It is amazing all the ink spilled on the subject without anyone's ever mooting the obvious (and only) solution - just stop talking about it, all of it, IQ included.
I think it would, that the laws are the only things holding wokeness together right now. Look at all the stuff that's going on around us today. Everywhere you look, even in hard-left areas like California and Chicago, we see wokeness in retreat. They overplayed their hands pretty badly in the last few years, and people are starting to wake up (no pun intended) to the serious damage their ideas cause when put into practice, and saying "screw that!"
There's a pendulum swing of politics in which there was a big wave of enthusiasm that couldn't persist at 2020 levels indefinitely. But it's institutionalized enough that I don't think it's actually going to be rolled back that easily.
Perhaps, but aren't the laws in question the underpinnings of that institutionalism?
Some people claim that "the law is downstream from culture," others that "culture is downstream from the law." I figure they're both right; the two both influence and feed into each other. Start fixing one, and it will begin to fix the other over time.
I expect it wouldn't disappear immediately, but there would be more variation among companies; and perhaps the non-woke companies would start to outcompete the woke ones, leading to the expansion of the share of non-woke ones, until the distribution of company policies matches the distribution of employee preferences.
But there is plenty of effects of wokeness at for-profits too. Having that reduced would be a major benefit.
I don't expect there would immediately be more variation in academia because likely the employees and students, not law, are the main drivers of the wokeness there.
But eventually if society as a whole turns against wokeness, if arguments against wokeness that currently only discussed among politically engaged right-wingers become commonly known because many for-profit employees are free to discuss them, I expect that would slightly reduce wokeness in academia too.
But also, ultimately it's the laws that I personally care about the most anyway. The main reason I mind wokeness is that it hinders getting the laws repealed or curtailed, and instead drives even more expansive interpretations of them. If private companies were free from anti-discrimination and hostile workplace environment laws, or only subjected to narrow anti-discrimination laws that required plaintiffs to actually prove discriminatory intent, I would care little about wokeness in academia or wherever.
Elon buying Twitter might make all the difference once Hanania's plan is implemented. The media field is now (arguably) more balanced and we might reach a much better equilibrium.
I’m genuinely concerned that my point was misconstrued based on the responses I’m getting. I share the concerns of the original civil rights advocates because discrimination based on race sucks. I don’t pretend what we have now is fair either but rather I’m hoping that socially we have ingrained more of our principles than the US of the 60s and 70s such that the law would be immaterial. The forces I cited would be useful social tools in shaping opinions of bigots that violate tolerant norms. Generally, I think I’d prefer a society where the government has fewer restrictions on behavior and societal norms informed by shared values has a greater influence.
And what happens when those "shared values" change, as they are doing right now? Not that the distinction really matters, of course; laws can easily be rewritten or even ignored if there's an actual will for that.
> And what happens when those "shared values" change, as they are doing right now?
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
While I would very much like wokeness to disappear (I favor color-blind meritocracy), Lewis is phrasing his advice in a literally one-dimensional way. Even individual _cells_ are not well described by a _single_ parameter, going forward or back, let alone people, let alone societies.
> Lewis is phrasing his advice in a literally one-dimensional way.
Yes he is. Sometimes, though, that's all you need, especially if you're trying to convey a broad point without getting bogged down in too many confounding details. Broadly speaking, "we must go back; going back is the quickest way on" is valid.
You sort of got there yourself: if you go fully cynical about people and government, it's hard to believe in anything. That's the beauty of the Constitution at least, to hold a set of shared values that uphold individual rights. It's why the civil rights laws were able to be passed in the first place, and (if you accept the book's premise) why they were able to have such an outsized impact. To your specific question, if things go sideways, pass a law. This course correction is roughly what happened with prohibition and what I expect to happen with abortion (eventually).
I'm going to differ on the Constitution, it consists of laws rather than values. There was no political principle behind the 3/5 clause or the 20 year limit before the slave trade could be restricted, they were just political compromises.
Yeah I’m sure there are other similar interpretations. Values are always upstream of laws. The point, though, is that you have to have some fundamental things you agree on that can only change when most of society agrees or else you just get tyranny of the majority (or chaos that leads to bad stuff).
I'm not at all sure that "that company hires fewer minorities than their proportion in the population" is going to be damaging from a customer relationship perspective. As other commenters have noted, affirmative action does _not_ have broad public support. More generally, woke people, while loud, are a minority (on the order of 33% https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/563415-poll-one-third-of-voters-identify-as-woke/) of the population.
The thing about Title IX in sports is that the basic problem is football.
The general requirement of Title IX is that sports should be separate but equal (obviously, I'm quoting Plessy v Ferguson maliciously here). That generally means that the number of scholarships given to male student-athletes and the number given to female student-athletes should be the same.
If it weren't for football, this would be easy - for instance, each (top-level) college can have 13 basketball scholarships per team, so that's 13 men and 13 women. Compliance with Title IX is absolutely trivial. Even with baseball, they just have 12 men playing baseball and 12 women playing softball.
But football is 85 scholarships and they are all men. This creates a problem where a college has to have 85 additional scholarships that are all women. But all (or virtually all) the other sports are played by both sexes. So they end up with every other sport having more scholarships for women than for men, and men's sports getting dropped, so that the women's version of that sport can be used to balance out the many men's scholarships in football. So many colleges now have women-only track and field, for instance.
It really would have been a far simpler solution to just require any college that has a men's football team to create a women's football team with equal numbers of scholarships. Most of the other distortions would drop out of the system if the requirement was equal numbers on a sport-by-sport basis, rather than a college-by-college basis with the single largest sport being the only major single-sex sport.
If I had to guess, (no actual facts to back this up, just personal observations,) probably because there's no demand for them. How many girls did you know, back when you were in middle school and high school, who showed *any interest at all* in playing football?
Soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, etc., sure. But for some reason, football seems to be rather uniquely "not a girls' sport."
There are a fair number of girls who are interested in playing football. I think even more than boys, though I'm not sure about that. But, you know, the *other* football, the one that actually involves a lot of contact between foot and ball. So we could imagine a school where the men's poncified rugby, er, "football", team is counterbalanced by the women's actual football team.
Except that, as Ryan notes, the fancy rugby teams give out a *lot* more scholarships.
I think John's impish suggestion was that you could fulfill the *letter* of the rule that says "there has to be a men's football team and a women's football team, only the one can balance out the other" by playing on the double meaning.
An exceedingly good question to which I don't think I have a complete answer.
I think that part of the answer is just that football is a very violent sport and colleges in the 1970s when Title IX was new did not regard creating a women's football team as a reasonable thing to do.
Another part is that there aren't high school women's football teams (Title IX doesn't apply to high school sport because there's no scholarships involved), which means that there isn't an adequate pool of players to recruit. It is dangerous to play football without a significant amount of time spent being coached and practising: if you hit people the wrong way you will hurt them. This will get penalised, but you have to practise until you have muscle memory of the right way to do it or you'll still mess it up at game speed with pressure on. Colleges can rely on high schools to have done this for boys, but not for girls.
There's no pool of players to recruit from, no professional ranks to graduate to, no Olympics to aspire to (which is what keeps sports like swimming and gymnastics going), and the sport is intrinsically more dangerous than others.
But that's more about why they don't do it now. Most of that was equally true for women's basketball or women's soccer in the 1970s. But that didn't stop colleges making women's teams in those sports, and high school and professional sport mostly built themselves up on the back of the college game.
Another thing to consider is that 85 scholarships is a lot. In football its necessary because even though each time only has 11 players on the field at any given time, positions are highly specialized. It's rare these days for anyone to play offense and defense, so 11 becomes 22. Then you have guys that are only on special teams (at minimum a kicker and punter, but increasingly a second kicker and a long snapper, and occasionally guys that specialize in kick/punt returns). So now you're around 25. Given injuries and the roster turnover that's inherent in college sports, you want to be 2-3 deep at every position at a bare minimum. So now you're in the 50-75 range. Then you have to factor in specialized packages. For example, a standard defensive formation will have 4 defensive backs, but you also need nickel (5 DBs) and dime (6 DBs) packages in certain situations. Or, on offense, 1 tight end might be standard but 2 TEs has become really common. In practice, managing those 85 scholarships is difficult.
Finally, consider that almost every school wants a football team because they are the biggest revenue generators and, in nearly all cases, pay for nearly every other sport (basketball is usually self-sustaining, but it's a rare exception to find any other sport that doesn't need to be subsidized). So multiply 85 by about 120 DI football teams, plus about 160 D2 teams (though they get fewer scholarships).
So everything you said above is true, but if you want to overcome all those physical and cultural hurdles and build up women's football from scratch, you have to create a much bigger pool of potential players than you would if you just needed ~12 scholarship players to field a team in a sport with a smaller roster. Plus, in that case, you have more flexibility in which sports you use to equalize the number of scholarships. For example, some schools have varsity women's ice hockey because the local culture makes sense, but other schools can do something different.
The natural comparison would be with the NFL, which - at first glance - has a roster limit of only 53. But that's not a proper comparison; plenty of players on a NCAA D1 FBS scholarship would be "inactive" in pro sports (injured players, redshirts, etc). The fairer comparison is to the number of players an NFL team is allowed to have under contract, which is 90. College teams don't have more football players than NFL teams, in spite of what some talking heads will say.
So yeah, building 100 full rosters would mean finding 8500 players, which realistically means 100,000 playing in high school. Basketball only needs 12 per team, much easier for a high school to put together.
If you look post-college, the only professional women's football was the LFL (originally "Lingerie Football League") which, uh, wasn't really selling itself on the quality of the sporting competition. There is a tiny bit of amateur 11 v 11 tackle football (well, unpaid: WFA teams are allowed to pay their players but none of them can actually afford to do so), and they just scrape enough money together to pay a game fee and flight and accomodation for the players who play for the USA in the IFAF World Championships, so that is technically the only professional 11 v 11 women's tackle football team in the world (for the three games they play every four years). Unsurprisingly, women's American football is even less important in every other country and the USA has won ever game they've ever played (they are 12-0 all-time).
There are 85 scholarship players on D1 football teams, but don't forget about walk-ons. Google tells me about 40 non-scholarship players is the norm. That doesn't contradict anything either of us has said; I'm just adding it for completeness. It makes sense to me that college would need a bigger roster given the 3-5ish year duration of a college career.
Man, I totally forgot about the LFL. Good times.
I knew nothing about amateur women's tackle football before reading this post. That's interesting. USA! USA!
I happened to be in Finland in 2013 when the women's world championship was on and saw a billboard at the airport. Honestly, I had to look it up in wikipedia to get any details, but it's a lot easier to find something if you're sure that it exists.
LFL was a casualty of the pandemic, apparently. They're now the "X-League", are wearing uniforms that cover slightly more of their bodies (cycle shorts and midriff-baring tops) and are supposedly coming back in 2025. I can't work out if they are owned by the XFL or not, which probably is intentional.
>Finally, consider that almost every school wants a football team because they are the biggest revenue generators and, in nearly all cases, pay for nearly every other sport
I'm reminded of something I read a while back, possibly from one of Milton Friedman's books, about colleges being in multiple businesses at once, producing education and certification for students, monuments for major donors, and football for alumni.
…I think the obvious thing to do here is to ban American football for boys as well. Just, like, in general. There. Balance restored, and fewer American young men will sustain grievous bodily injuries. Is there a downside?
Other than preventing consenting adults from engaging in an activity they want to do?
Well, you're also preventing some people from making life-changing amounts of money. Granted, it's a very small number of people who earn that much, so in the aggregate the impact may be small. But for the individuals who do benefit...
I'm an individualist with libertarian philosophical leanings, so these things matter to me.
Oh, yes, of course. The post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I find the mindset of people who willingly subject themselves to American football baffling, but I wouldn't seriously propose banning it. It's just momentarily funny to fantasize for a few seconds about, just this once, allowing ourselves to tell the insane people who would like to keep hitting themselves with hammers ".......you know what, screw this, I'm going to be a traitor to my principles and take your hammers away". Just a bit of "yes, yes, principles, but between ourselves those jocks' preferences *are* completely bonkers, right?" elbowing between geeks, do forgive me.
Though I do, more seriously, think that there should be awareness campaigns of how physically dangerous it can be, as there is for other hazardous activities we don't want to outright ban, like smoking. If girls have successfully come to the rational position that it is a bad use of their time, without anyone needing to actually ban them from it -- then surely, even accounting for testosterone and objective greater physical resilience, boys could with the right cultural shift come to the same conclusion. I wonder.
I've lost the reference, but some flag football is taking off with women.
I'd much rather watch healthy young women play -- even if it's flag. Commentators could go on about their personal stories and make a great show of it if they had a pro women's flag football league. It would be more interesting than soccer.
Why would professional womwn's flag football be more interesting than (professional women's?) soccer? I don't consider women's soccer particularly interesting but have no idea about flag football. In male sports, I consider soccer much more interesting than american football.
Soccer is a bunch of people standing around. American football is a master class in ambition -- at least for American men. And it's a meritocracy. It takes strategy, physical agility, and brute strength. Flag football emphasizes agility and strategy over strength, which seems like a natural fit for women. And women are just better looking than men. I wouldn't mind watching them run and dodge and block, and revel in it all.
Of course I don't share your view on soccer but I guess if both of us did a deep dive into the other's favored sport, we'd learn to appreciate it.
Right now, I see american football as an anaerobic competition. Short encounters, less than a round of boxing, of high mental and physical intensity. Association footballs seems to me much more challenging endurance-wise. Some of the guys stand around but every one except the goalies runs quite a few miles per match with a lot of intermediate sprints. There's high sophistication about where to stand around and how long, where to run when and how to handle the ball and the opponent.
Yes. If you want the sophisticated intellectual version, you can read Jonathan Wilson's columns in the Guardian. If you want the shouty talk radio version, then there's 606, which is available as a podcast.
Yep, and this leads to some really weird recruiting behavior. I went to a US university decidedly not known for it's football prowess. Despite that, we had a girls bowling team with members on full scholarship from all over the country. The girls tennis team was almost entirely Dutch women who were recruited specifically to play tennis at a school nobody has heard of.
You've caused me to look up something that puzzled me the other day, while grocery shopping. What seemed to be a delegation from Europe in matching tennis outfits, but which on closer inspection were those of a second-tier state college a couple hundred miles away.
I didn't think anymore about it, but just now looked up the rosters: mostly France, England, Ukraine, Luxembourg, Australia - just one American.
Well and you are assuming there is similar interest in playing sports among men and women, which I would love to introduce you to humans if that is your belief.
Fair. It's really title IX makes that assumption, but it would be a minor annoyance if there were women's football teams: if they existed, EEOC and courts would probably have eventually (at some point in the 1990s, probably) interpreted title IX to require colleges to have both men's and women's teams with equal numbers of scholarships in every sport that they have scholarships in. But that would mean a court requiring the creation of 10,000 women's football scholarships. There aren't 10,000 high school girls who know how to put pads on, and Title IX doesn't apply to high schools, so they'd never be able to get them to start building girls' football teams to supply players to the colleges.
The distortion of having a women's team matching every men's team would be real, but wouldn't be that big - sure, fewer women are interested in playing sports than men, but not by that much given the very small number of scholarships available. There are about 15 million students total; there are around half a million "student-athletes", though a majority of those are in the non-scholarship Division III. Division I scholarships are maybe half a percent of students. Guessing that perhaps half of men and a fourth of women are interested in playing sports, that means that they're the top 1% of men and the top 2% of women: that's more than a high enough standard for the sports to be interesting and competitive. Sure, the women's version will be a bit worse relative to what women are capable of, and the TV and in-person audience will be lower - but it's not catastrophic for the structure of college sports.
The distortions caused by men's football result in eight sports (Div I) being women-only (beach volleyball, bowling, equestrian, field hockey, rugby, triathlon, plus the two sports that cheerleading was split into: "acrobatics and tumbling" and "stunt") - note that five of these are Olympic sports, so US Olympic teams have men who never got scholarships competing alongside women who did [aside: women's rowing is governed by the NCAA, men's never joined and is governed by a separate body, the IRA, so it's not a "women-only sport" in spite of NCAA regulations apparently saying it is]. On top of that, the only sport with equal numbers of scholarships for men and women is ice hockey, though wrestling (9.9 men, 10.0 women) and baseball/softball (11.7 men, 12.0 women) are very close, and lacrosse has, uniquely, more men (12.6 to 12.0). But many other sports have vast gaps like 8-4.5 in tennis or 12-4.5 in indoor volleyball.
The combination of Title IX and men's college football (or the absence of women's college football) screws over almost every other men's sport. Even basketball is 13 men and 15 women. Why? To soak up 2 of the men's football scholarships in Title IX compliance.
Meh I think the differences in playing sports competitive are quite a bit large enough that there is some serious injustice in "equal" scholarship numbers. My college had a multiple national championship winning wrestling team disbanded to string together some barely functional girls volleyball/softball/swimming teams. All sports where the number of boys interested in scholarships and not getting them almost certainly exceed the number of women wanting scholarships.
You can start noticing the difference between boys and girls and their commitment to sports in soccer as early as like 8U. Stick 40 boys and 40 girls on a field and after a year 20 of the girls are checked out and 10 of the boys, and after two years maybe 25/12.
I would argue that title 9 has taken a situation where there were at say a normal 10,000 person mid-sized state school roughly 2,500/5,000 men interested in playing college sports and say 400 on scholarship and 500/5,000 women interested in playing college sports and 100/5,000 on scholarship.
And made the figures 250/5,000 and 250/500 and called that "progress", under the mistaken belief that the reason boys are 10X more interested in sports has something to do with "oppression" and "opportunity" instead of you know natural human behavior.
IDK I coach youth sports at a very fair handed coed even-minded level. And especially once you hit 10-11 you bleed girls like crazy. There are still plenty of girls interested in sports, but nothing like the boys. Go look at recess at any elementary school in the world. Like half the boys will be playing soccer/tag/whatever EVERY DAY. Meanwhile half the girls are sitting around talking.
As someone who actually works in civil rights law, this description of disparate impact discrimination is just completely wrong and made up. As long as the employer can demonstrate a legitimate reason for the requirement it wins. Before that a company that, say employed ditch diggers, could insist that employees pass a math test. Given our longstanding inequities in education, particularly of low-income workers, this had the intended effect of excluding black workers. So hiring on "merit" is completely fine as long as "merit" has some connection to the job. Courts are generally hostile to disparate impact claims, to the point that civil rights lawyers are very reluctant to bring them.
Similarly, we could endow a company with money to hire employees being discriminated against, and watch that company outcompete all the irrational companies.
> and watch that company outcompete all the irrational companies
In a situation where the discriminated-against party is outnumbered you would only expect choosing on dimensions other than quality to impact performance if labor is scarce. If there are enough qualified preferred-race (or whatever non-quality variable employers are being choosy over) candidates to fill available roles and the difference between hiring the nth and n-1th best candidate is negligible* the bottom line would be insulated against arbitrary choosiness.
*Actually this also holds in situations where actual performance is hard to predict from perceived quality--where outcomes are high variance and the difference is not negligible, but you can't reliably tell who is going to be most successful at the point of application
Also too, it only makes sense to describe discriminatory or arbitrarily choosy companies as irrational if they are aware they're leaving value on the table. If the discrimination is unconscious or is thought to serve as a proxy for value then, while someone could still come in and swoop up the extra value (assuming all competing companies share the choosy behavior and someone hasn't already done so) the companies in question wouldn't be making face-palmingly bad decisions.
The ratio matters, not the absolute number, as long as the number of needed hires does not approach the size of the preferred candidate applicant pool. In general, the higher the ratio of preferred (on an arbitrary dimension) to non-preferred candidates, the more often and the more steeply non-preferred candidates can be discriminated against without losing competitive advantage by allowing competitors to snap up the talent you left on the table.
Does this have the same problem that the last time this type of study was done, in that it's not black-sounding names that are discriminated against, but poor-sounding names, and stereotypically black-sounding names also sound poor, because black people are mostly poor?
e.g., are they comparing Lamar and Bubba, or Tyrone and David?
IIRC there are similar studies comparing "name" with "no name" or "name and photo" with "name and no photo," which shouldn't be vulnerable to that effect.
I hadn’t see that; thank you for posting it. The study data only shows discrimination against blacks. If “positive discrimination” (discrimination against whites) were as widespread as Hanania seems to think, I would expect it to show up in this study.
Thanks for this. Some more questions, if you have time:
Is it true, as Hanania claims, that they have to prove a test is nondiscriminatory for each race and site individually?
How easy is it to prove legitimate reason? If I say "I want my schoolteachers to do well on an IQ test, because schoolteachers should be smart" does that pass?
Why can't Sheetz say "We don't want people with histories of violent crime because we think they might be violent or criminal while working for us"?
Why was Duke Power Co decided the way it was, since they asked people to take a mechanical aptitude test for a mechanical job?
1) He may be right about that (I don't know actually) but even if he is right, so what? If a test is relevant to a job, that evidence will apply to each worksite. It's not like there's some affirmative requirement that employers prove the test works before they can implement it--they can do whatever they want and the only check is a lawsuit. A plaintiffs' attorney is not going to bring that case if it doesn't have some evidence the
2) Very easy. You just have to show there is a “manifest relationship to the employment in question" (a more lenient standard added by subsequent more conservative courts) then the burden shifts to the plaintiffs to prove its not legitimate or that the employer could achieve the same goal in a way that doesn't have a disparate impact. In Griggs, there was direct evidence from the employer's own experience that the test they were using was uncorrelated with job performance.
3) That is likely enough. But if, for example, their experience showed that people with a criminal history were no likelier to be violent and criminal than that argument would rightly fail. I think it is also unlikely the EEOC will win this case in the current legal environment.
4) As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.
If a plaintiff wins they can (though don't alwasy) get attorneys' fees, which is not true of defendants. But that's still a big risk for an attorney to take -- getting fees can take years, courts often quibble about the amount, and if you lose you are out years of work withiut compensation. Also plaintiffs do have to pay costs (filing fees, deposition transcripts, and some other things) for defendants if they lose and that can be tens of thousands of dollars in aditional losses.
Costs are not that expensive and usually run to hundreds or low thousands. Fees are where it's at. The major plaintiffs' shops run it as a factory business and can easily keep their costs to a minimum if the claim isn't shaping up to be lucrative. Since over 95% of cases settle, the chances of having to fight about a lodestar rate with the court are slim.
My larger point is that Hannania is a deeply (and admittedly!) dishonest person and engaging with his description of factual questions is unwise--as you found when you looked into the facts of the Tesla case, which were awful. He doesn't want anti discrimination laws not because they are counterproductive or over broad but because he thinks racial discrimination is a good thing as his past history of white supremacist posting shows. (Yes he has "apologized" for that but I don't see any reason to believe him).
> Good afternoon. I'm Monique Lillard, from the University of Idaho. I am very pleased to inform you these proceedings will be published by the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal. I want to acknowledge that EEOC Commissioner Paul Miller is in the audience. [To Commissioner Miller] It's a pleasure to have you here again.
Indeed. That makes me very confident that the following research will be deeply honest and not at all biased in favor of EEOC and its mission statement.
Are there any reasons to oppose disparate impact policies or anti-discrimination laws or affirmative action other than a desire for racial discrimination, in your view?
There are critiques of affirmative action around the idea that it leads to stigma towards the groups who benefit that outweighs the benefits. Also that it causes employers to ignore socioeconomic diversity. I don't find those persuasive but they're coherent.
In terms of bans on disparate impact discrimination, you might just not believe that courts can figure out which hiring qualifications are relevant to predicting job success. But why you should believe employers can do so in that case I don't know.
I would turn the question around and ask what the social purpose is of allowing employers to hire using mechanisms that demonstrably do not relate to employees success and cause discrimination.
More generally, we don't have hypothesize about what employment would look like if we got rid of antidiscrimination law. We only passed those laws in the 1960s. It wasn't true then that the market eliminated discrimination!
> There are critiques of affirmative action around the idea that it leads to stigma towards the groups who benefit that outweighs the benefits.
Yup. First time I ever heard the concept criticized was in my late teens, from a latino friend whose argument was essentially, "if there's affirmative action in place and I get a job somewhere, everyone's going to look at me like I only got it because of the policy and not because I deserved it, and I don't ever want that to happen, therefore affirmative action needs to die." That conversation was quite the eye-opener for me!
I think your statement about disparate impact is slipping in a few assumptions that aren't obviously correct:
You said: "I would turn the question around and ask what the social purpose is of allowing employers to hire using mechanisms that demonstrably do not relate to employees success and cause discrimination."
a. There is a big and important difference between mechanisms that can't be shown in court to relate to employee success and mechanism that demonstrably do not relate to employee success. It's similar to the difference between "not guilty" and "proven innocent."
In fact, all else equal, we should expect employers to be a lot better at figuring out what makes a good employee than a court will be--the judge is an expert on the law, but not an expert on running an electric company or a convenience store chain or a software house or whatever. And the world is absolutely full of things that aren't legible or easy to prove, but are still important. In my field, I think I can look at a young researcher and have a pretty good intuition about whether he or she will be a star in 10 years, even compared to other people who look very similar on paper, and I don't think I am unique here. The court is only involved here because the employers may also be making these decisions for bad reasons that are forbidden by law, like not wanting black employees.
b. It seems like "and cause discrimination" is assuming your conclusion. Having a racial/gender proportion of employees that is not the same as the population is not the same thing as discrimination, at least not in the normal way the word is used. Indeed, the world is absolutely full of fields and workplaces where the race and gender ratio is not much like that of the population, even in places where it seems extremely unlikely to be due to any kind of discrimination. (For example, women are overrepresented among veterinarians and East Asians are overrepresented among academic computer scientists. It's hard to see how either of these would be due to anyone discriminating.)
Many thanks for your detailed and informative answers on all these questions!
One quibble:
>In terms of bans on disparate impact discrimination, you might just not believe that courts can figure out which hiring qualifications are relevant to predicting job success. But why you should believe employers can do so in that case I don't know.
Typically, one would expect employers to be domain experts in their area of business, while one would expect the courts to be domain experts in the law.
While I have never been a manager, I have been one of a team of department members evaluating job candidates, and I asked technical questions closely analogous to situations that arose in the code base we maintained and extended. (e.g. "What is the topology of a CMOS NAND gate? What does the transient waveform in a low-pass RC circuit fed a pulse look like? etc.)
"allowing employers to hire using mechanisms that demonstrably do not relate to employees success"
The idea that courts can figure out a company's business model, hiring criteria, and employment practices better than the employer itself is one of the foundational philosophical divides between the sides.
"In terms of bans on disparate impact discrimination, you might just not believe that courts can figure out which hiring qualifications are relevant to predicting job success. But why you should believe employers can do so in that case I don't know."
3 reasons:
1. Employers have a financial incentive to figure this out. Court's don't.
2. Employers have more experience with their industry than courts do
3. All Employers have to do is figure out which are LIKELY to predict job success. Courts deal with proof.
The tldr is "likely" just means that the company believes it will predict job success. Because all a probability is, is a degree of belief. If I have a hunch that being smart will make someone a good teacher than the probability that being smart makes someone a good teacher is over 0.5 (at least my probability for this happening). Now I could be wrong, sure. Like maybe being smart is not correlated with being a good teacher. In a fair market companies will make reasonable, educated guesses and will be right more often than they are wrong.
But if being wrong comes with an expensive lawsuit then they will err on the side of assuming their tests doesn't work just in case someone can prove it doesn't work so that even tests that do work won't be used because maybe they dont.
> A plaintiffs' attorney is not going to bring that case if it doesn't have some evidence
Tell me you're completely unfamiliar with the concept of "the process is the punishment" without saying you're completely unfamiliar with the concept of "the process is the punishment"...
Sure there are nuisance settlements--I'm familiar with that concept. But my point was that the "you have to answer job site by job site" is irrelevant to that. Sure, there are some meritless cases, but there are lots of errors in the other direction too--meritorious cases that aren't proved because its too expensive and a lawyer won't take them. One-sided fee-shifting is meant as a means of addressing the imbalance in resources between employers and employees.
Re 3, I had a boss I was on good terms with a decade or so ago who definitely *thought* that he wasn't allowed to (explicitly) exclude people with a history of theft, and that the company would *also* risk being held liable for anything such a hypothetical thief did end up stealing. Sample size of one and all, upstate New York (so salt accordingly for different jurisdictions/local views on law/etc), but it's at least weak evidence of the chilling effect from the double-bind. (We didn't hire any thieves so far as I know, but I was never in a position to see background check results either.)
> 4) As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.
This does not mean the test isn't a good test in the sense that it doesn't measure job performance. See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left.
The test not predicting job performance could equivalently mean that Duke Power had a very well calibrated way to choose their employees where they were prefectly capturing the information from the apitutde test compared to all the other factors involved in hiring. Indeed the fact that this turns out to be very common suggests to me that this is going on here (and elsewhere).
Excellent. Call it Hartgood's law: a measure used for control purposes is worthless for observing statistical regularities in the phenomenon being measured in proportion to how optimal the control is.
First, I'm setting aside your assertions that "The way things are is correct", because that's precisely what is being debated, and simply asserting that doesn't demonstrate anything.
Second, this neglects the role of stochastic enforcement and extremely high punitive fines in creating a regime of fear, as well as neglecting the cost of fighting such claims in the event that they are brought.
Third, you're looking at the environment -after- everybody has already adjusted - it shouldn't surprise us if the median disparate impact lawsuit fails (which I note you don't actually claim, but am assuming for the purposes of steelmanning), that's the only equilibrium.
This sounds fine in theory, except for the fact that the courts have determined that things like IQ tests have no relation to job performance in certain industries even when they demonstrably do predict performance. More generally, why should we accept that judges have a better sense of what tests are a good metric for finding a good employee than employers do?
" Before that a company that, say employed ditch diggers, could insist that employees pass a math test."
Given that all sorts of cognitive tests correlates highly with IQ, and IQ correlates with job performance *in general*, then they should be allowed by default if we want meritocratic hiring.
Your SAT math score or high school math grade may not have some obvious connection to your history grades, does that mean every college should have to prove such relationships for every single class it offers? Or can we just accept that cognitive performance on different tasks are related?
Everyone gets that cognitive performance on different tasks are generally related. But it's still not clear why you would use IQ tests for meritocratic hiring in a specialized role, any more than you use IQ tests to decide who wins a chess tournament.
Why opt for a criteria that is (let's say) 0.7 correlated with what you're actually trying to achieve, instead of one that is 0.99 correlated?
I worked for a marketing research startup firm from 1982-2000. In 1982, our hiring exam was the final exam given by one of our founders, a college professor, in his Quantitative Methods in Marketing Research course. It was a great test, and we hired a lot of good people in the 1980s.
Our biggest client gave a similar exam and hired a lot of good people.
When the EEOC went after our biggest, most prestigious client over their hiring exam, the firm then spent a lot of money on consulting firms to have it validated as related to work performance to the necessary legal standard. And they continued to hire good people.
In contrast, when the EEOC finally noticed us in the 1990s, we found out how much it would cost to validate our exam and decided to save money by throwing it out. That turned out to penny wise and pound foolish.
> consulting firms to have it validated as related to work performance to the necessary legal standard
How does this work? What sort of guarantee does the consulting firm that did the validation provide? Are they on the hook legally to represent their client in case a suit is brought challenging that the hiring exam they validated passes the necessary legal standard? Or is it informal? I'd like to learn about this aspect of Anglo business culture.
"As someone who actually works in civil rights law, this description of disparate impact discrimination is just completely wrong and made up. As long as the employer can demonstrate a legitimate reason for the requirement it wins"
I'm not seeing a disagreement over facts here, you think it's a good thing these judges have a veto over private-sector employment practices and he doesn't.
"So hiring on "merit" is completely fine as long as "merit" has some connection to the job."
College degrees are famously irrelevant to jobs, but companies can still require them. IQ tests were rejected because judges decided they didn't like them.
In particular, I think IQ scores positively correlate with performance on nearly all jobs. The correlation is lower for a janitor than a programmer, but it's positive in both cases.
Now, anyone who wants to discriminate against blacks could certainly decide to demand an IQ test as a way to get away with discriminating. But since this will also help them determine who will perform better, how does it make sense to forbid it?
Similarly, blacks are more likely to have a criminal record than whites. I see that it's possible for an employer to be trying to use this as a stealth way to hire fewer blacks without getting in legal trouble. But a criminal record seems obviously relevant to a lot of things you care about as an employer. Making you spend a bunch of money proving that (once for each employer, I guess) doesn't seem like a very sensible policy.
I assume (but don't know) that in both cases, the EEOC and maybe the judges involved have a policy outcome they prefer (no IQ tests for employment, no excluding people for having a criminal record) and used existing antidiscrimination law as a crowbar to get their preferred policy imposed.
>College degrees are famously irrelevant to jobs, but companies can still require them. IQ tests were rejected because judges decided they didn't like them.
This point deserves emphasis because of its cost. A standardized test typically takes on the order of hours. An otherwise-unnecessary college degree takes _10% of a person's entire potential working life_. If credentialism is being driven by making hiring decisions more defensible to the EEOC, that is a _huge_ cost.
Can you explain the Sheetz case? Because saying employers are not allowed to use criminal history to decide whom to hire due to disparate impact seems really crazy to me.
A little history about social justice-- there were at least hints of it in Howard Fast's memoir *Being Red*-- I think long about the 1950s in the American Communist Party.
One of my friends says it was strongly in play in a gay/lesbian group at his university in the 80s.
The missing option among the four answers to black underrepresentation is: Whatever the reason, law is not the answer. We do not expect laws to balance out every single social asymmetry, particularly ones we cannot even agree on the origins of. We do not demand politicians fix this any more than we demand they solve cancer.
Bad wording on my side. The government wages its "war" on cancer with tax money, but it does not enlist every single corporation in actively "doing its part". Same for the war on terrorism.
Is this true? The government has forced every corporation to ban smoking, stop using asbestos in their buildings, and put little "this product is known to cause cancer to the state of California" notices on everything. I'm not sure affirmative action is really an outlier in terms of government use of regulation to achieve social change.
Good counterpoints! Except for the California one, as I categorically reject generalizing from California to the US. (This particular piece of Californian lawhackery -- Prop 65 -- has had almost 30 years to escape California, and never succeeded at that, so I feel safe claiming that it won't end up federal.)
I'd still argue that these are far less intrusive than the penumbra of civil rights law. Smoking bans and asbestos bans do not determine who gets hired and fired.
EDIT: And the situations are not quite comparable. A company using asbestos can be claimed to concretely harm its workers, whereas a company not putting its thumb on the scale in hiring can be claimed to... do less than someone in DC wants to set some ancient inequities straight in the wider society?
Banks and occasionally dual-purpose suppliers, if I am not mistaken. A better example in this direction would be companies forced to use E-Verify to prevent illegals from getting hired. Still less intrusive than civil rights caselaw.
> If the bill becomes law, any company or individual that provides ANY service whatsoever may be forced to assist in NSA surveillance, as long as they have access to equipment on which communications are transmitted or stored—such as routers, servers, cell towers, etc. 6/25
They are certainly trying to make everyone (including the lady that cleans around some office computers) work on their "war of terror".
This review offers a good account of the common answers people give to the question "why do racial disparities exist?":
1. Contemporary racism.
2. The historical legacy of racism.
3. Bad culture.
4. Not smart enough.
But that list is missing a very important reason that doesn't get enough attention (because it isn't toxoplasmic enough?): preferential clustering. Demographic minorities often cluster in specific industries and institutions, for mostly obvious reasons:
- To exploit social networks.
- As an outgrowth of cultural norms.
- Due to accidents of geography related to initial immigration patterns.
Therefore it should not be surprising that Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University all have lower percentages of black students than Atlanta (~47%), Georgia (~31%), or the USA (~14%), given that Georgia (and Atlanta specifically) has eight popular historically black colleges and universities (more, depending on how you count them).
Clearly these preferences can be a consequence of past discrimination, but they also have a life of their own and deserve separate consideration. Absent discrimination, we'd still see significant demographic clustering, though it would likely be less negatively biased.
Any time someone blames a specific feature of America's culture or law for something, your *very first* instinct should be to ask if the same thing has also happened in other countries. In this case, if wokeness is caused by American civil rights law, then why did so many other countries start caring about minority and LGBT rights at the same time?
Mencius Moldbug is a man who advocates that black people should be sealed up in pods where they play virtual reality games until they die, so I don't think he is an especially good person to listen to on this subject.
Yes, but this is kind of a wash - other countries are sort of woke, but often less so than the US, and often explicitly view wokeness as an American phenomenon which they are trying to resist. They also usually have a different landscape since they might not have black people, and probably have a different and more tradition-influenced relationship with whatever minorities they do have.
As an Australian, we are definitely net importers of US culture and movements that start in the US tend to have an echo here. For example during BLM. Less protests and certainly less property damage (we have a negligible population of African origin, and only 3% Indigenous Australian) but for awhile everyone was talking about police violence against Aboriginal people, and the case of an Aboriginal man who died in police custody back in 2015 was briefly revived
Yeah the biggest proof that it's imported from US and not organic is when it's exactly like US even when it doesn't make sense, and the activist protest posters are in English.
Wokeness in other countries seems to be somewhat correlated with the use of the English language; Anglosphere countries are the most woke (in the sense used in this discussion), followed by northern European countries in which English is widely spoken. This suggests that it comes from the US and that its vector of spread is English, accelerated by the speed of communication made possible by the internet.
So, wokeness was caused by specific laws, but in countries without those laws it still spreads just by cultural pressure? So what explanatory power do the laws add?
They are the root cause. Without the laws, the cultural factors providing said cultural pressure would not have established themselves, or at the very least would never have established themselves so firmly!
Well, wokeness being caused by specific laws is Hanania's thesis, which I don't completely agree with (although the specific laws clearly matter). I agree with Scott that Hanania is overly dismissive of the importance of ideas and truth (at least in the long term; in the short term, vibes and fashion can win the day).
I would say that wokeness comes from belief in empirical equality in the context of multicultural societies. Laws follow from that, and then there are self-reinforcing feedback loops between the laws and the beliefs. Social media accelerates the process.
Europe, Canada, and Australia lagged far behind the United States in implementing affirmative action. The U.S. really is the world's cultural leader when it comes to issues relating to blacks.
Which makes sense given the history of the US. doesn’t it? If we want to drag in Australia, and Canada, then it would be better to talk about affirmative action towards indigenous populations.
Almost all developed countries, and many others, have anti-discrimination and hostile workplace environment laws. How broadly they are interpreted varies, as does the general level of wokeness.
But I wouldn't consider legalizing homosexuality and later gay marriage, or caring about some basic minority rights, to be wokeness, nor attribute those to anti-discrimination law.
I haven’t read the decision in a while but I believe equality under the law was closer to the core of it. The IRS refusing to allow inheritance unless there was a legal marriage kind of forced the issue.
The cheeky answer is "gay propaganda". A less cheeky one is America puts a lot of cultural and legislative pressure on the rest of the world. Do you want to get on America's bad side by appearing not to care about issues America cares deeply about? This makes checking if "same thing has also happened in other countries" very hard in such cases.
Specifically, he says "Let’s peg white IQ at 100, Hispanics at 92, blacks at 85, and Asians at 105. We still have 3% for other, and let’s just give them an IQ of 95."
Well, how would you test for that? The first thing that comes to mind for me is, give IQ tests to people of different races in other countries, and see if 1) the racial IQ distribution is any different and 2) if so, if there is any correlation between different numbers and societal discrimination.
Has anyone done a test like that? (Would anyone dare to, in this day and age?)
> if there is any correlation between different numbers and societal discrimination
That's not going to work because societal discrimination against dumb and/or violent subgroups evolves very quickly. This is seen even within the same race and ethnicity ("townies" vs new ex-peasants).
> how would you test for that?
One idea is admixture testing. If (as seems virtually certain) the genetic component of intelligence is massively polygenic, and groups A and B differ in the average number of intelligence alleles, an admixed population aA+bB should average at aIQA+bIQB. Such studies have been done, e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34 and https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.14.444173v2.full The professor who performed these studies was fired by his university acting upon forceful suggestion by the resident woke contingent headed in this specific case by Kevin Bird (case number 1:23-cv-00546).
One thing that people have done in the past is look at the children of American GIs in other countries after WWII. The most famous one is the Eyferth study in Germany, and I know I saw a similar article just a few years ago based in Japan, and they found that there is no difference in IQ between the children of black GIs and white GIs in Germany or Japan.
Eyferth study looks at kids somewhat too young (heritability of IQ fully sets at 16-20 years, Wilson effect). So if a researcher wants to prove than IQs are not genetically determined, they test children at 7-10 years and never test them at 18 years.
Even if you accept results of Eyferth study, it looks ridiculuous that just a few years later of defeat of Third Reich German society had less racism than USA 2024 which attemped to do a lot more.
It's like someone claiming to have fully working, industrial-ready fusion and not using it.
Never heard of Japanese study, same later point applies.
You have a point about ridiculousness, but the Third Reich was mostly racist against other Europeans, since there were so few non-Europeans around to be racist against. I recall Scott pointed out that the Japanese they allied with were much more racially alien than the Ashkenazi they killed https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ but that's politics for you.
The US Army runs IQ tests on all inductees. This introduces a bias into the result of studies such as Eyferth. During WWII, the test was the AGCT, and inductees scoring too low were put into semi-skilled or labor positions. The result was that "the majority of Black soldiers [were shunted] into non-combat service units, which seemed appropriate for soldiers who they deemed unskilled (Lee, 1965)" [10.7709/jnegroeducation.81.3.0200] Later AGCT was replaced with ASVAB/AFQT, and except for McNamara's 100,000 episode the army has consistently rejected recruits with IQs below 90-95.
One other shortcoming of the Eyferth study is that the racial ancestry of the fathers was actually unknown: about 20% to 25% of the “Black” fathers were not African Americans but French North Africans, who may have been caucasian. I don't think that this study is ultimately informative.
Not everyone actually agrees. True, there is no argument against it. But lots of people get angry for acknowledging those are the stats even if you don't state what the cause is. One possible response is to dismiss IQ as a concept and assert that the tests just measure socioeconomic status (not true, but it serves as squid-ink).
On the positive side, the decreasing BLLs over 2000-2020 sound like this is a solved problem.
On the negative side, the 100X disagreement in effect sizes and large recent publication biases are infuriating in trying to see what is really going on. Presumably, at _huge_ BLLs, one would get into the flat-out acute poisoning regime, but that is a long way away from the doses relevant to the IQ studies...
Not having expected to learn anything novel and mockable from this piece, can I just say how much I love, love that it's the "I don't feel safe" age that has yielded Violent People as a new protected class?
For whom am I whistling? Or if you explained, would you be the whistler? Is this passive whistling? Was SA whistling when he told us about the woman who got a paycheck because somebody didn’t want to hire an attempted murderer? How far back do you have to go to get to the source of the whistle?
Remember: the distinguishing characteristic of a dog whistle is that *only a dog can hear it.* If someone tells you that their opponent's ideas are X-ist or whateverphobic dog whistles, but neither the opponent nor his audience perceives it as such, who's the X-ist or whateverphobic dog here?
I'm usually the one who doesn't bother to read the whole thing ;-).
No need to elaborate, it was in the piece:
"A disparate impact case made the news recently. The Biden EEOC sued convenience store chain Sheetz for running criminal background checks on their employees. They didn’t allege any intentional discrimination. They just said that more minorities fail criminal background checks than whites, therefore it’s disparate impact, therefore Sheetz has to drop the criminal background check.
"(the article links to another case where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application)
"Is Sheetz the only company that does criminal background checks on its employees? Do they do the background checks differently than any other company? My understanding is that the technical answer is that to do background checks without being sued, you have to prove in some very formal way that the specific crimes you’re looking for would be bad for your specific industry, and maybe Sheetz didn’t prove that a general history of violence was bad for convenience stores. But if this sounds kind of fake to you, and you’re wondering whether the real rule is “the government has wide discretion to prosecute whoever it feels like”, Hanania’s answer is “definitely yes”.
Somebody asked SA for the specific instance to which he was referring. He supplied this link:
Gotcha - so (at the risk of overexplaining the joke) "Violent People" means "people who fail criminal background checks."
Assuming that's your meaning, I'd expect most criminal background checks fail for non-violent crimes like drug possession, but I'm not an expert there and you were having fun with snark, not teeing up a thesis for a debate. Still, there is a jump between the two so I don't blame anomie entirely for not immediately connecting the dots, uncharitable though his assumption of your meaning was. Thank you for readily clarifying.
No, I don't think that's the joke (?) particularly. The government seems rather determined to go to bat not simply for those convicted of drug possession, but instead to jump to the cases that the general public would willingly have left alone (if they knew about this, which they surely don't). See Scott's accompanying link. Moreover, the idea is that it will decide pre-emptively what comfort level people are allowed to have - if there's any joke, it's that contrast with "whatever you say you are feeling, we are obliged to say it is valid, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, and to accommodate you accordingly".
This is of a pattern with the left's desire to - exalt what is low, despise what is good (or merely "bourgeouis"). That's ideology, not policy. It might be your ideology too, but one should have the honesty to recognize it as such.
I think if the question turned on drug possession*, being a disqualifier, it would be a massive problem for employers - but I haven't heard that's the case, or else, it is the case but bringing workers over the border camouflages it.
It's interesting to me to learn about this because at the same time it is pursuing these peculiar enforcement actions, the government is occasionally issuing a ban on certain people being commercial drivers. I didn't know that the feds got into the commercial driving business with that level of granularity until the other day when a guy driving a cement mixer, who was either high or sleepy from doing drugs most of the night instead of sleeping, slammed into a schoolbus returning from a zoo trip and injured a number of pre-K kids, killing one as well as the driver of another vehicle.
It turned out, surprisingly to me since I'd lay odds the driver wasn't in the country legally, that he'd failed so many tests or had other interactions with law enforcement in the drug way, that he was on some sort of federal list of "guys not allowed to drive". I was really surprised they were paying such close attention, or that this guy would have even been "legible" to them.
Of course, of that there was no enforcement.
*How many people have a conviction *only* for drug possession, is not something I know; and I'm not sure it is knowable.
I think it’s important to remember that having a criminal record does not automatically equal violent behavior. You can have a criminal record record for drug possession, for instance. And up until not too long ago that would include having some marijuana.
As for the attempted murder charge;
“a "Hispanic female who was convicted of attempted murder for shooting at her husband in a college football stadium where he was working as a cameraman,"
I will agree it’s not exactly good behavior, but it’s not like somebody running around robbing people at gunpoint. I don’t know all the details but it certainly sounds like a crime of passion to me. And one unlikely to be repeated.
>This satisfied the not-really-paying attention white electorate, because politicians could tell them that “quotas are illegal, we’re sure not doing anything like that”. And it satisfied civil rights activists, because inevitably businesses/departments came up with secret ways to favor minorities until representation reached the level where they wouldn’t get sued.
This hints at a deeper, more systematic problem, one formulation of which is "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy".
The reason that activists devote so much effort to changing the cultural and political trajectory of the US is that the US is a rich and powerful country. Those who control it therefore have enormous leverage to change it, and to change other parts of the world influenced by it.
But the wealth and power of the US are NOT created by political activists, who take those things for granted and seek to direct them to their own ends. Rather, they're derived from the productive activity of people who design, build, and maintain the technology and systems that make up the modern world. Think: engineers who design electrical substations, electrical linemen who build high voltage transmission lines, auto mechanics who repair cars, 10x programmers developing operating systems, roofers installing roofs, contractors repairing roads, etc.
The problem is that every hour you devote to the productive activities listed above is one hour less that you can devote to political activism. Thus, people who spend any time actually contributing to the creation and maintenance of a prosperous society will be outcompeted in the battle for control of the society by activists who do nothing but political activism.
Great review. I didn't read the book, therefore just based on your text.
What Hanania doesn't seem to address is that 13% is still too low of a number for this stuff create substantial harm. I don't know how much time General Motors' Mary Barra spends thinking about this stuff. Maybe if you had 50% black population, this could be non-linearly more harmful.
I am saying this because Brazil offers a nice comparison. We do have quotas. Quotas for public universities and quotas for public service. The federal law for public service quotas is 20% (much lower than the general population). There was some pushback when Congress approved these laws, but people mostly accepted it. Not even Bolsonaro pushes back on them. And I think quotas for university aren't the worst idea (you're educating people instead of putting them as traffic controllers) and the 20% number for public service isn't doing the same harm that the African National Congress quotas did on their country. Corporate life isn't harmed beyond that.
It seems that "just accept quotas" is the much better status quo.
The current status quo is how the Chinese communist state regulates corporate China. "Common prosperity" says the party leader and companies need to scramble to be seen as doing good. At least more than the next guy.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem that these suits against companies are that widespread at 13%. I'd expect Richard to quote statistics like: last year there was 1040 suits like these or whatever. As said, it doesn't seem to me that it is that impactful as Richard paints.
On yet another hand, just by following companies and their communication with investors, Europeans seem to worry about this thing way more than Americans. It's super common even in 2024 to find companies that don't report ESG policies and DEI goals. But every single European company does have this "common prosperity". I'd like to understand better how this compares with the European experiment. (I guess there it's even less than 13%, idk)
I suspect that if you offered the US business community, and non-woke non-black community in general, replacing the current morass of civil rights laws with, "look, we need at least 5% of your employees to be black; you're allowed to do the quota think to meet that", there would be very broad support for that. In a country that's 12+% black, finding 5% blacks in any field is much easier than the current alternative, and you can find safe places to put them even if they are only marginally qualified.
The problem is, it's a complete non-starter because the black community and the social justice community will scream bloody murder. I'm not sure how you all got the quota set at only 40% of the actual representation in the population; good for you on that. But it's not going to work here.
Also, I think racial quotas of this kind survive mainly by being kind-of opaque. Voters generally seem to vote these down when given the opportunity. So not only do you end up with various activists on the left screaming bloody murder about "only 5%," you also end up with a program that will not survive if it is ever put to a vote.
I think Scott rebuts your judgement pretty handily in the body of the post:
> But my impression of Hanania’s place in the ecosystem is that he’s not writing this for you or me. He’s writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He’s reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it’s against conservative principles, and that it’s pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest of the book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people.
...are you one? One would expect that a human being could click the explanatory link which Mr. Trogoldytes helpfully provided and discover exactly what fideism is and how it applies to the question at hand. And yet you apparently did not do so.
If it were a cheap gotcha, I wouldn't have hedged as much and I would have stated it more decisively. At any rate, it's quite hard to tell what your objections is, and I'm still curious.
I'm saying the book is a topic of conversation among people who discuss the same issues as Scott. And Scott doesn't strike me as "above" them, he's just another blogger on the internet.
It sure seems like Scott gets to decide what books to review on his own, and we have the option of reading or not reading the reviews as we see fit. That's kinda the point of Scott having a Substack instead of being a writer for some magazine that assigns or contracts with him to write a review for a specific book they want reviewed.
Scott is really putting in a lot of effort lately to take down his friends/fans - who all do warrant attention. Bray Caplan /Szaszsz/, Tyler Cowen /AI/, just last week he did it to Robin Hanson (who goes to those EA/rationalist venues) - and by willfully misunderstanding Hanson, I'd say - and Hanson answered kinda surprised (twice). Now it is Richard Hanania, who had just delivered a fine adulation of Scott. Who is next? TheZvi? Putanumonit? Yudkowsky? XKCD?
(That said: I liked all the posts, esp. this review - only the versus-Hanson seemed wrong, but was a nice overview about medical progress and the limitations of big studies to show it. I just worry if all things are fine in Scott's life - with baby-twins, they can't be)
They'll warrant attention when they put forth something thoughtful. Some of those -- Cowen for example -- had something thoughtful to chew on, even if he was lazy about it. The latest posts about Hanania and Hanson are covering such bottom-feeding inane garbage that it's a waste of Scott's talent to be writing about them.
I dunno, but: do better. - also: there is a book review contest coming. Or at least, make some suggestion of such angel-feeding divine manna Scott should be writing about.
Szasz has been dead for quite some time, so not a friend/fan.
I stuck up for Hanson, but I'm not going to say Scott was "willfully misunderstanding". Haven't we learned about inferential distance from Less Wrong? Misunderstandings are common, and Hanson was pushed to clarify himself so Scott (and others) would understand better.
Sorry for my unclear interpunction. Scott argued against Caplan on the basis of Bryan's interpretation of Szasz. Versus Tyler about AI. In both cases (+Hanson) not in a friendly way, I'd say. Though/cuz all 4 are in the same tribe? Which Hanania is not really, so he gets a friendlier treatment.
If Scott's understanding of Robin's views was genuine -which it was- and he gives a platform to Robin's response -as he has- then I bet Robin himself is happy about it. I think he likes it when his work is challenged even more than when it's ignored, as long as it's done in earnest. And, as it became clear, Robin hadn't been as clear as he thought he had been about his ideas, which ends up helping everyone.
I would hope next time Scott reaches out privately to him before the post, even if he still puts out his post to show his remaining qualms and clarify Robin's position further to those that had understood it like he had at first. From Robin's first response, this didn't happen here and I don't see an excuse for that other than that Scott was overconfident he had nailed Robin's position. Merits an update
Neither Caplan nor Cowen seemed very happy. I hope Robin was. His answers did not show sth new in his view I was not aware of (being his position). I assume he was kinda disappointed/surprised Scott did not know his work better. I hope his books/posts will get a boost, but I am skeptical. Stil, I do agree with a Straussian view: a negative review is much more of a boost than no review.
My admittedly anedotical 0.05$ as a generic office drone. *Every* white collar job I've heard of uses patently IQ test-like screening. I'm not talking about Google or Jane Street, I'm talking about big4 consultancies, mid-sized accounting firms etc. Places where productivity is not nearly high enough to justify resisting the acrimonious persecution Hanania posits, and that yet are happy to ask their applicants to submit Raven matrices or quirky plane geometry problems (the joke is even that the only thing those working there got out of grad school/MBA was prepping for the GMAT/GRE, since once hired they'll end up filling excels anyway).
As for wokeness driving the soulness of workplace, I worked under a boomer boss who openly made (admittedly funny) "I hate my wife" and "women amiright" jokes in front of the HR lady, confident that suing for harassment was something you see in media much more than in real life. The place was as soulless (or, I'd rather say, soulful in the modest and self contained way you can expect an office to be) bc people just wanted to do their work and then go live their lives.
I honestly think Dr. Hanania's jump from academia to punditry might have obscured him some aspects of corporate America, which he describes in a way more redolent of 90s movies made by ennui-poisoned theater kids than how the vast majority of people involved describe it. He had an objectively brilliant idea of how the law could shape incentives and then culture, and went ahead cherry picking cases showing the final result *should* be what he describes rather than checking how offices actually look like from inside, or even from a neutral outside view. Yes, they are not Mad Men, bc *it was exaggerated fiction depicting the most ebullient, quirky and hedonistic sector of the whole economy*. They are a bit like Office Space, but so they have been since forever. We learn to live with it.
He has described himself as being unsuitable for a regular job. As "Richard Hoste" he said he was the worst employee at the McDonalds he worked at as a youngster.
It used to be that the government considered the applicant pool to be the people who applied for positions at your company. At a federal contractor I used to work for, we tracked every applicant's race on a chart for this purpose - we were required to produce this data on demand and compare it to our workforce.
I don't know the details, but sometime fairly recently it appears that the government became concerned that *where* companies do their recruiting can have a big effect on that applicant pool. If you only advertise in places likely to be seen by affluent people, for instance, you will get disparate impact. This is currently morphing into a general sense that different levels of racial representation necessarily means disparate impact which also means there must be some mechanism that produced it. This is something popping up in EEOC enforcement more than court rulings, but there are some court ruling pointing this direction. The legal system is in the process of fleshing this out, but the current trajectory is definitely to consider all of this disparate impact and therefore illegal.
Hanania is a fascinating subject himself - a Palestinian libertarian who admits hating conservatives and who, apparently, would love to live in a progressive multicultural state that didn't discriminate or do strange things with taxes. He's read largely by white conservatives. It's a wild ride.
Most of his arguments seem to be stronger arguments for an honest quota system which allows meritocracy within the groups than whatever it is he's advocating for.
There's a lot of weirdness with the definition of 'black'. What's really meant is 'descendants of slaves in the US' but people are so uncomfortable talking about that there isn't even a word for it. Instead 'black' gets conflated with it and people who are first generation dark skinned immigrants get included. Employers then get credit for hiring them even though they like other recent immigrant groups are already overrepresented in a lot of fields.
I’ve seen both “Foundational Black Americans” and “American Descendants of Slaves” used for that concept, sometimes as a specific attempt to exclude recent African-descent immigrants from soft quotas and affirmative action policies.
The problem is that there isn't a shorthand for it like 'mestizo'. Maybe 'ebonic' or something like that. It's a weird semantic problem race relations might be very different if a proper word for it had been invented instead of a series of pointless euphemisms for 'black'.
They might indeed. But of course that all rides on the people doing the inventing *wanting* clear definitions and good race relations; history rather strongly suggests the opposite.
It would be weird to watch someone be deprotected by the EEOC for insufficient slave ancestry in their family tree (even if the other ancestors were free African immigrants)...
Why is "woke" a 2010s thing? I thought you hit on it earlier in the piece - why are Republicans no longer afraid of being called "racist"? The collapse of the traditional anti-Communist Reagan Republican ticket in the wake of Bush and the Iraq failure. Culture wars shifting from Christianity vs. secularism and American Nationalism Hell Yeah vs. Hippies, back to issues of race and gender (large components of Obama and Clinton politics and subsequently the new reactionary Republican rallying point in Trumpism). Dear Colleague, wage gap, Birtherism etc. are all nice examples.
Seems a bit simpler than that to me. Republicans are no longer afraid of being called racist because:
1) They're finally starting to grasp the dane-geld principle. Appeasing those who will try to call you racist does not make them stop calling you racist; it just incentivizes them to do so again the next time you do something they don't like. It was never about anyone actually being racist; it was about leverage all along, so the winning strategy is to deny them that leverage.
2) Their opponents have badly overplayed their hand. More and more people are seeing that they were cynically crying wolf on racism all along, so the accusation doesn't have nearly the same persuasive power to voters as it once did.
I bet that if the Republicans actually try to repeal the Civil Rights Act, people will actually listen when they are called racist. Frankly, I am very pro-Origins of Wokeness because every time a Republican says something like "we should repeal the Civil Rights Act," we get that infinitesimal bit further away from a Trump reelection.
I'll take that bet. The left has been crying wolf for so long over X-ism and Whateverphobia that they've forgotten the moral of the story and what ends up happening to people who cry wolf. Progressivism is in retreat across the board right now, because people have stopped listening to the constant stream of lies, to the point where even if they were to find an actual racist on the right, how many people not already deep in the extreme-left camp would believe it?
I don't know how to explain to you that "the left crying wolf doesn't actually matter to this," at least not without being somewhat impolitic, so I will go with this metaphor:
Say me and my buddies get together to call you a pedo. We smear you publicly. People at first maybe listen, maybe not, but there's no basis for the claims, so eventually they get used to our shouting and decide we're full of shit.
Then you're interviewed on TV and say "I love fucking kids." In context, it's not sarcasm or a joke. Do you think that all the BS we spouted earlier will change how people interpret that?
The same applies to "we should repeal the Civil Rights Act." Maybe you can sit down and have some elaborate long explanation of how it's good. Maybe even it would win eventually in the court of public opinion - but I'm not talking about years down the line, I'm talking right now. You have six months to get Trump in office, please spend every second trying to argue we should repeal the Civil Rights Act.
You're clutching at straws here. Let's be clear: *no one cares.*
Not with the economy in the toilet, crime running rampant and badly exacerbated by the border mess, and Leftist college campuses turning into hotbeds of antisemitism, calling openly for Jewish genocide after a barbaric attack on Israeli citizens.
That's what has everyone's attention right now, and it's not going away in the next six months no matter how loudly you howl that people *should be* paying attention to other things or that everyone's misinterpreting the evidence of their own eyes.
1. I said that conservatives saying "We should repeal the Civil Rights Act" will hurt them.
2. You responded by saying that the left has cried wolf so much that it won't matter.
3. I changed the context of the scenario of a person crying wolf so as to make it more obvious how it doesn't matter how much somebody cried wolf: if you actually start howling at the moon and mauling folks' sheep, they're gonna believe you're a wolf.
You appear to have misread my last post as saying "Please list the last half-dozen things you saw in the news/on your social media feed that made you mad." I do not care to engage with that, since I very carefully avoided getting into some gargantuan debate about every element of Trump v. Biden, but instead contained myself to the topic of Scott's original post: Richard Hanania proposing Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act. If you would like to have that conversation, I am sure there are many people out there who would love to talk your ear off about Trump bad or whatever, but I am not one of them.
If you reply to this with some more complaints about the Biden administration, rather than the substance of both my previous posts, I will not reply to it. If you write two sentences complaining about the Biden administration and then follow up with a really cogent and clever explanation of how I'm wrong and "repeal the CRA" is a real vote getter, then I will never read the latter because I will have stopped by then.
(Uncharitably but lovingly joking:) Americans when discussing social phenomena: It seems pretty tricky to tell what the effect of our laws is on our culture. If only there were other places we could look at!
German here: We have laws prohibiting outright discrimination during hiring, but the (fairly high) onus is on applicants to prove that they have been discriminated, and certainly there are no government agencies going after companies publicly because of insufficient women or minorities. Yet almost nobody uses IQ tests during hiring, and work places are very very much some form old mad men style old boys club. Germany would, however, be a data point in favor of Hanania's theory since companies focus comparatively less on increasing representation of minorities and women during hiring (in case of women perhaps more in recent years, but I don't think this is downstream of new laws). A caveat is that this is from public perception, I have only ever worked at small no-name companies with very irrelevant HR departments.
I personally would need to see a stronger breadcrumb of large cases and settlements brought about by American government agencies to believe that they are a deciding factor. I can see companies being pretty risk averse, and lawyers being biased of advising their clients that they do need to implement complicated rules around hiring, and why yes, they of course need legal experts to do this correctly. On the other hand, it seems employees get shafted regularly in clearly illegal ways by large corporations (wage theft, ignoring mandatory protection laws, etc.), and I find it hard to imagine that "merit-based hiring is forbidden but so are quotas" would be the one rule government agencies care enough to enforce above others.
Oh, I just recalled: Our Eastern European branch office DID turn into a old boys club on Friday afternoons, to the degree that some of the women there just went home at 2pm because it became unbearable to work there.
My flaming hot ultimate foreign relations take: I sincerely hope USA destroys itself and ceases to exist, but not before helping all the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Finno-Ugric, Tibetan, Caucasian, Boer, Balochi and nameless other peoples free themselves from the Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Afghani, South African, Indian or Pakistani yoke by destroying those countries first.
No, for example how FAA recruits employees sounds like a society that has to cease to exist. On the other hand, if USA ceases to exist today even worse societies will take over the world. So first those worse ones should be dismantled and the peoples long oppressed by them should be freed. Once such a world is achieved then USA can be safely delenda est.
dismantling of USSR didn't take many deaths, and yugoslavia could've had even less but it was botched unfortunately. russia is one strong support to ukraine and a well staged coup away from that, iran only supporting azerbaijan and wooing turkey a bit so a side proxy war. afghanistan is already a failed state, south africa is halfway and pakistan is quarterway there. china is y'alls main enemy and that can be ugly but who knows in a decade how they will implode. india i added mainly for flavor but some balkanization is necessary so that nobody is bullying the world in a post usa scenario. i'd say in total no more than a million or so.
Don't forget the (rolls dice) Dravidians, we need to protect them from the nefarious influence of (rolls dice) Bavaria. Once that is done we can proceed to finally dismantle the (rolls dice) world chess federation.
nope, bavaria is not a sovereign nation and even if it did it wouldn't cause any threat to world order in a post USA scenario. also, there aren't a significant number of geographically clustered dravidians there. lastly, i'm for dismantling the nations holding other peoples hostage, not organizations. your dice are all wrong.
Something I've always wondered: when I'm applying for a job and I fill out that demographics survey where they say "we're required by law to collect this information," what does my response get used for (if anything)? Is it one of the factors the EEOC might use in determining the "applicant pool"?
Yes, I can't put the words "fact check" next to every single thing that's true in a book. This was less specific "fact checking" and more ambiently reading about the topics he was mentioning.
>But Hanania doesn’t just say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like Office Space.
Hanania obviously didn't work in an office environment in the 1950s, and a glance at his Wikipedia page suggests he's never worked in a real corporate office either.
Is he just talking about *media depictions* of office environments, which is what he'd be personally familiar with? I have no doubt that those *depictions* changed over that time frame.
In my review of law professor David Bernstein's book "Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America," I explained how we got here in terms of race classifications:
The main plotline of "Classified" that partly unifies all these disparate examples is the rapid switch during the 1960s from America being a land of white privilege to one of legal nonwhite privilege. Thus, in the 1970s, immigrants from India, seeing themselves losing out to their officially Oriental rivals on government goodies like contracting quotas and low-interest Small Business Administration loans because they were counted as white, got the government to switch their categorization from unprivileged white to eligible Asian.
(One farsighted Indian activist group objected to this change on the grounds that someday being lumped in with high-performing East Asians might hurt them due to quotas. And indeed, Indians would be better off these days applying to Harvard if they were still considered white.)
As Bernstein notes, Indians and Chinese don’t have much in common, genetically or culturally. But government categories can more or less socially construct groups. These days, white people tend to assume that if the government calls them “Asian,” then they must have solid reasons to group them, like, say, they both eat rice and are good at math. The sordid story of why South Asians stopped being white—because being white doesn’t pay anymore—is not at all well-known among whites. This makes it easier for naive whites to fall for today’s reigning conspiracy theories such as “white privilege.”
Not surprisingly, West Asian and North African activists have been trying to bail out of the now-disprivileged white race ever since South Asians made their escape. The outgoing Obama administration granted “Middle Easterners and North Africans” their wish for the 2020 Census, but then the Trump administration reversed the plan. [The Biden Administration recently revived the MENA racial classification, although nobody seems to have wondered whether or not Jews qualify, which strikes me as an important question.]
Back in the days of actual white privilege, the League of United Latin American Citizens successfully pushed for Mexican-Americans to be counted as white on the 1950 and 1960 Censuses. But with the introduction of affirmative action in 1969, Latin pressure groups organized their jailbreak from whiteness.
Their problem, though, was that some Latins were white and many others liked to think of themselves as white—Latin American culture has truly been white supremacist since Cortez landed in Mexico 500 years ago.
How to qualify for racial affirmative action while still checking the box as white? Bernstein cites the witty Chicano essayist Richard Rodriguez’s allusion to Richard Nixon as “the Dark Father of Hispanicity.” The Nixon administration came up with the cunning notion of creating a new category orthogonal to race: ethnicity. People of Spanish cultural origin would be gifted with valuable “Hispanic ethnicity,” while everybody else got stuck with the booby prize of “non-Hispanic” ethnicity.
This Nixonian distinction between race and ethnicity is actually insightful. If you define a racial group as a partly inbred biological extended family, and an ethnic group as a collection of people united by traits, such as language, accent, cuisine, surnames, and so forth, that are usually (but not necessarily) passed down within biological families, then the subtle difference between race and ethnicity makes sense.
But like a lot of Nixon’s stratagems, it was too brilliant. Almost nobody got it. Instead, they just started thinking of everybody from south of the border as being of the Latino race. Due to Nixon’s brainstorm, we’ve now managed to socially construct a population that has a hard time seeing with their own eyes that Fidel Castro was white.
As for the Asian American Pacific Islander grouping that you used to hear about in the later 20th Century and then didn't hear about again until the 2020s and now you hear about it a lot ... That started off with bureaucrats trying to come up with a limited set of races that would fit easily on 8.5 x 11 inch paperwork forms.
Should there be separate categories for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders? That would make it harder to fit standard race checkboxes on one side of a sheet of paper, so where can we condense? Well, a large fraction of America's Asians and Pacific Islanders, back then, lived in Hawaii, and the population of Hawaii is famously intermixed, so a lot of people in Hawaii have both East Asian and Pacific Islander ancestors, so lumping them together to save space made sense.
But then in the late 1990s, Pacific Islander groups complained, not unreasonably, that they didn't have much in common with Asians. They especially didn't like being lumped in with Asian math whizzes when applying to college. So the Clinton Administration broke out Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander for the 2000 Census.
So the term AAPI faded away ... except that Congress had passed a law in the early 1990s creating an AAPI Heritage Month (like Black History month), back when AAPI was the official term. Congress has never gotten around to updating the legislation to fit the current race categories.
With the growth in antiquarianism during the Great Awokening, AAPI Heritage Month suddenly became a big deal in recent years, so the AAPI term came back into prominence, even though it was last used on the Census in, IIRC, 1990.
>Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground.
Which is why wives stayed at home for hundreds of years of fairly-modern capitalism, then suddenly started getting hired to work: there was a mutagen in the water in 1950 that made all women uniformly as capable and economically productive as men, whereas before they had been stupid and flighty, making it suddenly economically rational to hire them when it hadn't been before.
Whenever someone makes this argument, I just want to stare at them and say, 'Do you not know what a bias *is*?'
Acting not-perfectly-rationally-and-optimally-in-a-consistent-way is the *definition* of having a bias!
If there's a broad cultural or systematic bias against a group, then yes, the market will behave inefficiently in way that disadvantages that group! That's definitional!
"The Pill" was 1960, not 1950, but yeah kind of this. Reliable birth control was *huge*. Before 1950-1960, a woman who did not want to live a life of chastity, was not going to be as productive as a man in most jobs because they're going to spend a lot of time pregnant or nursing, during which they are not producing anything for their employer and their professional skills and networks will atrophy. And that would happen at completely random times, possibly just after you'd finished training her to be really productive.
Exceptions being jobs a women could do from home, and jobs where there's greatly diminishing returns to experience (but not manual labor because upper body strength) where you don't lose much by rotating in a new batch of girls to replace the cohort that just got married and quit. Extra bonus points if it's a job where the employer or the customers will prefer someone perky and energetic and attractive, and "...but how do we get rid of them when they're thirty?" stops being a problem if you hire young women and expose them to a steady stream of prosperous, eligible bachelors.
Women did become relatively more economically productive once, due to technological advances, most labor was no longer physical labor. Other technological changes made housework less time-consuming, and generally drove a bigger share of the economy towards the formal economy, each of which made a more traditional division of labor, where the wife isn't formally employed, have more disadvantages and less advantages.
Another argument against anti-discrimination law is that it's only made when no longer needed. A society where people are so uniformly biased against a group that no company tries to take advantage, hire them, and outcompete its peers, won't make a law protecting that group either. Conversely, a society that makes such a law—and even more so a society where racism/sexism are as taboo as in modern-day America and other Western countries—is one that's not systematically biased against that group.
First paragraph: See my replies to Edmund, who made the same points.
Second paragraph: I feel like the Civil War alone sufficiently refutes this claim, although there are many other possible examples.
Certainly it takes *some amount* of public opposition to a form of oppression before we can get the political will to pass a law against it.
But the idea that this opposition needs to be sufficiently universal that *the oppression already stopped existing* does not seem to have any historical support I can think of... passing these laws has always been contentious, at least once involving a major war.
And, given the way our two-party system works, we should really expect most things to get passed into law when they have at most something like 60% support, since that controversial middle is where one side tends to take it up as a cause and use it as a bludgeon against the other side.
It doesn't take universal opposition to discrimination for anti-discrimination laws to be made, but it doesn't take universal opposition to discrimination for anti-discrimination laws to be unneeded either. If, say, 13% of the population is black, they performed equally to whites on average, but 50% of the companies in each sector refused to hire blacks, then the companies that don't care about race and just follow their interests would hire all the black people, and they would be not much worse off than whites. And when these companies perform as well or better than the racist companies, it would make it clear to most people that the racism is unjustified, and many of the other half would also stop discriminating.
Slavery was a different situation, because even if slave states were a minority of the US, slaves weren't allowed to move to a free state, or to choose whom they worked for.
Also, to the extent that was a thing, it would have been perfectly possible (and right) to make federal laws to fight it, as well as against discrimination by state governments, without making broader anti-discrimination laws that apply to private entities.
When you look at slavery, in a whole lot of ways, it's not that different from employment. (Some slaves even got paid for their labor!) But there is one big, significant, bright-line distinguishing factor. The sine qua non of slavery is: the slave is legally not free to leave.
Trying to implement such a blatant law, even under Jim Crow, seems like just asking to get smacked down by courts or Congress.
>If, say, 13% of the population is black, they performed equally to whites on average, but 50% of the companies in each sector refused to hire blacks, then the companies that don't care about race and just follow their interests would hire all the black people, and they would be not much worse off than whites.
If discrimination didn't cluster by location or industry or things like that, maybe.
This goes back to the gay cake thing. 'Just go to another cake store' makes sense if you live in a big city with 30 cake stores. If you live in a small town with one cake store 20 miles over in the next larger town, not so much.
If it's clustered by location, you can move. I'd consider it preferable to have private discrimination against black people in some parts of a country and little discrimination in other parts, to having the government meddle with it, resulting in legally incentivized discrimination against whites everywhere a few decades later.
Would you say that was true of antidiscrimination law as applied to blacks in, say, 1960-1970? Because it sure looks to my uninformed eye like there was quite a lot of explicit and implicit discrimination going on before it was banned, including restrictive covenants that forbad selling houses in some neighborhoods to blacks, employers who would not hire blacks for some jobs regardless of their qualifications, etc.
I think you can make a plausible argument that these laws aren't worth the costs they impose in 2024, but I think that is a *way* harder argument to make about, say, 1970.
>Because it sure looks to my uninformed eye like there was quite a lot of explicit and implicit discrimination going on before it was banned, including restrictive covenants that forbad selling houses in some neighborhoods to blacks, employers who would not hire blacks for some jobs regardless of their qualifications, etc.
Were these sufficiently visible and unambiguous that the discrimination could have been banned _without_ weakening the standard of proof to "disparate impact" and imposing quotas (with attendant dishonesty about the quotas). From your examples, the racist covenants sound like they should have been an open and shut case. Were the other 1970s era discrimination actions similarly clear?
_Most_ of the damage from the EEOC looks like it came from extensions (such as "disparate impact") effectively turning into anti white_and_asian racism.
My impression is that discrimination was already declining fast in at least parts of the US by the 1960s, and would have continued to do so even in the absence of civil rights law. One reason to think so is widespread support for the civil rights act itself (59% to 31% according to one 1964 poll I found); there wouldn't have been wide support for it if most people wanted discrimination to continue. Another is that, AFAIK, the relative wage gap between whites and blacks decreased much more in the decades preceding 1964 than it did since then, suggesting that the cultural changes that precipitated the civil rights act were more important than the act itself.
I don't say there wasn't any discrimination anywhere in the country in the 1960s. I say within a decade or two, black people could have found more-or-less equally good jobs and housing as similar whites in at least parts of the country, and they could have moved to those parts. Making that process faster by a few years, and forcing the same norms on all parts of a supposedly federal country, weren't necessities that justified infringing upon the freedom of association, and all the costs described in this book review.
(Restrictive covenants had been unenforceable since 1948, Shelley v. Kraemer, though I disapprove of that decision too.)
This is a good point to bring up. Potential counterarguments (as opposed to the "mutagen in the water") would be that:
1) Women's preferences shifted due to changes in culture/education (such that most women honestly didn't have a preference for full-time paid employment in the 1920s, but did have that preference by the 1970s).
2) The jobs available changed dramatically (less physical danger? More demand for verbal skills and less demand for upper-body strength?) such that it made sense for a woman to refuse the job options available in the 1920s, but embrace those available in the 1970s.
3) Women's time was more needed in the 1920s to keep the home functional: cooking, mending, and cleaning (without modern tech) take a long time. Once technology made those burdens lighter, women had more ability to pursue other employment.
I am not sure if either of those explanations is true, and the real answer probably involves a combination of several factors.
>1) Women's preferences shifted due to changes in culture/education
Sure, but those are some of the likely causal for the racial gap according to the non-HDB side of this argument. But the HBD side still doesn't want affirmative action in admissions or minority scholarships to reduce the education gap, for example.
>2) The jobs available changed dramatically
To some extent, but I don't believe that women were equally represented in safe office jobs in the 1940s and 2010s. This could be an argument for why absolute female employment went up, but not why it went up in specific industries where women were always capable, and I believe it *did* go up hugely in those industries.
Also, you know, competitive advantage. If it were the case that there were lots of jobs suitable for only men and some jobs suitable for men or women, market logic would demand that the men all get hired into the former, meaning that the latter would be overwhelmingly dominated by women. And that the number of women in the latter type of job would *decrease* when the former type of job went away, freeing up more men. That's the opposite of the actual observed pattern.
>3) Women's time was more needed in the 1920s to keep the home functional: cooking, mending, and cleaning
*Someone's* time might have been more needed, but men can cook, sew, and clean.
To use your second answer in response to your third answer, relative to *most* jobs available in the 1920s, women had the comparative advantage on the tasks listed (and men had the comparative advantage on factory work, farm labor, construction, etc.)
2) "To some extent, but I don't believe that women were equally represented in safe office jobs in the 1940s and 2010s. This could be an argument for why absolute female employment went up, but not why it went up in specific industries where women were always capable, and I believe it *did* go up hugely in those industries."
The labor necessary to run a household in 1940 was still considerable. "Only 55 percent of homes with plumbing had what the government considers a 'complete system' -- hot and cold running water, a flush toilet and a tub or shower." Someone had to be at home making the place function.
3) "*Someone's* time might have been more needed, but men can cook, sew, and clean."
They cannot nurse. It makes sense to train the person with the milk ducts to do the tasks compatible with infant and child care. Comparative advantage. Formula did not become popular until the 1920s, and it costs money, while lactation is free. Hormonal birth control was not released until 1960.
One major thing that shifted in the 70s was stagflation.
"Women's lib" was sold to women in the 60s on the premise that "if you want to go into the workforce and not just be a traditional housewife, you should have that option." And they got it. And then, no sooner did they get it than the cost of living skyrocketed and it was, in many cases, no longer tenable for it to just be an *option* anymore, because you just couldn't afford to raise a family on Daddy's salary alone. So we went in a few short years from opening the door to the workplace to women who wanted it to forcing the ones who didn't want it into the workplace anyway, just to keep their heads above water.
But the experience of women & blacks in the US workforce is very different. There is no female equivalent of Jackie Robinson famously breaking a bright-line barrier and thus changing things:
Rather female employment just increased over time as they shifted out of full-time housework (and with labor-saving devices & birth control technology being behind much of that). The decade with the largest increase in female participation in the workforce was the 1980s, because Reagan focused on cutting marginal tax rates and women were marginal workers.
Bryan Caplan's take* on the history of women in the workforce seems to be that the norm of household production was once efficient, and that leaving the household for workplaces is the result of material conditions changing. Which is I suppose a quasi-Marxist viewpoint.
"wives stayed at home for hundreds of years of fairly-modern capitalism, then suddenly started getting hired to work"
Is this an accurate description of what happened? Wouldn't it be more like:
With the exception of a few leisured elites, both men and women have always worked. In agricultural societies, almost everyone "stayed at home," because the workplace was the home. Significant labor was required to run a household. Industrialization brought work out of the home to the mine, factory, slaughterhouse, etc. Men, women, and children all worked in these settings in some capacity. Married women, who could expect to quickly become pregnant in the absence of reliable birth control, often labored in the home for obvious practical reasons. Most would not have traded places with their husbands, because eg hacking apart cows by muscle power alone is both unpleasant and dangerous. Many families could not afford a single member forgoing paid work to keep house; those wives sat at sweatshop sewing machines or kept house for others.
Continued technological progress 1) made industrial work less reliant on muscle-power 2) brought a ton of work into the even safer and more pleasant office 3) drastically lowered the labor required to run a household and 4) made it possible to prevent pregnancy.
Within a couple decades of this completely unprecedented situation obtaining, women were all up in paid employment.
1. I don't trust Hanania. He's not a reliable historian. And he's much more heat than light. I have concerns that in participating in this I am adding to attention drawn to him; I'm out of the thread after this. I did not read the book.
2. I have some expertise in harassment cases in California. The idea that one joke creates liability is untrue. See: California Civil Jury Instruction (abbreviated CACI for reasons not immediately clear to the casual observer) 2521A. Further different workplaces can have different standards; (see the Friends case - Lyle v. Warner Brothers (38 Cal.4th 264)). "FEHA is not a civility code."
For clarity, I am not talking about what the law should be. I am discussing what the law is. And isn't.
> The idea that one joke creates liability is untrue.
That's not the idea, though. One joke creates *grounds for a suit,* and then, even if the defendants win because the suit was obviously without merit, the disgruntled employee who filed the suit is now a member of a protected class and you can't do anything to them for fear of having it called "retaliation."
Reading the CACI jury instructions, it looks like anything that a California jury thinks is both “severe” and “offensive” is grounds for liability. It is well-established in 1st amendment cases that relying on “reasonable person” standards for speech is a recipe for disaster.
What if Bob makes one offensive joke, Alice reports him to HR, HR does nothing, then Bob makes several more of those jokes, then Alice goes straight to the court? If the court would hold the company liable for condoning harassment by not having disciplined Bob the first time, then the company is forced to discipline employees even for one joke.
Also, companies don't have a lot of resources to investigate complaints, so they err on the side of presuming guilt. And the laws are vague, and the awards excessive; and courts adjudicate civil cases on a mere preponderance of evidence basis; and employees avoid actions that carry even a moderate risk of getting them fired.
All of these point in the direction that hostile environment law has a chilling effect on a far, far broader range of speech than what's actually likely to lose a lawsuit.
>Also, companies don't have a lot of resources to investigate complaints, so they err on the side of presuming guilt. And the laws are vague, and the awards excessive; and courts adjudicate civil cases on a mere preponderance of evidence basis; and employees avoid actions that carry even a moderate risk of getting them fired.
Many Thanks! Great articulation of the whole _chain_ of amplifiers for the chilling effects!
Why is it the origin of woke (power)? Surely incentivizing companies to suppress criticism of an ideology makes it much easier for it to spread.
Part of the origin, of course, is that activists come up with the ideas. But it, especially its sillier parts, wouldn't have anywhere the clout if most people were as free to argue against it, without risking their jobs, as for it. In particular, it's risky to hire an outspokenly anti-woke manager, so managers are either true believers, or shut up. The true believers push the stuff well beyond what the law technically requires, and no one stands up to them.
Civil rights law (as interpreted by courts and the bureaucracy) is necessary to explain at least the sheer uniformity with which companies and organizations subscribe to woke advocacy and curtailment of its criticism. In its absence, there could be more variation, and I expect many companies would end up less woke in the absence of the legal pressure.
And perhaps the more extreme excesses of wokeness wouldn't have occurred to anyone if civil rights law hadn't helped them thoroughly win all the previous battles. They would have more important things to worry about. Then and if you define wokeness as the more recent excesses, rather than as racial/gender progressivism in general, then it may be correct to say that civil rights law was part of the cause of even the conception of those ideas.
EDIT: an analogy: For a liquid cooled below its freezing point to freeze over, it needs a nucleus around which further crystals can form. But in most circumstances there will be one, so it's reasonable to identify cooling below the freezing point as the cause of the freezing, rather than try to search for the nucleus.
----
As for the original origin of racial/gender progressivism: I think it results, roughly, from these beliefs, common among educated people/liberals, some of which were close to the truth back in the 1960s:
(1) racism/sexism are among the most evil ideologies
(2) in a debate between a more anti-racist (etc.) and a less anti-racist position, the former is right, and the latter is racist
(3) if a phenomenon may be explained by racism (etc.), it definitely is; people who deny that racism is a big problem, and is the cause of all sorts of inequalities, are themselves racist.
The problem is that this creates a ratchet where people justify less-and-less reasonable (ostensibly) anti-racist ideas, because pushing back against them would be considered racist. And society can't course-correct, because arguing that these beliefs are no longer reasonable is itself seen as evidence of racism.
Does someone know if the SCOTUS has ever upheld laws against verbal harassment against a First Amendment complaint?
It doesn't fall into any of the established exceptions to the First Amendment. It's not a content-neutral time, place or manner restriction. There have been cases where particular applications of hostile workplace environment (i.e. harassment) law have been struck down as unconstitutional. The only problem is that only the employer has standing to make a constitutional challenge, not the employee fired for his speech, because the company would have the right to fire him even if the government didn't compel it to do so. So perhaps just no company has tried to get it struck down completely, perhaps because it would seen as incongruous with claiming that the company sincerely condemns harassment and does everything to prevent it, which is the claim companies try to use as their main defense?
The best thing a libertarian/conservative organization with a few million dollars could do is to offer to pay the legal costs of a company that makes a First Amendment challenge against hostile workplace environment law, and fights it all the way to the SCOTUS. Perhaps, if it can afford it, also offer to pay the damages in the case of a loss, lest companies are wary about taking up the offer because they expect to lose and be forced to pay more than if they settle early.
(The main place I've read about harassment law is https://www2.law.ucla.edu/Volokh/harass/, written around 2000; IIRC, according to him, harassment law had been upheld against First Amendment challenges by some lower courts, but not by the SCOTUS.)
My thesis is that people get upset about how our society treats some minority groups worse than the majority group. It seems like people think it is unfair.
Johnathan Haidt blames tumblr (etc) for wokism's explosion in popularity in the past decade. Haidt has a substack where he discusses this more at length.
Personally, I thought his observations added an interesting dimension, though I think there's more to the story.
> But since 1964, when Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were the three equally-sized and equally-interesting groups, the Hispanic community has become dominated by Mexican (and Central American) immigrants, who do form a pretty natural grouping.
The conspiracy-brain take is that this was an attempt to diminish the impact of Cuban Americans specifically, who were overwhelmingly anti-communist and very pro-Reagan, at least back in the 80s, for unsurprising reasons (most of the ones who had made it to America had deliberately fled communist Cuba). This fact alone should highlight that I think this grouping is very *un*-natural... each of these places differs drastically, just as you point out for Korea and Tonga... what makes this grouping natural, in your opinion? It includes people of almost exclusively European ancestry and mostly Native, plus everything in between. They might natively speak Spanish, Portuguese, or English (or probably lots of other languages, variants, Creole languages, etc). Is it just that the ones that are in the US immigrated here? That's not a racial or ethnic group, that's just "immigrants."
You know, we could have avoided all of this bullshit if we'd just agreed to reparations instead.
There was a point where I think most of the culture agreed with the sentiment 'Black people are largely descended from slaves who were pulled for their homes and treated as chattel, even after emancipation they faced constant discrimination across all areas of public life an the economy, this has left modern black people in a state where they are massively and unfairly poorer than everyone else.'
And the obvious answer to that seems to be 'that is true and unfair, lets give them money until they are on par with everyone else.' Equity achieved, thank you and good night.
But no one wants to give people money. And not enough people were willing it ignore the injustice entirely.
So instead we invented these notions of racial justice with the intent of achieving the same outcome by manipulating the system until it produces the outcome we want. Instead of just creating it directly with cash transfers.
Inequality in what sense? I specified that the amount of reparations is whatever it takes to reach economic equity.
If we found that equity slipped very slightly in the next generation or something, I might want to re-up once or twice, give generational trauma effects some time to wash away.
And white ones too, for that matter. Just about anyone who doesn't understand basic money-management skills, who then ends up with a lot of money, rapidly proves unfit in their handling of it.
Whites are irrelevant to the point I'm making, which is this:
if black athletes lose their hard-earned money to a newsworthy degree, then why assume that blacks who are just handed money will only experience a slight dip into the next generation?
Feel free to share the source for your claim though.
I can't help but find the idea that just giving black people enough money to get up to the median wealth would eliminate inequality to be incredibly naïve. The Chinese Communists during the Cultural Revolution tried a far more radical levelling intervention: they confiscated all the wealth and murdered millions of their upper-class. But that class still economically dominates modern China: https://www.economist.com/china/2020/09/17/the-families-of-chinas-pre-communist-elite-remain-privileged
The problem is that, for all the good that it might theoretically do, the idea of reparations remains strongly in conflict with the idea of justice.
There are no black Americans today who were slaves. I'm pretty sure there aren't even any alive today whose *grandparents* were slaves. And the same can be said about white American slaveowners. We did not do this. The idea of reparations is profoundly unjust because it involves punishing people who did not commit the crime in question, and rewarding people who were not the victims of it. Justice is individual and always has been; like "American," it's one of those words whose meaning is diminished, if not outright negated, when you stick adjectives on the front of it.
It's important to remember that, even in times when slavery was a thing, very few people participated in it. Not very many white people, even Southern whites, were slaveowners; to use the modern vernacular, they were "the 1%." In fact, there were plenty of white people — several of my own ancestors among them — who were persecuted and even killed for their abolitionist views. So trying to impute to them, or their descendants, some degree of guilt and liability for the actions of the Southern elites whose injustices they suffered greatly to fight against is unjust and offensive in the extreme.
Reparations might have made sense during Lincoln's day, and there were some plans being made along those lines. Unfortunately, John Wilkes Booth cut short the implementation of any such plans, and we'll never know how they would have turned out. But today, we're a century and a half too late for there to be any reason to take the idea seriously.
Only if you believe in the capitalist formulation of justice, where the accident of your birth is always cosmically just since it is the result of your parent's hard work.
Some people being born in poverty and squalor while others are born into wealth and abundance is an injustice. Some people being starved for nurturing and opportunity while others are swaddled in support networks and mentorship is an injustice. Privilege is an injustice.
Now, the typical response to this is something along the lines of 'Oh, but you don't care about poor white people who face disprivilege and squalor, you just care about black people and want to help them! Racist hypocrite much?'
To which I say: I *absolutely* care about poor and disprivileged white people too. If you are ready and willing to redistribute all the wealth and power, raze the current power structure until we have a fully level playing field, and roll out the guilottines for anyone who opposes teh glorious revolution, I'm all for it. Most of the beneficiaries of that redistribution would be poor white people, and that's just fine with me.
But if you're *not* willing to do that, then I'll take whatever half-measures I can get. Racial justice is a half-measure that has a lot more political support than total global economic redistribution, because we all acknowledge that slavery and segregation were pretty bad and we feel a little guilty about it. Capitalists can even embrace it by saying that those past injustices took away opportunities and training needed to develop human capital, making it anti-meritocratic and thus in need of market corrections.
I don't think poor people, regardless of race, would benefit from such a revolution. Poor people are far better off in capitalist countries, where they are rich compared to the rest of the world and only poor relative to the much richer people they share a country with.
So redistruibute everyting one time (or once every 100 years or w/e) but keep the economy capitalist. Fine with me.
Honestly though, I think that *free market economies* are very good for everyone, and capitalists have spent unimageinable amounts of money and influence over centuries to make 'Capitalism' (ie, the means of production are owned by a separate ruling class of obscenely wealthy people) synonymous with 'free markets'.
I think free markets are great, I don't think they actually require billionaires to work.
A one-time redistribution is genuinely much better than ongoing redistribution (no deadweight loss if it happens by surprise), but realistically no one would actually expect it to be limited to one time.
Thus, land value tax and UBI. No deadweight loss even over the long term because land can't be manufactured or concealed. More competition since everyone can afford to try entry-level entrepreneurial stuff, and fewer billionaires because collecting rent stops being a reliable way to compound wealth faster than inflation.
At least, fewer until we get toward a point where there are news stories like "humanitarian crisis in the Alpha Centauri system! After a long history of high-level corruption and mismanagement, one survey reports almost half the populace would be insolvent if their household were faced with an unexpected billion-dollar expense, and many are in such extreme poverty that they can't even afford personal aircraft."
> Some people being born in poverty and squalor while others are born into wealth and abundance is an injustice. Some people being starved for nurturing and opportunity while others are swaddled in support networks and mentorship is an injustice. Privilege is an injustice.
I don't buy that for a second. I know better, from personal experience.
Name any "privilege" you can think of, I didn't have it. I was born into poverty and raised in hellish abuse and deprivation all throughout my early years. The only advantage I ever had was a mother who loved me very much and did the best she could, under such conditions, to raise me right and teach me good principles.
Under the "privilege" theory, I should be a junkie and a career criminal today. And I very easily could have ended up that way, but I didn't. Instead, I'm a successful software developer with a high salary, a wonderful, loving wife, and a comfortable life I'm very content with. Why? Because I rejected the trajectory that my circumstances had laid out for me and chose to be better, to live by the things that Mom taught me were right, and to make something of myself.
Wait, which angle are you coming at me from? That I'm insufficiently rational and overly "emotionalized," or that I'm insufficiently "empathetic" and therefore "despicable"?
Or are you just throwing insults at the wall to see what sticks? It's the oldest dirty trick in the book: when you can't attack an opponent's reasoning, hurl insults and personal attacks to distract the audience (and hopefully the opponent) from this fact. Problem is, that trick only works on people who aren't aware of it, so you may as well abandon it now.
Well done. I see you have assimilated much of what Mister Trump has modeled regarding deflection. The more egregious the spin, the better. And keep it coming as a torrent, so nobody remembers what was said a minute earlier. Good day to you, Mister Frank.
His life is indeed an anecdote, but you haven't given any reason to think it's unrepresentative in any relevant way. He didn't tell a Horatio Alger story of Nimble Dick being given a boon by one of the very limited number of Uncle Pennybags. He basically said he followed the "success sequence", which many others could have done but chose not do.
Hell, my uncle smoked all his life and lived to be 95. Hell, I heard about a guy who was killed by his seatbelt. Hell, I was in the same battle with this guy who now claims to have PTSD. It seems he just gave up on his man-trajectory, eh? Am I right?
If you don't understand why BF's "success sequence" argument is pure BS you're further off the rationality train than I imagined. Meanwhile Clarence Thomas is still a corrupt, sociopathic fool.
Do you think that a larger percentage of people born into your circumstances become junkies or career criminals than the percentage built into my circumstances of wealthy white parents with great educations and lots of connections?
Because from where I'm standing, there are plenty of outliers from both populations, but the trend lines are pretty clear.
I shouldn't have to explain to anyone here how Bayesian reasoning and stochastic processes work. Yes, every distribution has outliers, but those don't disprove the population-level trend, nor the systemic factors behind it.
> The only advantage I ever had was a mother who loved me very much and did the best she could, under such conditions, to raise me right and teach me good principles.
That's a pretty substantial advantage, which many people not only don't start with, but don't even realize is possible, at least not soon enough to usefully seek out.
I think it is a very dangerous thing to use one’s subjective sense of one’s self to judge others’ outcomes. I as well can describe my upbringing as objectively hellish by any excepted methods of measurement. I have been told by therapists that statistically I should be either dead or in jail. My outcome has been pretty good. There is nothing there to generalize from.
Side notice: xenophobia and sexual jealousy are also evolutionary responses.
Here, you're not applying justice to your tribe but to those who are 50-100k years apart. You should think why, or else it's like eating sugar well, because we definitely do like sugar.
Yeah, the proximal reason is that it's in our utility function. That's the proximal reason for doing anything.
Sugar is great. Too much sugar is bad for *specific health reasons*.
If you have *specific reasons* a certain type of justice is bad, we can discuss them directly. But that's what literally this entire conversation has already been about, until someone asked 'why do we care about justice'.
We do care about it, but I think over the eons the notion of what “unjust” is has changed quite a bit. I think there are many things that we consider unjust today that at one time we’re just looked upon as one’s normal place in a given society.
“ God bless the Squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations.“
-Old English couplet
I could argue that historically human beings have understood the genetic distribution of ability much better than we do. I think it’s pretty clear from this comment section that we are no longer willing to accept this, but don’t really have a clue what to do about it.
> Only if you believe in the capitalist formulation of justice, where the accident of your birth is always cosmically just since it is the result of your parent's hard work.
Not sure how I missed this gibberish the first time around, but... seriously? Do you honestly expect anyone in a rationalist community to accept that this is what capitalists actually believe?
On the contrary, far too many capitalists have seen seen the age-old tale of "Grandpa built the company, Dad took it over and managed it, and then Son ran it into the ground" play out in cases they're personally familiar with to ever believe in such nonsense. I'm not sure which ideology believes the things you describe, but it's certainly not capitalism!
Of course they wouldn't say that when being asked about meritocracy and equality of opportunity.
They say it when being asked about inheritance tax.
But the real world is a single piece, not separate magisteriums. If you believe it when asked about inheritance tax, then you believe it when asked about meritocracy and justice. Even if you don't *say* it in the latter case.
> They say it when being asked about inheritance tax.
Meh. To be frank (no pun intended,) that's a libertarian thing, not a capitalist thing. For as much effort as they've spent trying to conflate the two and redefine capitalism as libertarianism, they are very different things and are directly opposed to one another on many important points.
James Buchanan is generally thought of as a libertarian, and he was very much in favor of inheritance taxes. Other libertarians (most economists among them I'm aware of) oppose it as collecting little revenue for lots of deadweight loss.
Parents being able to pass on much the benefits of their hard and productive work to their children specifically, rather than all children equally, is necessary for anyone who wants there to exist a society as prosperous as our own. A consequence of this is that the children of diligent and talented parents will have advantages that other children do not.
If this strikes you as unfair, your choices are to suck it up and live with it, or settle for a much less prosperous society. And if your plan is to make the society you presently inhabit into a much less prosperous one, you'll probably want to run that past your neighbors before they decide to lynch you.
You might be able to wait until our current society suffers some great catastrophe that greatly reduces (and rearranges) prosperity, and try to convince people that they should aim for fairness rather than prosperity in the reconstruction. But I'll still be on Team Prosperity.
>Parents being able to pass on much the benefits of their hard and productive work to their children specifically, rather than all children equally, is necessary for anyone who wants there to exist a society as prosperous as our own. A
Possibly, though child-free people have a higher income than people with children. 'People won't work hard unless they can give that money to their kids' is an appealing intuition if you're trying to justify the current system, but people seem pretty willing to work hard just to give themselves a nice life and retirement.
But, granting the premise:
>If this strikes you as unfair, your choices are to suck it up and live with it, or settle for a much less prosperous society.
Or fix it on the other end, which is what I'm proposing here. Give the under-advantaged kids what they need to compete.
You can make it less comfortable and less prestigious if you want, so rich parents still give their kids *nicer* lives, just not ones with more opportunity. If you think that level of child suffering is needed to motivate people to work for some reason (I don't) then we can test that and implement it at the needed level.
*At the needed level* being the most important point, here.
Even if we think that inheritance is an important motivating factor, it must be true that there's some distribution where allowing more inheritance creates more motivation, and taxing inheritance more produces less motivation.
Conversely, I've provided an example of how inheritance hurts the economy by taking away opportunities from kids (thus burning available human capital by not developing and exploiting it fully). There's also a sliding scale there, where more or less inheritance creates less or more inefficiency of this kind.
If we actually cared about these factors, we could find the equilibrium point between these and other concerns, which produces the highest overall utility/prosperity, and try to set society to that point.
But if you're saying 'don't do anything, don't change anything,' then you're implicitly assuming we're already *at* that point.
And since the current point was arrived at randomly with no intentional design or direction, the only reason to think we're already *at* the optimal point is the Just World Fallacy.
"Or fix it on the other end, which is what I'm proposing here. Give the under-advantaged kids what they need to compete."
If the under-advantaged kids are given what they need to match the "advantaged" kids, then the parents of the advantaged kids aren't actually helping their kids with their hard and productive work. Giving them some luxuries, maybe, but not giving them real advantage. The smart move is to slack off, make just what you need to satisfy your own desires, and let the State or the AI Gods or whatever give their kids for free all the stuff they'd have to work themselves ragged to provide.
All the productive work that is presently motivated by the desire to help one's children succeed in life, becomes a chump move and goes away. Your society will be much poorer as a result.
I don't think teddy bears make kids measurably more competitive in the job market when they're 30, but parents seem very motivated to buy them anyway.
Sorry, but this really feels like a just-so-story. Like I said, childless people already have higher incomes, that should disprove the importance of that motivation on productivity on its own.
Not to match, just to compete. Hand over a pile of cash as citizen's dividend, ensure stable access to goods and services everyone agrees are essential (water, electricity, nutrition, libraries, lifesaving medical care, etc.), let individual families chase the je ne sais quoi of parenting the rest of the way into diminishing returns. Sorta like how sports have standardized equipment and playing fields, but each team gets to work out the details of their own training program between games.
Yeah, at the extreme end, you need to make parents stop helping their kids learn stuff they're stuck on (also a great way to review that calculus you learned 30 years ago!), reading to their kids, teaching their kids values and behaviors that will help them have a middle-class life, etc.
>But if you're *not* willing to do that, then I'll take whatever half-measures I can get. >Racial justice is a half-measure that has a lot more political support than total global >economic redistribution, because we all acknowledge that slavery and segregation >were pretty bad and we feel a little guilty about it.
Is this really true? You will find people who pay lip-service to racial reparations, because they know it is unlikely that they will ever happen. But are massive racial reparations more likely to happen than strong social democratic measures (no need for a guillotine hopefully)?
Where would immigrants and their descendants fit in the picture? Unless I am very mistaken, most of the ancestors of today's US "whites" weren't around at the time of the Civil War. As for the period during which the South enforced segregation and full-on institutional racism, and the rest of the country tolerated it - would the large (mostly non-white and/or Latino) chunk of the US population whose grandparents weren't around for that have to pay reparations?
I agree that it is an enormous shame that agrarian reform with reparations wasn't undertaken right after the Civil War. Forty acres and a mule would have made a world of difference - the socioeconomics of the US would have changed massively, for the benefit of everybody (save the slaveowners who would have had their lands expropriated, obviously). I hope that there is or will soon be a long-overdue consensus on *that*, at the very least, and I don't mean just in the progressive corner. When I arrived in the US in my mid-teens, I was bemused to see how high-school textbooks (and teachers) painted Radical Republicans as having been an unforgiving, destructive lot. Thaddeus Stevens ought to be a major American hero.
As for money that comes from Southern plantations and is still in the hands of those whose great merit was to descend from slavers: from my perspective, the more of that you confiscate, the better. Now, as for a way to do it...
>>Where would immigrants and their descendants fit in the picture? Unless I am very mistaken, most of the ancestors of today's US "whites" weren't around at the time of the Civil War. As for the period during which the South enforced segregation and full-on institutional racism, and the rest of the country tolerated it - would the large (mostly non-white and/or Latino) chunk of the US population whose grandparents weren't around for that have to pay reparations?
The American people and the Federal government are not a unified single identity, so the culpability or non-culpability of the average taxpayer shouldn't really factor into our analysis here. Bigger writeup on this below in my convo with Bob, but the short version:
Most of us are not involved when the FDA approves thalidomide, if the Bureau of Prisons allows corrections staff to abuse inmates, if the intelligence services violate the 4th amendment, or if a government agency poisons the water at Camp Lejeune. But we don’t accept the argument that the Federal government shouldn’t pay out damages in those kinds of situations “because paying the victims so would only punish taxpayers who had nothing to do with it.” The Federal government is an independent entity which can be held responsible for its past actions, regardless of turnover in the population of voters, the same way a corporation can be held liable for its actions regardless of turnover in its shareholders.
There's a difference in degree that becomes a difference in kind, though. Even in the case of reparations for interned Japanese-Americans, we are talking about a much smaller group of people, and presumably also smaller amounts of money; $20000 a head per surviving Japanese-American held in camps (not descendants, unless I am mistaken) works out to a pittance per taxpayer. Here we are presumably taking about taking large amounts of money from people who do not descend from slaves (or who descend from, say, Black people who were slaves elsewhere) to descendants of enslaved people (even those wealthier than the mean).
I would agree that, say, paying reparations to victims of the Tulsa riot would have been much more like paying reparations to Japanese Americans (though the riot wasn't perpetrated by the Federal government; rather, local authorities were complicit in it). Reparations weren't paid (except in an extremely limited sense), which is an enormous shame.
A couple thoughts (with the caveat that I'm undecided about reparations, just have had a pet peeve about this government=people thing since post 9/11 when I kept seeing people try to scuttle attempts to ask whether blowback for US foreign policy was part of the causes with "so you're saying the victims deserved it?", as if somehow the state department and intelligence apparatus were one in being with civilians in the tower, and you couldn't hold the former accountable without 'blaming 9/11 on the American people').
(1) The size of a claim against government doesn't eliminate the distinction between the government and the people. The culpable entity is still the government, and we shouldn't let it off the hook because of the 'innocent taxpayers' who aren't the ones under discussion in the first place. Impacts on the people writ large are secondary, and we don't permit a corporate entities to hide behind secondary impacts to avoid being held liable for obligations when they do harm. BP can have arguments about whether it should be liable for Deepwater Horizon, and for how much, but "liability should be zero because otherwise you'd just be punishing my innocent shareholders and employees" isn't a good one. For example, as of 2015, the Federal government owned $1.8 trillion dollars worth of land (probably worth more now). https://www.bea.gov/research/papers/2015/new-estimates-value-land-united-states. A decision by the Federal government to pay reparations by passing costs on to taxpayers rather than, say, selling a third of that land, would be a decision to pass harm along from one party to others, consistent with my point that we are talking about separate entities, even when we talk in large dollar figures.
(2) Also, there is a range of dollar amounts between "such a large number that a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind" and zero. When a corporation screws up so massively that it can't afford to pay a legal claim against it, the answer isn't "well we have no choice but to reduce the obligation to zero," the answer is it pays what its assets will bear. If someone's reply to that is "but if reparations aren't full, then people won't stop complaining about racism, even if we pay them" then my answer is that person is thinking about reparations the wrong way. They're not supposed to be a "fee so that black people shut up about inequality" in which case if you can't get the shutting up then you might as well pay nothing. They're supposed to be compensation for harm done, which means that if the Fed can't cover all the harm, then it pays what it can bear without collapse, and we all live with the fact that the whole harm won't be paid. Same principle as when a poor person hits me with a car and can't cover all my medical bills.
Since you've posted this twice: the FDA pretty notoriously did NOT approve thalidomide, at least back during the era people are thinking of. It has been approved since then for those who aren't pregnant. Somehow the "FDA sucks" position has come to produce this retro-memory.
This approach strikes me as improperly letting the Federal Government off the hook for its own actions by permitting it to hide behind the American people. The Federal government and the American people are not the same entity.
Most of us are not involved when the FDA approves thalidomide, if the Bureau of Prisons allows corrections staff to abuse inmates, if the intelligence services violate the 4th amendment, or if a government agency poisons the water at Camp Lejeune. But we don’t accept the argument that the Federal government shouldn’t pay out damages in those kinds of situations “because paying the victims so would only punish taxpayers who had nothing to do with it.”
Another example - the Japanese Internment happened from 1942 – 1946. Reparations of $1.6BB were paid in 1988. Median age of the workforce at that time was somewhere between 35 and 36 (https://www.gao.gov/assets/ggd-92-38.pdf pg 28), but I don’t think the argument that “this mostly just punishes taxpayers who weren’t involved in the internment” would (or ought) to have been considered as a serious reason not to pay them, and I’m certainly not aware of any counterproposals where the government considered only apportioning the tax costs of those reparations to people aged 42 and older.
The Federal government is an independent entity which has been in continuous existence since brought into being by the constitution in 1787. It can be held responsible for its past actions, regardless of turnover in the population of voters, the same way a corporation can be held liable regardless of turnover in its shareholders. Saying “I’ve never had slaves I shouldn’t have to pay,” to me, holds about as much water as “but I only bought my BP stock *after* the oil spill why should I be affected by the settlement?”
Fair enough. But this is not the case for reparations for slavery. Literally no one is advocating for paying the victims, because *there are no victims left alive* and haven't been for many generations now.
I think that's the better argument with respect to reparations for slavery, specifically, but there are plenty of racial harms for which the Federal government is responsible and for which victims are still alive. The military was segregated until 1948. Redlining of black neighborhoods by the FHA continued until the 1960s. The little girl who Brown v. Board of Education got into school only died 6 years ago.
Would you have a more favorable disposition, as an example, towards compensation for members of black families denied home loans due to FHA redlining? That would be a clearly defined class of currently living victims.
> I think that's the better argument with respect to reparations for slavery
Better than what? That is in fact the argument that I made: both the perpetrators and the victims are long dead, so there's no justice to be done here.
> Would you have a more favorable disposition, as an example, towards compensation for members of black families denied home loans due to FHA redlining? That would be a clearly defined class of currently living victims.
I would find such a thing acceptable, if it could be accomplished without harming innocent people. If the government, for example, decided to build some number of new housing developments created for this purpose and give currently-living victims preferential treatment on obtaining these homes, I'd be just fine with that.
>Better than what? That is in fact the argument that I made: both the perpetrators and the victims are long dead, so there's no justice to be done here.
Better than the argument that reparations would somehow be inappropriate because "it involves punishing people who did not commit the crime in question," "even in times when slavery was a thing, very few people participated in it," "[n]ot very many white people, even Southern whites, were slaveowners," "plenty of white people... were persecuted and even killed for their abolitionist views," etc. None of that has any bearing on the culpability of the Federal government for its own actions or inactions.
I think your argument about the direct victims being long dead is the better one. I don't think it's beyond dispute - I think serious people could still entertain the notion that indirect harms of slavery may still impact persons living today, and I think you're stretching the certainty of your argument to say authoritatively that "we're a century and a half too late for there to be any reason to take the idea seriously," but I certainly give more weight to your point that the direct victims are long dead than I do to your point about reparations "punishing" modern taxpayers by forcing their government to pay out on a liability.
>I would find such a thing acceptable, if it could be accomplished without harming innocent people. If the government, for example, decided to build some number of new housing developments created for this purpose and give currently-living victims preferential treatment on obtaining these homes, I'd be just fine with that.
What do you mean by "harming innocent people?" Does simply cutting a check to currently-living victims "harm innocent people" in ways that building a house for those same victims would not? Both would be paid out of government coffers, and if by "innocent people" you're referring to taxpayers it seems like the harms of building the housing (cost overruns for Federal construction projects, people displaced by any land seizures that needed to happen) would outstrip the costs of a simple cash payment.
"Members of black families..." is not all that clearly defined, and is likely to wind up pointing to currently-living people who are not victims as normally defined because they were not alive at the time of the victimization.
If you do limit it to people who were then direct victims and are now still alive, you could probably get a consensus for something like this. But it won't do all that much, and you'll still have all the usual suspects pointing to what they feel is a much bigger problem that remains unsolved.
Agreed. By "members of black families" I was thinking of both the discriminated-against buyers and their then-living children at the time of the discrimination (i.e. the people who are direct victims in the sense that but for the redlining they would have been permitted to live in the house in question), but I see how it could be read more expansively. Call for better clarity on my part - I'm really just trying to get down to how Bob thinks about currently-living direct victims if we consider them in isolation.
And 110% agreed on "it won't do all that much, and you'll still have all the usual suspects pointing to what they feel is a much bigger problem that remains unsolved." Reparations for just a single clearly-delineated racial harm for which the Federal government is responsible certainly make for more easily defended policy, but anyone expecting something like that to just settle the race issue forever, or for advocates to just disappear once the policy passes, would be naive. One would hardly expect Korea to just consider all WW2 matters satisfied if Japan made a single payment to still-living comfort women - no reason to expect anything different from a limited step like FHA compensation, even if its limited nature makes it an easier sale politically.
I tend to think of military conscription as somewhat similar to the internment camps, and somewhat similar to the slave trade. It takes someone formerly free and law-abiding, takes them from their home, forces them to perform tasks, - and also puts them in lethal danger. So call it an even mix of kidnapping, slavery, and murder?
For the fighting-age males, sure. But even there, one of the side effects was that while the internment was going on, their property was stolen, seized, and/or extorted, leaving them with very little once they got out.
I'm not sure about better or worse. I'm not sure how I'd choose myself - I'm told that the death rate for US soldiers was about 1/40, so your options are would be a 1/40 chance of death but if you don't die you get the GI bill and hailed as a hero, or you spend 4 years in a prison and then when you get out your house and business have all been taken by others but at least are assured of life.
Either way though, I think it isn't so much that the internment was bad and the draft wasn't - it's that the draft, good or bad, was a necessity forced upon the US by a foreign attack, and the unavoidable harm was distributed as fairly as one could ask for it to be (randomly among men of fighting age), while the internment was unnecessary and visited on a specifically targeted minority. In that light, I think it's fair to view the two as morally distinct, and the internment the morally worse of the two.
John Tyler, 10th president of the US (1841-1845) and slave owner, still has a grandson alive today. Looking only at the maternal line, if someone was a slave born in 1850, had a daughter in 1890, and the daughter had a daughter in 1930, the granddaughter could certainly be alive today, albeit quite elderly.
Me and my wife were both 42 when our second child was born. No tech was involved. It probably requires some genetic privilege and good health on mother's side, but it is possible.
Obviously that's the historical _average_, but women are often able to have children at 40 and did so historically. For a normal family it's 5 or 6 generations, but 3 generations is possible in some cases. I'm only responding to the claim that they don't exist, not saying that it's the median case.
I mean, that's still a 90+ year old person who almost certainly never met their grandfather who was the slaveowner; not a particularly close connection.
At least there is a historical case to compare. Germans as a nation really wouldn't have reason to complain much if they had been mostly massacred and partly enslaved for a few generations after WW2. Instead, they could prosper, even the eastern part, and pay some reparations. Compared to the Versailles peace treaty, it was a fine deal for us and we managed to be on good terms with Israel even, so far. And german jew-haters today are overwhelmingly muslims, not nazi traditionalists.
I'm well out of my area of competence here, but my picture was that imperial germany more or less stumbled into WW1, didn't do anything much morally worse than it's enemies and got heavily punished at Versailles, which later contributed to Hitler's sufficient electoral success. Teach me if I'm wrong.
I don't know much about imperial germany on the eve of WWI. My impression was that it wasn't totalitarian, but was more on a par with its sibling european powers. Roughly how controlling was it of its citizens, say, compared with Brussels bureaucrats of today?
Off the cuff I'd say the regime was too dysfunctional to be totalitarian. There probably was a more or less common identification with martial competence (prussian tradition) and national identity (student stuff from 1848) but no grip on industrial ecomomy. The Kaiser was not competent and for the allied KuK Austria-Hungary monarchy, read Musil.
Well, Imperial Germany was certainly the aggressor, invading Belgium (which was neutral) and France (under the slimmest of pretenses). The war in the West was fought entirely in French and Belgian territory, and was unbelievably destructive - entire villages were wiped off the map, and part of the country remains uninhabitable *to this day* (Red Zones). Demanding Germany to pay for the cost of reconstruction was pretty reasonable.
Now, demanding that Germany pay for the cost of waging war is something else, at least to our sensibilities. (It was not really exceptional at the time: Germany imposed heavy reparations on France after the Franco-Prussian war for the crime of, well, defending itself and losing?) That demand was later scaled down, and my understanding is that the part of reparations that was actually paid was the entirely reasonable part, but some of the rhetoric in the UK and France was certainly damaging.
Of course that something is legal and justifiable (reparations) doesn't necessarily make it wise, but that's another matter. The allied powers could have avoided some of the political blowback in Germany simply by not rubbing it in.
So what's your take on Foch's disgust with the Treaty of Versailles? He had two points: that Germany wasn't being punished anywhere near harshly *enough,* and needed to be occupied and disarmed (essentially, what we did to Germany and Japan post-WWII), and that if the Allies went through with this treaty instead, they would find it was "not a peace, but a twenty-year armistice."
His second point was unquestionably true, eerily so; it was twenty years and two months later, fulfilling Foch's prediction *almost to the day,* when Hitler invaded Poland. But that doesn't necessarily imply that his first point was correct. What say you?
Harshly enough from the point of view of what? Justice?
Much more harshness across the board (resulting in even lower living standards, etc.) would in fact have been cruel; whatever people say about Versailles ("terrible reparations", etc.) would have been unquestionably true in that case. Yet I've heard a (very old, but obviously not WWI-old) German academic claim that Versailles didn't make it clear enough to Germany that it had been defeated.
One obvious alternative is "greater clarity about the outcome and the new order, less ability to rearm, and less harshness towards the people". Harsher on the Krupps, then, but an immediate lifting of the blockade (it remained in place for some time after the armistice, even though it was literally starving the population), some measure of direct emergency help (food that was not turnips, basically) as soon as the peace was signed, stricter rules on behavior in occupied zones (part of Germany *was* occupied, and civil servants would sometimes move in the nicest house they could find, with the owners relegated to the kitchen coop - not exceptional behavior, and much better than some of the things that the Reich did do in Belgium, but not exceptionally good either), etc.
> Black people are largely descended from slaves who were pulled for their homes and treated as chattel, even after emancipation they faced constant discrimination across all areas of public life an the economy, this has left modern black people in a state where they are massively and unfairly poorer than everyone else.
Compared to *which* everyone else? Certainly not poorer than the descendants of the West Africans who _weren't_ brought as slaves to the United States.
It seems to me that reparations were paid (and then some) in 1866 in the form of US Citizenship, a huge privilege that has led to US blacks being far, far better off than the non-slaves of West Africa.
> How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots? The George Floyd protests? Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice (and his black female vice president)? Drag queen story hours? Gay pride parades? If it doesn’t explain any of those things, what’s left of it explaining “wokeness”?
I wonder if the answer is in this very post, just a little bit higher up:
> Fine, then the undergrad programs are the racists. Or if they can prove they’re not, then the high schools are racist and we should do busing. The point is, somebody somewhere along the line has to be racist, right?
The idea that any difference at all necessarily proves some sort of discrimination is, as you note, basically unfalsifiable. And it very naturally leads to a spiraling feedback loop. You do some anti-discrimination work, and that has some success, because the US really did have lots of racism in the 60s. And sexism too, so you improve on that front. But you quickly run into diminishing returns, or perhaps even 0 returns, because there are some differences that aren't really the result of discrimination. So you try to do more anti-discrimination work, but find that it has very weak results, maybe even indistinguishable from random noise. But of course, discrimination *has* to still be out there and causing the observed differences. It's simply an article of faith, unquestionable. So you conclude that you simply didn't do enough, or the efforts were sabotaged by secretly-racist organizations and people. And then you have to go on a purity campaign to expel the heretics and demand even more be done. And of course, this cycle has no end, because it cannot and will not actually solve the problems it identifies, plus there are an infinite number of outcomes you could claim are the result of discrimination. No different from how religious cults often operate.
So the answer to your question could be that you started with a few ideas that seeded modern wokeness, probably originating in academia, and with some laws with good intention (paving the proverbial road), and the back and forth between ideology and law gradually ratcheted up both of them.
Hanania goes on to outline his political strategy for rolling back the current legal/regulatory regime.
But perhaps what we need is to roll forward civil rights law to actively protect whites in this era of institutionalized racist antiwhite hate. For example, mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training should be seen as prima facie evidence of a hostile work environment for whites. I outlined some principles to guide legal reform:
(1) The key is not to try to abolish civil rights laws, which would be impossible in the current climate, but to articulate that civil rights are inclusive. No race is excluded. Everybody possesses equal civil rights. Same as everybody else, whites and men are protected classes.
(2) For instance, one crucial step is to declare in clear, ringing language that the 14th Amendment’s famous Equal Protection Clause applies not just to the currently more favored races but also to whites and Asians.
Bizarrely, the question of whether or not the phrase “equal protection of the laws” protects whites as well as blacks simply doesn’t come up much these days. I searched in Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for the text strings:
“Does the 14th Amendment [equal protection clause] apply to whites [white people]?”
…and found absolutely nothing on the entire internet.
My impression is that conservatives assume that of course the 14th Amendment pertains to whites as well as nonwhites: Just read it. On the other hand, liberals assume that of course the Equal Protection Clause does not apply to whites: That would be racist (which in practice they define as the law treating people equally).
The Supreme Court should clear up this muddle definitively.
(3) Similarly, the Court should announce that hostile environment law very much protects whites and men as well as its traditional beneficiaries. Therefore, mandatory training classes preaching the antiwhite doctrines of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity and/or Critical Race Theory represent prima facie evidence of a hostile work environment for white employees. Nobody would doubt this if the races were reversed and blacks were forced to endure organized harassment by professional white bigots, so why should it be legal for employers and schools to impose a hostile environment upon whites?
(4) Statements of support for DIE/CRT by holders of powerful positions in institutions are to be taken as prima facie evidence of intention to discriminate illegally against whites and/or Asians.
(5) In law, the word “equity” does not mean equality of outcome. “Equity” as recently redefined is no part of the Constitution.
(6) Affirmative action discrimination against whites and Asians cannot be justified on the grounds that they are the “majority.” Whites are already a minority in the two biggest states and headed for minority status in most places. Asians, of course, currently are a minority. Instead, racial quotas are racial discrimination.
Did you not pick up that a huge chunk of his argument is that the law will be implemented by bureaucrats who reject a colorblind agenda? The same thing will happen to new laws.
> But perhaps what we need is to roll forward civil rights law to actively protect whites in this era of institutionalized racist antiwhite hate.
That's just taking Kendi's infamous "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." and flipping the script on it. If it's wrong when Kendi does it, it's wrong when other people do too.
> The Supreme Court should clear up this muddle definitively.
We could start with Justice Roberts' principle that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Feels like this would turn the current double bind (don't hire based on race but still get the desired racial balance) with a triple bind (also don't discriminate against the group you must discriminate against to achieve that racial balance).
This idea is too clever by half. Personnel is policy, and everyone in charge of civil rights law would instantly gut any attempts to put all the races on an equal basis. This is far more likely to galvanize further racial conflict and white identitarianism than alleviate wokeness.
Why did the Great Awokening not start until 2013 rather than in, say, 2009? My prediction in my 2008 book about Obama was that he would keep anti-white tendencies among his supporters in check during his first term to help his re-election bid, but during his lame duck second term, watch out.
That timeline seems pretty accurate from the perspective of 2024.
Some astounding omissions signal way too much bias for a trustworthy book review. First, why no mention of the Voting Rights Act, and how the Roberts court systematically dismantled it, claiming without evidence -- just on gut feelings -- that problematic states no longer had enough racism to worry about. Which is why we've seen an explosion of unchecked voter-suppression efforts in the past decade, providing a rich dataset of how far we still are from a reason-based approach to race and diversity.
Most important to the broad topic is there's no mention of THE most important argument for the entire bucket that includes affirmative action: that EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution. I have never seen an anti-woke argument address this fact directly, because the bias is always too strong: egalitarianism is treated as a form of welfare instead of recognized for the very real widespread social benefits that come from diverse experiences, intelligences, strengths, etc. Critics prefer to argue anecdotally about air traffic controllers and IQ.
Yes, the laws address inclusion practices out of pragmatic necessity, but the big picture is that when we are nudged to live and work alongside others, we do learn to accept and appreciate difference, culturally, linguistically, physically, etc, as useful, welcome expansions of worldview. No, this is not essentially an argument for social engineering. In the end, the LEGAL goal is still to protect minority populations from unfair disadvantage due to biases, whether those biases are intentional, or relevant, or not. The most efficient way to gain ground on this Constitutional front is for culture to evolve -- a goal that gets set back with each intellectually reckless eruption such as anti-wokeness.
Please read more from, say, the New York Review of Books or The New Yorker to learn how reviews with the most integrity maintain a perspective while still performing a disciplined, honest, deep dive into another side's thought processes. It seems your typical process is to pick and choose your on-the-other-hand arguments mostly from your own (limited) common sense instead of diligently trying to understand the passion of the others, many who have been battling on the ground for more fulsome agency their entire lives. It's lazy if nothing else. I would probably assign a C to this review if it were submitted by a grad student -- with the option to expand your research for an up-grade.
But, more theoretically, if it were actually beneficial we would expect a competitive market of for-profit companies to converge on that without the government needing to force them to do such things for their own good.
Scott has done a LOT of book reviews. I suggest you read more of his before telling him he needs to read NYRB or the New Yorker as if he hasn't already.
LOL, a year ago he didn't even know the difference between the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. A scrupulous review would require an analysis of the VRA precisely because the book left out this entirely relevant dataset (assuming it did, I haven't read it). Trustworthy reviews must engage what the writer strategically (or foolishly) leaves out.
The book is about the CRA (and later modifications of it, by all three branches of government), not the VRA. You might have wanted the book to be about the VRA, but books are about what the author chooses to write about.
Well, I'm not going to continue arguing about your parsing of how to responsibly review books in an ostensibly reason-based public forum, as your idea of criticism is apparently stuck in high-school English class. As for his ignorance of the storied history of The New Yorker, he admitted it himself here, as if it was just an amusing example of how supposedly liberal media all blends together in his brain. But, no, he did not realize The New Yorker was an independent magazine. I'm not going to do the search. If you want to bother I believe it was in a comment.
> Some astounding omissions signal way too much bias for a trustworthy book review.
This would be a lot easier to take seriously if the arguments you raised weren't so astoundingly full of intense (and long-debunked) biased talking points.
> Which is why we've seen an explosion of unchecked voter-suppression efforts in the past decade
No we haven't. Not even close. The election-integrity laws that extreme leftists slander as "voter suppression" have never had that effect, neither in theory nor in practice. Don't believe me? Check out what the Washington Post (which no one can reasonably accuse of harboring right-wing biases) had to say: the effect of the introduction of such laws in Georgia was to expand voting, rather than limit it, and the limits they imposed were in fact less restrictive than those on the books in deep-blue states that no activists are complaining about. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/30/biden-falsely-claims-new-georgia-law-ends-voting-hours-early/)
> Most important to the broad topic is there's no mention of THE most important argument for the entire bucket that includes affirmative action: that EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution.
Perhaps because that argument is well-debunked nonsense unworthy of mention, let alone serious consideration?
There is definitely some benefit to some degree of diversity in a lot of situations. But there's a yawning chasm between that obvious fact and the extraordinary claim that "EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution," a chasm for which no extraordinary evidence has ever been introduced to try to bridge it. Most researchers who have attempted to replicate the initial findings failed to do so; this is just another victim of the replication crisis in social sciences.
"Most important to the broad topic is there's no mention of THE most important argument for the entire bucket that includes affirmative action: that EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution. I have never seen an anti-woke argument address this fact directly, because the bias is always too strong: egalitarianism is treated as a form of welfare instead of recognized for the very real widespread social benefits that come from diverse experiences, intelligences, strengths, etc."
If this were true, you wouldn't need laws to force it on people.
Note what tech company workplaces look like. There is a *ton* of diversity there, just not the kind that's needed for political reasons in the US. If you have a workplace with four Chinese, two Israelis, a Russian, three white Americans, two Indians, and a Frenchman, that's pretty normal, and very diverse by any definition that would make sense for benefits from diversity. But it's not the right kind of diversity, because Chinese, Russians, Israelis and Indians aren't sufficiently important voting blocs in the US.
>that EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution.
What is the argument for this exactly? I don't see it at all, especially if we aren't talking about viewpoint diversity, which incidentally isn't something protected.
Hanania makes a strong case that the main reason for wokeness has been the past half century of government regulation of the workplace in the name of civil rights.
As Willie Sutton replied when asked why he robs banks, that’s where the money is. For the ever-growing numbers of people paid to micromanage diversity and shut down potentially offensive free speech at work, it’s a living. It may not seem like a lot of money to Silicon Valley titans, but to many soft-major college grads it’s more than they could make doing anything else. To update Upton Sinclair’s famous quote, “It is not difficult to get an HR woman to believe something when her salary depends upon it.”
In response to the proliferation of government regulations (and the lawsuits that accompany them) banning discrimination against some people and encouraging discrimination against others, corporations vastly increased their human resources staff to cajole and mollify the bureaucrats.
Of course, corporate HR staffers are less the adversaries of the government and plaintiff attorneys than their codependents in a symbiotic relationship featuring slightly different career paths in the same field. Just as many of the environmental consultants hired by corporations to placate the Environmental Protection Agency are former EPA staffers (and thus are definitely not going to call for repealing environmental laws), corporate HR, federal civil rights bureaucrats, discrimination lawyers, sexual harassment trainers, and so forth have perfectly understandable mutual economic incentives to bring ever larger parts of American life under their purview to generate more business for people like themselves.
From 1968 to 2021, despite immense improvements in automation, the number of Americans working in human relations grew from 140,000 to 1,500,000:
In 1968, only 1 in 558 American workers were employed in human resources. By 2021, that number had risen to 1 in 102, including 1 in 184 men and 1 in 68 women.
I wonder what fraction of black women with college degrees work in HR: 1 in 20? 1 in 10?
A third of a century ago, the founder of a couple of firms I worked at had a stated policy of only hiring black women as his head of human resources because that inclined the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to harass his companies less. As Hanania explains, the civil rights rules regarding employment are so vague and potentially far-reaching that in the inevitable federal investigations and discrimination lawsuits over firings, the best defense is often to look like you aren’t one of those bad racist companies that must be rooted out and punished. And what better proof that you are Good than making the face of your HR department a black woman? Employers, Hanania says,
"are encouraged to find ways to convince bureaucrats, and potentially judges and juries, that they are good people who take discrimination seriously…. “Woke capital,” which often refers to corporations taking left-wing stances on identity-related issues, is a natural response to a system that rewards this kind of virtue signaling."
For example, if a few deep-pocketed employers increase their budget for DEI staffers to new highs, the EEOC can extoll this to other employers as a “best practice” that might be looked upon favorably by the EEOC the next time they get sued for firing a protected class goldbricker (likely next week).
The diversity racket is a self-licking ice cream cone that ratchets upward much more easily than downward.
I'm a little surprised that you write "I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason, but Hanania is no doubt right about the strategic considerations" when you've also written https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/. What differences do you see between Hanania's not publicizing certain parts of his views as loudly for strategic reasons and scientists keeping quiet about lightning? With Hanania putting his real views on his blog where the intellectual curious can find them and his slightly sanitized versions out in a book meant for mass market appeal, it looks to me like he's following your recommendation to a T.
As for the accuracy of the title and how well the book described the origins of woke, I think Hanania is trying to describe the origins of woke the current, successful movement, not woke the strain of intellectual thought. Progressives have believed all sorts of things, especially in the 60s, and I don't imagine Hanania is interested in the particular intellectual traditions the judges in Griggs v Duke Power were drawing from, he's interested in why those thoughts are dominating the 21st century American labor market despite being economically inefficient and unsupported by the majority of Americans.
That said, I agree that his description of the origins of woke as a movement is still incomplete. The first part of your own post, describing how people are forced to use and internalize wokeness in order to survive in business, is how Hanania believes woke laws have turned into woke culture over time, but there was a dramatic shift in the 2010s that I don't believe he has an explanation for. I do know he's said in his blog that he doesn't believe repealing civil rights laws will undo wokeness overnight or even quickly, merely that it will allow the pendulum to swing back the other way eventually, but he may have left that out of the book rather than admit the limitations of his policy recommendation as he makes it.
Jews and East Asians far outperform (non-Jewsish) whites in many of the same statistics in which whites outperform blacks. Since it's implausible that this is caused by discrimination in favor of those groups, this is sufficient to prove that racial disparities *can* have causes other than discrimination, and so discrimination against blacks can't be inferred either just from outcome disparities between whites and blacks.
That way one can avoid discussing specific explanations, each of which may be more taboo than making the above argument.
And in a society where racism is as taboo as in present-day America, and there are as strong pressures on companies to have equal representation of races, it doesn't seem more plausible that managers still secretly hate black people, discriminate against them for no reason, and then go through all this effort to signal the opposite, than that there are genuine differences between demographic groups that cause these disparities, while managers try to favor the underrepresented minorities while trying to maintain some degree of merit-based hiring.
(In the case of East Asians, it can be argued that maybe they outperform because immigration policy selects for the best-performing ones. But this doesn't apply to American Jews, most of whose ancestors migrated to the US before selective and merit-based immigration policy, and even in the case of East Asians, it doesn't clearly explain why they outperform other immigrant groups.)
And the criminal justice system (which isn't disciplined by a competitive market, and thus more likely be biased) goes after men much more than women, but nobody thinks that's evidence of sexism. https://twitter.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1782410808342839430
>(In the case of East Asians, it can be argued that maybe they outperform because immigration >policy selects for the best-performing ones. But this doesn't apply to American Jews, most of >whose ancestors migrated to the US before selective and merit-based immigration policy, and >even in the case of East Asians, it doesn't clearly explain why they outperform other >immigrant groups.)
Immigrants self-select - and do so differently depending on the country they migrate to. The average Ashkenazic IQ in Israel isn't particularly high. Was the random person who stayed in Chelm all that clever?
One could expect immigration to select for smarter people—but then again, non-Jewish white Americans are *also* descendants of immigrants.
There may still be selection effects that applied differently to Jews and non-Jewish whites, but there may have also been different selection effects on white immigrants and African slaves forcibly taken to America, so we're once again talking about a kind of explanation that may also explain differences between whites and blacks.
Per Cremiuex, Israeli data are consistent with an Ashkenazi IQ identical with American Ashkenazim (see: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/pinpointing-jewish-iq), although he still suspects that Israel’s Ashkenazim are slightly less intelligent than their counterparts in the U.S. and U.K., due to selective migration.
I just checked; he seems to work hard to tease out results that he doesn't have. You would think the necessary results are somewhere? Of course one should be about any quote that says 100, as that may be due to normalization.
I think Trump is a poor leader and I think that Jan 6th was moronic. But I'll forgive him for every bad thing he's ever done if he follows Hanania's advice to the letter: repeals every related EO on Jan 21st and starts up a bunch of lawsuits to cancel out prior judicial overreach on Civil Rights law. If he's lucky he'd also have full control of Congress and would be able to sneak in some legislative changes as well.
I *wish* it was Vivek or DeSantis or Haley or Suarez running instead but I'd settle for Trump if I have to.
I thought the _sic_ was not only about the surname _Di-az_, but also about the first name _Demetric_, instead of the more plausible _Demetrio_. It looks like, somewhere along the way, someone misread a dirty copy of the name, and then their mangled version became official.
Re: The origins of . . . Inequality, I think there may be a simpler explanation for the underrepresentation of black math PhDs that doesn't rely on assuming racism.
I accept the premise that increased diversity is valuable precisely because people of different races tend to have different life experiences, perspectives and preferences on average, so it seems plausible that career and educational preferences may also differ across racial lines to some degree. For example, perhaps a lower percentage of black students are innately drawn to the field of mathematics at the PhD level compared to other racial groups, for cultural or other reasons.
This would parallel how we see gender-based differences in preferences leading to unequal gender ratios in many fields, without necessarily implying sexism. There's no reason to assume that every racial group will be equally interested in every possible career path. Diversity of people will naturally lead to diversity of career choices.
A couple places I suspect racial and cultural diversity really matter a lot:
a. Medicine--I think a lot of people feel more comfortable dealing with "one of their kind" as doctors, especially when there are some cultural or genetic differences they share. Getting a slightly less stellar intellect as your family doctor might be worth getting someone who "speaks your language."
b. Politics--a lot of people prefer to be represented by someone "like them." It's nice if they can manage that.
c. Education--just as with medicine, I suspect having a teacher who gets your culture and "speaks your language" might be beneficial, though I'm not sure how big a deal this is.
> “So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities.”
?????
This isn’t true, not even remotely.
I took plenty of tests (both written and hands on) for both my private sector apprenticeship, and then my civil service jobs.
Most civil service jobs also give points towards getting hired for being a military veteran, and the service’s administrator the ASVAB tests.
Right now at this very moment I’m sitting with a new hire who took a series of written tests to get hired (though his veteran status probably clinched it) in November 2023, so aptitude tests are still very much a part of the hiring process, and no one gets promoted in The City without also passing more tests.
While they’re a few entry level jobs (sidewalk repair, strew cleaning, and tree planting) that are “affirmative action”, those jobs are based on neighborhood and age, not race, because government hiring based on race is illegal (by voter decree) in The State of California.
Given how the chain of argument is represented here, blaming the original civil rights legislation for the current policy seems a bit like blaming the US constitution for Roe v. Wade.
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> White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85
One whopping fucking standard deviation? Why the hell are we not talking about this all day long, identify causes and try to CRISPR the hell out of the next generation if the causes end up being genetic? (Yes, yes, massively polygenetic, yes, yes, eugenicism has a bad rep, I get it.)
--
I think the overall standard of non-racism should be color blindness, not equality of outcomes. If someone uses a correlated test with the goal to discriminate against a protected group, e.g. hires only tall people for an office job because they prefer men, that seems bad. But anything remotely related to job performance should be fair to test for.
In the South in 1950, I can imagine that finding good employment as a qualified black person. In an environment where customers prefer to deal with white employees, the rational business owner will prefer to hire white employees. This sort of thing is why the government stepped in.
This is not a problem these days any more because customers have changed. Sure, that Chinese restaurant might prefer to hire Chinese people and Swastika Auto Parts might only hire white people, but if customers care about the hiring policy of the shops they frequent at all then it will be to make sure that they are inclusive enough. (Of course, no legal framework, bureaucracy or movement ever declares the problem they were created to fight solved and is repealed or disbands.)
On the flip side, there are costs of all sorts associated with the current status quo. Having a government which has an official and completely arbitrary policy about which races there are (for the purposes of detecting discrimination) seems like a bad thing. Any departure for meritocracy imposes additional costs, which will be ultimately paid by the customers. Then there is the spiritual damage of having to engage in doublethink when you can't openly do affirmative action but also have to ensure equality of outcomes, so you do something illegible instead and hope that you are not caught. For the prospective employees that then results in epistemic damage, because an important practical part of their lives if purposefully made opaque.
The FAA thing can be summarized as "a federal agency conspired to discriminate against some races by systematically enabling black people to cheat in an exam". Dear Democrats, how do you think how a moderately right-leaning rural white would update their world view with regard to the impartiality, non-corruptedness, and ultimately legitimacy of the federal government, the fairness of written tests and outcomes of such tests? Dear media, given that you have decided to not report on this much, how much do you think that same person is going to take a lack of you reporting some fake news they read on telegram as evidence that it did not actually happen?
> (Of course, no legal framework, bureaucracy or movement ever declares the problem they were created to fight solved and is repealed or disbands.)
You just hit the nail on the head. This is known as the Shirky Principle: bureaucratic institutions will actively work to perpetuate the problem that they were crated to solve. It's a big part of the reason why there was so much conservative opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, by people who had been big supporters of civil rights and of previous civil rights laws: they could see something like today's mess coming if you got bureaucracy involved.
"> White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85
One whopping fucking standard deviation? Why the hell are we not talking about this all day long, identify causes and try to CRISPR the hell out of the next generation if the causes end up being genetic? (Yes, yes, massively polygenetic, yes, yes, eugenicism has a bad rep, I get it.)"
This happened, and the causes turned out to be environmental. Google "The Bell Curve Debate" for more information.
I've heard of the debate, but hadn't heard that "the causes turned out to be environmental". Rather, my understanding of recent admixture studies https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/admixture-in-the-americas-introduction-partial-correlations-and-iq-predictions-based-on-ancestry is that they've shifted the evidence against the environment (Murray & Herrnstein themselves were agnostic about the proportion to assign to it vs genes). James Flynn was the main anti-hereditarian even willing to engage in debate with hereditarians, and he's dead now.
It's a very complex issue that I am happy to go into if you really want, but I warn you it's a real rabbit hole. There are controversies around how one operationally defines race or genetic influence (basically the IV), how one measures environmental influences (the other IV), how one defines intelligence (the DV), and how one uses correlational statistics to measure heritability. And what "heritability" actually means. The bottom line is that once you control for the many well documented environmental differences between blacks and whites in the US, there isn't much group variation left to explain.
"Adoption from a poor family into a better-off one is associated with IQ gains of 12 to 18 points. "
"The black-white IQ gap is decreasing, and is now closer to 10 points than the widely cited one standard deviation (15 points), which is the erroneous value Murray cites in the interview. Academic achievement of blacks has also improved by about one-third standard deviation in recent decades."
"The heritability of intelligence, although never zero, is markedly lower among American children raised in poverty. Several interpretations of this fact are possible. The one we find most persuasive is that children raised in those circumstances are unable to take full advantage of their genetic potential because they do not have access to the high-quality environments that could support it."
I read that Vox article when it came out. It does not show that "the causes turned out to be environmental". Blacks from high SES families still have lower average IQs than whites from low SES families. Lower heritability in poorer families is just evidence that the environmental contribution is non-zero, which doesn't contradict the actual position Murray took going back to The Bell Curve.
Actually, you're right--I overstated the case. What I should have said was: "The causes of the differences between races are not primarily biological" or even "the differences between races are not biologically fixed" which are much more nuanced statements. My apologies.
Some other reservations about the Vox piece. Has the IQ gap between blacks and white been shrinking? This is debatable, but there’s reasonable evidence that it has not been. Cremieux surveyed much of the evidence and finds that the gap is still about one standard deviation, virtually unmoved for decades:
Adoption may improve IQ. However, this doesn’t necessarily tell us much about racial gaps in cognitive ability since the IQ gaps from adoption seem to be on specialized cognitive abilities, not general intelligence. However, the IQ gap between blacks and whites appears to be strongly related to general intelligence:
The heritability of intelligence & SES: this is also disputed, with different studies arriving at inconsistent findings. But, as someone else pointed out, this still wouldn’t explain the gaps since the gap is actually bigger at higher SES levels.
The cause of the black/white gap in IQ scores is an open research question, not some known thing. The Vox article and many other argument like it say that we should assume its cause is environmental until proven otherwise (for a variety of good and bad reasons), the cause is not known.
My sense is that the best available picture of the world now is that some of the gap is environmental, some is genetic, and we don't know how much of each yet.
> > White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85
> One whopping fucking standard deviation? Why the hell are we not talking about this all day long, identify causes and try to CRISPR the hell out of the next generation if the causes end up being genetic? (Yes, yes, massively polygenetic, yes, yes, eugenicism has a bad rep, I get it.)
Genetic engineering will so radically transform humanity that most ethnic groups known today will disappear. After all, genes will no longer be tied to parentage. (I also find the obsession with African-Americans in this context both bizarre and contemptible, but it is beyond my powers to explain this to people shaped by US culture.)
The obsession with both African-Americans and IQ is also bizarre to me.
One is a category that's transparently unconnected to genetic reality even by the rather absurd standards of 19th century race science: let's take a subset of West African populations, ship them overseas and then inject a large percentage of anglo/Irish ancestry via the master raping his slaves. Add in the most obvious confounders of having been enslaved and then actively discriminated against until a generation ago so that the environmental deck is stacked against them as hard as possible. This population is now the subject of endless screeds on the genetic differences between races, and is also projected back to the much more diverse parent population to somehow explain why melanin = poor performance.
The other is application of a fairly questionable tool (an intelligence test that can get order-of-magnitude differences in results with the same subject tested on different days) to a domain it was never supposed to be applied to (inter group scores, where the whole mechanism of testing relies on norming for a group), generally using the least useful version of that tool (Raven's matrices, which only correlate with IQ at like a 0.25 level).
The whole "black people are dumber than white people because African Americans IQ tests" thing is this incoherent tower of assumptions and poor tools that, funnily enough, seems to then vindicate the prejudices of the white Americans applying it. And, just by coincidence, provides a convenient justification for ignoring the unseemly effects historical discrimination by blaming the victims.
I agree with you that HBD certainly attracts the wrong kind of people -- everyone who inherited their world view from their racist grandparents will point to it and say "see, we were right all along".
I am also suspicious of new theories which have a lot in common with old theories which were soundly debunked: if someone tried to sell me on their Earth-centered world view I would go "this looks a lot like geocentrism to me".
On the other hand, I think that this is very much a culture war topic where open-ended research might not be appreciated, which is probably why people who argue for the existence of genetic group differences in intelligence point to the Ashkenazi (who probably did not have the kind of economic advantage over the gentiles that the US whites have over the US blacks) instead of running straight into the largest mass of barbed wire on that battlefield and marry Adolf Hitler.
I do not think that if Scott was 99.7% certain that there was no genetic influence on the observed group difference, he would have written that possible explanation as he did, but that is just my subjective opinion.
> an intelligence test that can get order-of-magnitude differences in results with the same subject tested on different days
This is pure bullshit. What would it even mean to get an order-of-magnitude difference in an IQ test? Do you honestly believe someone can test IQ 20 on one day and IQ 200 the other day? I am not even sure if such an IQ test exists that would provide either of these values.
I am going to assume that you actually meant something like "a standard deviation of difference in results". (Please correct me if you insist on the original version; in that case I am afraid this debate makes no sense.) Even this statement is kinda true, but only in a way that doesn't matter. Basically, the further away from IQ 100 you are, the greater the noise in the test. It is possible to score IQ 145 on one day and IQ 160 on the other day, because maybe that's just a difference of getting one or two most difficult questions correct by accident. (Or maybe the two tests just assign different maximum score for getting all the questions right.) But the chance of getting IQ 100 on one day and IQ 130 on the other day, or IQ 75 on one day and IQ 100 on the other day, is negligible -- and this is the part that people are talking about most.
Whatever source you got this information from, I suggest to treat it with more skepticism.
One funny piece of evidence that probably any local branch of Mensa could give you, is that there are people who are obsessed about becoming Mensa members, and they keep doing the IQ test as often as possible; which by the official rules of Mensa is at least 6 months after the previous attempt. So there are people who keep doing this for years, they already took the test about dozen times, and have failed every time. Which would be quite unlikely if the noise was as big as you assume. (In a hypothetical world where IQ tests are so random, soon the word would get out that if you want to join Mensa, you just need to try three or four times to get lucky.)
*
Now let's return to your question, why are some people so obsessed. Yes, some of them are obsessed, because they are racists, and they see it as a support for their prejudice. (Though I wonder what is their opinion on the fact that some black people score high in the tests, and some white people score low. Would an actual racist be okay with having a black neighbor, if that neighbor was e.g. a math professor?)
But I think that many people arrive at this topic defensively. They organize some activity for other people -- establish a school, or write a blog and organize offline meetups -- and suddenly someone points out that the majority of participants are white, and accuses the organizer of racism, and insists that the burden of proof is on the accused. So people feel like they need to come up with an explanation, and the hypothesis of different average IQ is one that seems to fix the observed facts. If we didn't have so many baseless accusations of racism, there wouldn't be so many people looking for an alternative explanation.
You are correct - I meant a standard deviation. That's on me for typing in haste.
My argument here is that this whole idea rests on a tower of assumptions, some of which are patently false (i.e. that more melanin is a useful way of categorizing human genetic diversity) and some of which are shakey and become useless once taken together (the noise in IQ testing + the tests being designed to be normed intra-group + Raven's matrices not being well correlated with the tests by themselves + applying tests across populations mainly via Raven's matrices = junk stats).
I don't quite understand your example of people becoming defensively racist - if someone accuses me of sexism in hiring female doctors, is it then okay if my first response is to build this tower of pseudo-science about how woman can't be doctors because their menses makes them too emotional and prone to fainting? Am I supposed to condone the people who build and disseminate pseudoscience because it helps soothe the hurts of others?
I'd prefer things to be true rather than be plausible ways to justify our preconceptions, especially when those preconceptions affect the lives of others.
Imagine that you want to hire some people, and 10 candidates apply for the position. 9 of them are men, 6 are qualified, 3 are not. 1 is a woman, and she is not qualified. Let's say you need 5 people, so you choose the best 5 out of the qualified men. So far, makes sense?
The next thing is that a journalist notices that 5 out of 5 employees you hired are men, and accuses you of sexism. The burden of proof is on you, because "everyone knows" that there are absolutely no differences between men and women, therefore the true reason why you didn't hire at least 2 qualified women must be that you did something wrong.
You know you didn't do anything wrong, so you say something like "who knows, maybe women are simply not interested in being doctors". But then someone points to that 1 unqualified woman you didn't hire, and uses her as evidence that women actually are interested in being doctors. You point out that she wasn't qualified. They say "but sure there are many *other* women who are qualified -- why didn't you hire any of them?" They may even provide a specific example of a great female doctor, living in a different state. You say "well, none of them came to my interview", and they say "of course they didn't -- you have a reputation of being sexist, they probably didn't feel safe; you must try harder".
So you hire a team of diversity consultants, send your 5 doctors to sensitivity training twice a year, put "feminism power" posters all over your hospital, make a huge advertising campaign about your hospital being a woman-friendly place, and announce the next round of job interviews, exclusively for women. This time, 3 women candidates come, but all 3 are unqualified. You hire the most qualified one of them, hoping that now the journalists keep you alone. Perhaps with more experience, she will improve and become as good as your other doctors. Sadly, she does not.
One day you say "I don't know, perhaps women are just less qualified to be doctors, in general". The next morning you find out that your accounts at Twitter and Google were banned for hate speech, and a mob of angry students is trying to burn down your hospital.
Perhaps I can propose a hypothetical to illustrate where I'm coming from:
It's now one of the world's worst-kept secrets that men are significantly underrepresented in university (both as incoming admissions and as new graduates). This appears to be world-wide phenomenon, and shows up everywhere where women aren't actively excluded from studying. The only places where this is not true are in maths, engineering and computer science, which are still predominantly male.
Being aware of this fact, choose from the following (alone or in combination) as useful ways of addressing the issue going forwards:
A) Demand that 50% of admissions in all faculties must be men.
B) Study the issue to determine the genetic causes of this problem - maybe the Y chromosome contains genes that make men better at maths but worse at literally everything else?
C) Look for sociological factors that explain the discrepancy - maybe boys are now socialized to not want to be biologists or lawyers when previously they did?
D) Conclude that men are intellectually inferior to women, and that tipping the scales in any way would lead to less-qualified people becoming doctors, scientists, lawyers, artists, sociologists etc.
E) Conclude that there's something fundamentally fucked with how high school and university education works, that whatever measures it uses to assess a student's ability to perform the jobs they're nominally being trained for is wrong, and that a fundamental rethink is necessary.
F) Enter conspiracy mode and decide that any differences are caused by US affirmative action policies driving men out of universities.
I am not even sure that this is a problem that needs to be solved. Perhaps men are more interested in math & similar subjects, and in things that do not require university education, and women are more interested in non-mathy things that do require university education. We should make sure this is not the case, before attempting to solve the problem.
A -- clearly wrong, because either there is no problem, or there is a problem but this does not address the underlying cause
B -- it's possible, and it is an empirical question to find out
C -- it's possible
D -- it's possible
E -- it's almost certain that the system is fucked up, and it is a good idea to fix it regardless of what impact it would have on gender balance; that said, it is possible that fixing the system will have no impact on the gender imbalance (or could even make it worse)
F -- it's possible
I am not really giving you a specific answer here (except for the point A), am I? Thinking about the answers, I would like to suggest an option that it could be a combination of these things in some non-linear way. For example, that today it is expected that a person working in a profession X would have some skill Y, and that men are objectively worse at the skill Y, but that there is no objective reason why we should require the person in the profession X to have the skill Y, it's just some historical accident. For example, maybe men are better at "hard skills" and women are better at "soft skills", and it is the balance between the hard skills and the soft skills that is changing recently. (To put it extremely bluntly, is it more important to do a technically good job, or to avoid a possible controversy? Perhaps men are better at the former, and women at the latter.)
I'm not being prescriptive about the solutions here, so whatever floats your boat.
The interesting thing, for me at least, is that this is more or less the same menu of options that get touted for a number of situations where there is a disparity, and that the preferred solutions advanced by different groups change wildly depending on whether it's men/women, black/white, gay/straight etc.
For instance, some conservative universities have introduced quotas (either overtly or covertly) so that the student body doesn't become too female. This is, safe to say, not their preferred approach to the problem of underrepresented minorities on campus. Similarly, there's very little US lefty concern (that I can see) with solving the issue, despite it being just as glaring as, say, female underrepresentation in IT degrees.
It's also interesting to see biological explanations being hauled out for things that have changed over time. Programming used to be seen as women's work, back in the day when a computer was a room full of women with slide rules. Which is why a lot of the first computer programmers were women. Then it became seen as men's work and suddenly women turned out not to be interested/able.
Similarly, where I'm from medicine has gone from being almost exclusively men's work to being heavily skewed towards women, while in other countries its still seen as a job for men because women are too squeamish/emotional/irrational.
The solutions and explanations are always downstream of other things, is what I'm trying to get at. A good heuristic is to beware biological essentialism, as it often serves as plausible cover for other reasons.
It is easy to understand the obsession. Speaking plainly, US has a large highly visible subpopulation that, without massive affirmative action, would be _overwhelmingly_ relegated to menial occupations with no hope for betterment in the lifetimes of their children and grandchildren. Human nature being what it is, it is a terrible prospect for both sides and I cannot fault Americans for obsessing over it.
I also think that knowing more details on the causal pathway which leads to worse economic outcomes could be genuinely helpful to figure out the best solution to ensure that economic outcomes are less unequal in the future. And IQ seems like it might be one stepping stone on a causal pathway. IQ can be lower for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps many of the teachers of the black kids were racist. Perhaps it is the lead. Perhaps black culture has less emphasis on academic success.
As Scott argued in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/ (IIRC, SSC does not load for me), racism as a root cause acts as a curiosity stopper. People are racist, end of story. I do not find that very satisfactory.
'Group X has worse outcomes by N, ergo society is racist, ergo we fix society by doing affirmative action on the order of N' does not seem remotely sufficient from an understanding the world point of view.
I agree with all you wrote above, but there is an important addition: plausible "causal pathways" which are left after half a century of hunting down preventable causes (lead etc.), which can be broadly grouped under the heading of culture, need blacks' active cooperation to work. And that can be tricky to get. asdf put it like this [https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-analogy-with-religion/#comment-493783] (I elided the harshest words to spare feelings):
---------------------
It’s true that people in Baltimore schools would benefit from better discipline. But they don’t want it bad enough. The social status hit of admitting they need [severe discipline] to even begin to act half human is just too much. [...] Back when making them [behave] meant cheap reliable factory workers, their betters in Baltimore bothered to do it, hard as it was, because there was something in it. There were Methodist churches all around my neighborhood taking in the working class and churning out punch clockers. Now, there isn’t. So the only people who bother aren’t people that need them to show up for their shift sober, but people who need them to show at the polling booth drunk.
I think it was literally the first time I heard that number, so I do not consider myself obsessed. If there is any group with who's genetic IQ component I am obsessed, it would probably be the Ashkenazi (based on SSC.)
Not sure why you react the way you do about dating in the workplace. Presumably you've seen the famous graph about where couples met, with "met at work" peaking in the early 1990s and then dropping off. Combine that with younger millennials and zoomers being much less likely to be married and have children than previous generations were at their age, and it's a pretty serious problem.
We made a society where people are encouraged to stay in school until their mid-20s and delay marriage to focus on their careers. But we also made it so the people who you would naturally meet and interact with after college, your coworkers, are off limits for romance. We replaced that with Tinder, Bumble, etc., which don't work very well for most people.
Having a family is one of the most important parts of life, and so laws that make family formation harder are important. And I think the fact that flirtation can constitute a hostile work environment that can cost your employer hundreds of millions of dollars is a significant factor.
Fuck the mess that is dating apps, but isn't breaking up (which is not a good thing and people should try not to overdo and be more serious towards their relationship mates, but necessary nonetheless) difficult and awkward in a workplace?
A workplace is one of the very few places in a modern secular-ish society where you're **forced**, on threat of not finding food, to interact with people. How much more difficult would that be if every 5th employee was once your ex who is not on good terms with you? How much more awkward would it all be if this ex eventually married/did-the-serious-whatever-it-is with another guy from work, and now there is a lowkey jealousy/awkward feelings whatever it is in either you or the husband or both?
I'm not opposed to the general abstract idea and I also think Scott unfairly jumped to satire too early here. But the above is a legitimate concern. To say nothing yet of the inevitable case when bosses start bullying/annoying lower-rank exes. Which is bound to happen.
>but isn't breaking up (which is not a good thing and people should try not to overdo and be more serious towards their relationship mates, but necessary nonetheless) difficult and awkward in a workplace?
Classic "Bad things are good" Chestertonian thinking. Being able to interact fruitfully with people you don't like is good, dealing with awkward and difficult situations is good. Lack of exposure leads to an inability to cope, and an inability to cope leads, in the long term, to less happiness and productivity. This obviously leads to bad outcomes on the margins (the "bosses bullying exes" situations mentioned above), but is a good tradoff.
That being said, I think I'm an unusually non-resentful person, so maybe I'm underestimating the frequency of those bad outcomes.
I agree with you in principle, but I don't think this is a good application thereof. Situations like this aren't training to be able to cope; they're *the things you need to cope with.* If you don't already have the requisite skills by the time you enter the workforce, getting thrown in the deep end isn't going to benefit you much, and if you do, then you already have them and don't need a situation like this to learn them.
"People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law?"
I saw that change happen in real time at my last job. Out in the far reaches of the Mojave desert, in the Land that Woke Forgot, we had a workplace culture where pretty much everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs. With rather less sex than the TV version, because A: real life rather than Hollywood and B: nerds rather than Advertising Bros. But where there was mutual desire, it happened, and where there wasn't, nobody really pushed.
Until one woman filed a sexual harassment complaint(*), which everyone recognized was utterly baseless, and revenge for a social slight. But management decided they had to pretend to take it seriously, money quote, "I'm sorry, [redacted], I have to take her side - she's the girl". In a matter of months. Policies were changed, management became much more intrusive, and the job ceased being fun for anyone not long after that.
I should have quit immediately; by the time I eventually left, my colleagues were only half joking when they suggested I could offer my next employer an entire spacecraft-propulsion R&D team, cheap.
* Really, a series of escalating complaints of increasing bogosity when she wasn't satisfied with the social response to the earlier ones. By the end, management was officially 100% on her side, and she had no friends whatsoever of either gender.
I retired a couple years ago and there weren't that many women in the engineering departments where I worked so I must have missed a lot of this. The only time I ever saw a women raise an issue was a meeting where some guy answered her question about a data type with 'it's a fucking integer'. It was pretty lame. She had a foul mouth in her own way too., Issue raised - Issue dropped
I'd kind of like to see this phenomenon live and in person. I live within an easy bike ride of the University of Minnesota. Alum 65 and older can take courses for credit at $10 per or audit for free. I would expect a lot of justified resentment if I were to pop into a class there though. Hi, I'm old, my health care is subsidized and I'm only paying 50 bucks to take this course. How you doing today my young friend?
BTW you are probably too young to fully appreciate Mad Men. My youngest brother didn't understand what i saw in it. If you don't remember the Manson murders or at least their aftermath you won't flip out when the show reaches 1969 and Don Draper's love interest is in California and picks up her green phone. Oh gawd. Sharon Tate had a green phone!
I am happy to be reminded that bogosity is a word.
Also it seems odd to me that moving was an option for you. Spacecraft propulsion seems adequately expensive and government-entwined that I find it difficult to think that any company could preserve a healthy culture for long.
I feel it's worth mentioning (since nobody else seems to have made this point) that Mad Men is a cautionary tale -- Don Draper is not intended to be an aspirational character, he's an essentially broken person. Much of the subtext of the show is how this era produced powerful men who were philanderers, alcoholics, bullies, and egoists. The juxtaposition between that reality and the superficial trappings of the era ("when men could be men", great fitting suits, etc) is what makes the show so interesting.
Even though the government’s misuse of the “applicant pool” concept gets touched upon, it feels like this by far the most egregious part of the entire phenomenon. The problem that civil rights laws are trying to fix is discrimination, and the (real) problem being described in the book is when non-discriminatory companies have to jump through a lot of dumb hoops because they couldn’t naturally hire “enough” minority employees on their own. But if the real applicant pool does correspond to the % minorities in the company, then the company is being sufficiently non-discriminatory that it shouldn’t need to jump through those hoops.
I feel like whenever see statistics for a company’s representation, I never see it the statistics breakdown for “people who applied to the job who met the bare minimum qualifications” or “people with the desired college degree” presented alongside it.
It is worth noting that “job applicants” (no caveat for being qualified) alone is probably not a great metric. I know some tech companies that were able to hire more female employees without affirmative action simply by paring down the listed requirements to a more realistic level (which significantly increased the number of women who applied—stereotypically men apply to jobs where they meet 1/10 requirements while women wouldn’t apply to a job where they met 9/10 requirements). But even the flawed “job applicants” number would be a better metric than the general population.
So the counter-argument here is that hiring practices aren't just about treating everyone equally. It's about creating a counter-weight against the social discrimination minorities and other communities experience in the rest of society. It would be ideal to eliminate disparities in everything from education to housing to health care to employment in general, but no law could ever do that.
The question then becomes whether the cost of forcing employers to make due with a less productive workforce (because, granted, this means they are not hiring the very best applicants) is worth the benefit of giving members of discriminated communities a chance at upward mobility. That's more a matter of personal opinion.
It’s still the case that the real applicant pool (as opposed to the general population) is hugely important. Let’s say companies get 1000 qualified applicants during a year for 100 positions. Company 1 has 200 qualified applicants who are women, and Company 2 has 500. If Company 1 hires 40 women and Company 2 hires 50 women, it *looks* like Company 2 is better at promoting gender equality, even though Company 1 is providing a huge counterweight and Company 2 did nothing.
But it seems like we rarely get to see the full picture in practice.
I would argue that an employer's contribution to gender (or any other form of) equality isn't based on applicant ratios, but the total objective effect on the larger society. The fact remains that one company hired more women than the other, so their value-added to gender equality is higher. Again, the question still remains whether or not this is a desirable policy.
“The fact remains that one company hired more women than the other, so their value-added to gender equality is higher.”
… Just to clarify, are you saying this as someone who personally cares about gender equality at all, or is this a best guess at how e.g. feminists would view things? Because if it’s the former case, that is WILD and I am curious as to how you came by that belief.
Seems logical to me. Given that society has made a decision that employers should to contribute to social equality, then it seems more logical to me to measure their contribution to overall social equality, and not limit it to how they selected from the applicant pool.
To use a different example, if we decide we want, say, manufacturers to contribute to fighting global warming, then we should do that by measuring the total amount of carbon they contribute to the environment, and not simply by measuring how efficient they are at using energy, even if they are relatively better than the average manufacturer.
There are also costs to requiring many hiring/promotion decisions to be legible to protect against lawsuits, and a lot of other compliance costs. The laws still may be worth it overall, but you should include those in the costs.
The fear that people express about how their career can be terminated in an instant by an offhand joke or remark taken the wrong way... sometimes strikes me as just a bit pathological. It's like somebody who has a fear of snakes or spiders. Do snakes or spiders sometimes kill people? Undoubtedly. But are the odds of this happening to *you* high enough to the point where developing a chronic phobia over it is worth all the discomfort and paranoia and avoidance? Often not, methinks.
I know that people sometimes lose their jobs and reputations over mostly innocent politically incorrect remarks, and I know this is bad. But I struggle to see this as so prevalent that we should view it as an epidemic (particularly post-2022... I'll grant that in 2020-2021 we got carried away with this).
Across many years of being in the workforce (and being involved with myriad startups and midsized companies as an investor) I'm having a hard time thinking of a single individual male who was ostracized in a permanent way for some sort of lewd comment he carelessly made. In 99% of cases this seems to be handled appropriately either via informal feedback (pulling the person aside to let them know what they said isn't acceptable) or some sort of disciplinary hearing that - at least in my view - is typically handled professionally and fairly.
In fact I can much more easily find examples of *women* who became un-hireable because of a harassment claim that they made at a previous employer. If we lived in the "woke" world with its "victim culture" that Hanania imagines we do, that would not happen.
While I concur that the excesses of the "woke" are bad and should be pushed back against, these people who are completely fixated on the excesses of woke progressives (whether it's Hanania or Bill Maher or Tucker Carlson or whomever)... I dunno man. Seems like pearl clutching to me.
Yglesias has made a similar critique using Jonathan Haidt's argument against many Haidt fans. Razib Khan also denounced people as cowards for being so afraid and not willing to use their real names online. Unlike him, I'm not a professional blogger/podcaster and founder of my own company and have a boss, so I keep my real name mostly off the internet and have thus avoided getting asked about online history in any hiring process.
My suspicion is that provocative writers who use their real name trust that their most outrageous articles will never be found. They would struggle more if their primary platform was YouTube or TikTok, and less if they only wrote books (which are notorious for how few of them are read).
Some of Razib Khan's writings from his days writing for the Unz Review caused the New York Times not to hire him, but I doubt that they knew about his passionate defense of James Watson's comments on the low intelligence of Africans, and the full extent of his advocacy of HBD. Afaik he also received funding from Ron Unz personally for his university education, so he did not succeed entirely on his own. Now it is easy to look back and say "I no longer hold these views", as Hanania has done, but of course Hanania would have never risen to fame in the first place if his previous writings had been public knowledge. I will also claim that both he and Scott Alexander have become noticeably more cautious in their writings after they got unmasked.
> The fear that people express about how their career can be terminated in an instant by an offhand joke or remark taken the wrong way... sometimes strikes me as just a bit pathological. It's like somebody who has a fear of snakes or spiders. Do snakes or spiders sometimes kill people? Undoubtedly. But are the odds of this happening to *you* high enough to the point where developing a chronic phobia over it is worth all the discomfort and paranoia and avoidance? Often not, methinks.
The difference is, we don't live in close proximity with venomous snakes and spiders. If we ever find such creatures intruding on our homes or places of business, we go to significant lengths to either exterminate them or drive them off. This is the principal reason why deaths to snakes and spiders is quite rare.
The same cannot be said of the woke.
> I struggle to see this as so prevalent that we should view it as an epidemic (particularly post-2022... I'll grant that in 2020-2021 we got carried away with this).
So it was a legitimate problem in 2020-2021, people took it seriously enough that it's now not a particularly big problem anymore... and therefore we should stop taking it seriously?
> So it was a legitimate problem in 2020-2021, people took it seriously enough that it's now not a particularly big problem anymore... and therefore we should stop taking it seriously?
Actually yes, that's about how I feel about it.
The problem is that Hanania's book came out 4 years too late. The battle is over and the woke side has lost. Examples: BLM is almost completely discredited. Nobody is hiring Chief Diversity Officers anymore. The median American voter hates racial hiring quotas and hates the Free Palestine protestors at Columbia even more. San Francisco threw out their DA and then voted for a bunch of referenda that are anti-crime and anti-social justice. Americans HATE Kamala Harris and are on the verge of bringing Donald Trump back into office. All of the most-read and most-watched voices on Facebook and Youtube are conservatives whose opposition to "woke" is their number one calling card. People are moving en masse to red and purple states. The things cited as problems in Scott's article are things that nearly everyone reading this hates just as much as he and Hanania do. Opposing "woke" is not a minority opinion, it's an overwhelming majority opinion!
People like Hanania like to perpetuate a vision of a world where none of this has happened because it gets disgruntled conservatives to keep buying their books that validate their view of themselves as an oppressed minority.
On the one hand, you do have a point about the things that have happened. I agree with you, wokeness is currently in retreat throughout our society, and I believe that's a good thing. But a retreat is often followed by regrouping. The bad guys are currently "down but not out," and it would be a bad idea to let down our guard until the ideas underlying wokeness are discredited in our society to the point of unthinkability, the same way that Nazism, slave-holding, and being subjects of the British Empire are. (Funny how we tend to face an existential, civilization-defining threat every 80 years or so. We've had a pretty good track record at defeating and discrediting them so far. I can only hope that trend continues in the present iteration!)
Remember, if a weed grows in your garden, you don't just cut it down and declare victory. You have to pull it out by the roots, otherwise it will always come back and continue to cause trouble for you.
Though I agree with your overall point (that an essentially Black Swan phenomena shouldn't determine policy), I need some verification of some of your claims. Can you connect me to an online resource documenting the rate of people being fired for frivolous reasons across 2020-2021? Was it a real problem even then? Or were there just a handful of well-publicized cases? (I grant that even one unjust outcome shouldn't happen, I'm wondering how significant this really ever was).
"BLM is almost completely discredited. Nobody is hiring Chief Diversity Officers anymore. The median American voter hates racial hiring quotas and hates the Free Palestine protestors at Columbia even more."
Really, you sure? I would be interested in any opinion polling you have seen. Has BLM been discredited or have the number of protests declines simply because the number of well-publicized police shootings seems to have declined? Racial quotas may be unpopular, but the Gaza thing may very well cost Biden the next election.
> the Gaza thing may very well cost Biden the next election.
If the open borders, botching Afghanistan, blatant, out-in-the-open politically-motivated prosecution of his opponent, inflation like we haven't seen since the 70s, and manifest senility didn't already...
>The report reveals how the IRS committed alarming civil liberties abuses, including an unannounced, unprompted field visit to the home of journalist Matt Taibbi on the very day he testified before Congress about government censorship.
* replacement of things by similar things (BLM specifically is discredited, but the niche "things you express support of and donate to to show your solidarity" is not). And most people don't even know that BLM is discredited.
* things that were true all along (the mean voter hates quotas)--the voter has no influence in ending the quotas that he hates, especially since as Hannania points out, the quotas have their root in laws that the voter can't get rid of
* intra-left fighting (Palestine)
* wishful thinking (I'll accept Trump getting in office as a gain for the right *after* Trump gets in office)
* things that operate on such a shallow level that they have no influence, or which otherwise lack influence (by what means do you think conservatives on Facebook will dismantle wokeness?)
They struck down a specific case of it with loopholes big enough to drive a truck through. And the courts ignore the Supreme Court constantly whenever the ruling opposes the left. Look at what's happened with guns already.
Also, the Supreme Court is an outlier because Trump put conservatives on it making the present Supreme Court is a holdover from the past.
> BLM specifically is discredited, but the niche "things you express support of and donate to to show your solidarity" is not
In mid-2020 we had a situation where employees were demanding that their employers donate specifically to the BLM entity (not just broadly to social justice organizations - it HAD to be BLM) by threat of either quitting or disrupting the normal course of business. It's hard to imagine that happening in 2024. As for the general niche, I'm not sure what's problematic about people donating to express solidarity with a minority group? The issue was the coercion to do so. (maybe I'm misunderstanding your point)
> by what means do you think conservatives on Facebook will dismantle wokeness?
My point was not that this is a super effective political movement. I'm just pointing out that conservative and/or anti-woke viewpoints are not in the minority, they are an ascendent/majority position. Or at the very least, widespread and hardly suppressed.
Last I checked, the word "Black" still gets sacral capitalization per the AP style guide, and Trump hasn't actually been re-elected yet. The thermostatic equilibrium did shift back after Biden took office, which is a reason for anti-woke types not to want Trump to win.
Perhaps for anti-woke types who mostly care about culture. I mostly care about policy, and I care about wokeness mostly in as much as it affects what policy gets passed. A backlash against wokeness is worth little if it doesn't actually result in anti-woke politicians getting elected, and enacting some anti-woke policy, or at least not enacting more woke policy, as left-wing politicians would.
Grammarly, at the very least, seems to principled about capitalizing every ethnicity. Indian, Asian, Black, White, Arab, Jew. "Indian" and "Asian" and "Arab" had squiggly red lines under them when I wrote them with the first letter lowercase, "Black" and "White" did not but only because the spell checker probably thought I wanted to use them as colors, other spell checkers like those of google and microshit want to capitalize them too, as well as "Jew", which Grammarly also didn't see as an ethnicity.
I didn't mean to imply that all those ethnicities were capitalized on the suggestion of Grammarly, I mentioned a bunch of them upfront then indicated the subset which Grammarly wanted to capitalize.
Not trying to be annoying by asking this follow-up, but doesn't 1 instance in the entirety of your however many decades of knowing hundreds/thousands of people in your personal life (you didn't explicitly say that it was only 1, but I imagine you would have mentioned others if there were more) suggest a quite low base rate?
FWIW my count is 0 snake or spider bites, 1 scorpion bite, 1 shark bite, 0 cancellations by woke mobs.
When something has a large downside and low probability of happening the behavior selects for people with low IQ and low impulse control. The classic example is in crime where extending prison sentences doesn't deter crime, but increasing the rate of catching criminals appears to. The opposite is true for high payoffs with low probabilities (so long as the EV is actually high), such as starting a business. That selects for good traits like high intelligence. High payoff low EV still selects for low IQ. Lotto tickets for example.
Maybe its better for the company if every guy feels like he can say "nice ass" to any woman at the company, but if I get away with "nice ass" 50 times, and time 51 I get bussed out of the profession, that screws me over royally.
I would distinguish between 1) the regime of affirmative action and legal enforcement against anything perceived as "discrimination," and 2) wokeness as a broader cultural phenomenon. Hanania conflates these two things, possibly deliberately for marketing purposes.
If one simply made the claim that civil rights law is upstream of 1), I'd say that's quite credible. To give an account of 2) in terms of civil rights law is far more dubious.
Remember that time a kimono exhibit in Boston got shut down for being anti-Asian? It was by a Chinese activist, even though the Japanese organizers were all for it. Talk about a cultural misunderstanding!
I enjoyed this review,, and I think Scott did a good job applying its lessons to some more recent events. Here’s my response to certain points and critiques:
1) Yes, civil rights law does not directly explain why things got so crazy in the 2010s. In the book, however, I take issue with the idea that this period of time was as much of a watershed as people think it was. The basic ideas – disparate impact, tests are racist, crime fighting is racist, etc. – were already woven into American life for decades. I argue that the 2010s was the culture catching up to law. This is why I called the book “The Origins of Woke,” as it was not meant to be an all-encompassing explanation for everything that happened as a result of civil rights law.
Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth. It would of course be massively incomplete, inconsistent with some evidence, and not be an all-encompassing theory of everything. If someone was going to study a topic they’d ideally want to know more than one sentence about it, but to the extent to which we can put the blame on one thing in order to make the world legible, this is it.
2) I agree that the judges and bureaucrats took the law in the direction they did in the first place for reasons not having to do with civil rights law. I see guilt over the black issue as the cultural core of this, and civil rights law determined the path this instinct took, that is, what “caring about black people” meant in practice and which groups the same template got applied to.
3) I stick by the absurdity of the Di-az/Diaz story and using it as an example. In my universe there’s no way that any words used against an individual can justify the payout they got. Yet I could’ve provided a more balanced summary of the case, and I regret not doing so.
4) I left a comment about the alleged inaccuracies of the “walk-up” and “great view” controversy at the link, I don’t think that was misleading at all.
5) Yes I didn’t talk about the origins of inequality. That would have been a bad strategy. I prefer what Scott calls the “meta-honesty” approach, where you tell people exactly what you’re not going to talk about and why. This means that the pieces are all there for an intelligent reader to figure out what you think, while making things hard for the cancellers and political opponents. This is a political book, and I sometimes do politics, which I justify with the meta-honesty approach. Scott has a revulsion towards this, which I consider having the flaw of being too pure for this world. I, in contrast, have an appreciation for politics as an art, and this is maybe just an aesthetic thing. But I will never lie to or mislead you about what I think, and believe others should live up to the same standard, even if they sometimes practice selective silence
> Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth. It would of course be massively incomplete, inconsistent with some evidence, and not be an all-encompassing theory of everything. If someone was going to study a topic they’d ideally want to know more than one sentence about it, but to the extent to which we can put the blame on one thing in order to make the world legible, this is it.
Of course, that just invites all the nit-pickers to come and pick. Ever notice how the Venn diagram of people willing to demand evidence for ideas they don't want to believe and people willing to accept such evidence when it is offered is two non-overlapping circles?
"A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?”
Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. "
Is that correct? Do you have a counter-argument to this? Because to me (a left-leaning centrist on the American political spectrum) it's a pretty damning indictment.
The point of civil rights law, to a left leaning American, is to address the discriminatory treatment directed toward populations with too little political power to defend their own interests. One can argue about the means to do so, and perhaps certain policies, such as Affirmative Action, were unequal to the task, or even did more harm than good by that metric. But the goal itself, that the US has a moral duty to attempt to address discriminatory treatment of relatively powerless populations, still remains.
Unless there is some rational argument against it. Is there?
> Unless there is some rational argument against it. Is there?
Read "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," by black scholar Thomas Sowell. The rational argument against it that he makes is a simple appeal to the data: black Americans were doing just fine on their own at working their way towards equality, a slow but steady trend that continued for a century... and then abruptly hit a wall after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 got a bunch of bureaucracy involved, and has been backsliding ever since. Sowell's argument against it is that it is not achieving its stated goals, and is in fact accomplishing the opposite thereof.
I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but that sounds pretty rational to me!
That doesn't dispute the goal of racial equality at all, just the means to achieve it. If it is true (I don't know) that the CRA interfered with a consistent trend toward black equality, that would be an argument against it. But is that what Hanania argues?
> That doesn't dispute the goal of racial equality at all, just the means to achieve it.
That's a fair point... at first. But then 60 years went by. The thesis that the Civil Rights bureaucracy was actively making things worse for the people it was supposed to be making things better for was supported pretty strongly by the evidence as early as the 1980s. If the goal was truly racial equality, people motivated by that goal would have reassessed it and hit the brakes at some point, rather than relentlessly doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on the failing policy and building the bureaucracy ever-larger over the course of the next 40 years.
There are really only two possible explanations for what actually happened. 1) People on the Left are universally really, really stupid and literally no one influential *ever* noticed what was going on, or 2) the stated goal and the actual goal being worked towards are not the same. And explanation #1 is obviously not true.
I'd propose 3): Bureaucracies and political movements have a life of their own once started, and can persist for decades even when they are actively harmful to the thing they are supposed to be remedying. See the Baltimore public school system and the Nuclear Regulator Commission for examples.
Well said. OTOH, given ambiguous data, I am comfortable trusting the anecdotal evidence of the people the policy is impacting most directly, and black people didn't (and don't) seem to want to reverse civil right legislation. They must think it's benefiting them somehow. The one's I know tell me that it's far from a perfect policy, and they might have preferred a different approach, but it's better than nothing.
Which tells me that before one suggests that we reverse civil rights, one has to propose a better, more effective alternative that will accomplish the same goal.
There's a fundamental disagreement between the left and the right about what "equality" should ultimately mean. The right thinks that everybody plays by the same rules and get what they deserve, whereas the left thinks that everybody deserves to have more-or-less the same given the same amount of effort.
The left is currently ascendant (for various complicated reasons, the main of which is I think that fascism is more discredited than communism), so their preferred definition wins out where the elite opinion is concerned, and wokeness is ultimately downstream from there.
> The right thinks that everybody plays by the same rules and get what they deserve, whereas the left thinks that everybody deserves to have more-or-less the same given the same amount of effort.
The position you ascribe to the left is actually much closer to the conservative position. What you see in practice — actions speak louder than words! — is that the left thinks that everyone deserves to have more-or-less the same outcomes, period, and that anyone bringing up "effort" is secretly X-ist and Whateverphobic and is trying to confuse the real issue which is obviously discrimination.
Those things aren't really in conflict though. If for some reason the same amount of effort from the average member of some group is less productive than that of others, then productivity can't be maximized without discrimination. The left thinks that sacrificing productivity is worth it, the right doesn't. The average Joe isn't entirely on board with the left too yet, hence why all the obfuscatory rigmarole.
"If for some reason the same amount of effort from the average member of some group is less productive than that of others, then productivity can't be maximized without discrimination." That doesn't follow. Equal treatment will result in unequal outcomes, from which the left will wrongly infer discrimination, but there is no need for actual discrimination.
I would argue that what the Left wants doesn't exist, because "The Left" isn't a homogenous mass of voters all of whom want the same thing (much like conservative voters). But to the extent that one can over-simplify and over-generalize, most self-identified left wing or progressive voters are more likely to focus on removing the effects of prejudice and discrimination on the average outcomes of historically marginalized populations.
I mean I think to call black Americans a powerless population is like calling Iran a secular state. All of our institutions have been for decades obsessed with eliminating inequality between them and whites, there are few if any instances in human history where there’s been more of a good faith effort to uplift a group at such large expense. We basically threw out the constitution to do so. Leftists are just wrong, because they start with the premise that equality is achievable.
This is a reasonable view now, but was much less reasonable in the 1950s and 60s (when civil rights laws were originally written). Do you think the harder racism of the 60s (e.g. blatant things like bus segregation) would have gone away to the degree it did without civil rights laws? (Bearing in mind that much of this was local law in fairly un-woke areas)?
(You may reasonably say "some stuff was needed but we went too far" or "we made a bad tradeoff with nonzero benefits". I'm not sure what your argument would be though).
There could have been a bright-line distinction between anti-discrimination law applying to state and local governments, and anti-discrimination law applying to private entities, and they could have only enacted the former. Or, indeed, government discriminatory practices would have likely been struck down as violations of the 14th Amendment within a short time, without the need for a law, like school segregation was. And even if discrimination wouldn't have disappeared everywhere, people could have moved.
U know that the mainstream view is that existing institutions are obscenely and comically unfair to blacks. U know from experience that the exact opposite is true. U know that the truth doesn’t actually affect the narrative except by intensifying it. U know that obvious liars can and do prevail.
U know that those obvious liars base their legitimacy on a prior movement in which they alleged the same things they allege today.
How certain are u that ur understanding of what America was is accurate?
Now read the following article closely. Read it very closely. Don’t fill in any gaps with charitable assumptions. Do u get the impression that the people described herein are actually being oppressed?
U my friend, are nothing more than the teen, raised under Stalin who sees that things are shitty. So he rejects Stalin in favour of Lenin, and imagines that Stalin’s only error was to betray the movement or take it too far. But no, Lenin was actually a piece of shit too and actually the Tsar for all his flaws was the better guy.
That's a matter of opinion. I don't think anyone can objectively measure the extent to which US institutions have attempted to eliminate inequality. To go by the self-reported experiences of members of relatively less powerful communities like black Americans, it's more lip service than anything else. Implicit racism still seems prevalent in our culture.
I agree that contemporary America has tried to do a lot, compared to previous time periods and other regions (though Western Europe would assert themselves). And I would propose that if you offered anyone, including a member of one of these communities, to magically switch places with a randomly chosen individual from, say, 100 years ago, you would get no takers. Conditions have improved.
This does not imply that we have succeeded, or that we have done all we can, or that we should not strive to do more.
I think the main point of Hanania's book, as I read it, is that there is (roughly speaking) 1/3rd support for the actual system we have today, and 2/3rds support for what the system we have today pretends it is, and so it is a political failure that we have the system we have today, given supermajority opposition to it.
[That is, a supermajority of Americans are against explicit racial discrimination, including quotas. Then why do we have a system that uses quotas to determine presumption of guilt, while not allowing quotas as a methodology?]
Are quotas worth it? Well, that's something you should try to convince Americans of first, rather than just sneaking it into policy.
The problem with political approaches based on these poll results is that a supermajority of Americans also believes in substantial racial equality. What would happen if somebody somehow got rid of the current system of backdoor/sub rosa quotas and the predictable result ensued? I don't know, but it probably wouldn't be pretty.
- Race and sex discrimination by the government are human rights violations, that of equality before the law. Discrimination by private entities is unfortunate but not a human rights violation. But laws that make private companies discriminate (as the de facto guilt-presuming anti-discrimination laws do) are discrimination by the government.
- At a point when racism is as taboo as it is in present day America, where a large fraction of the population pretty clearly sincerely supports either color-blind liberalism or id pol progressivism, there is no risk that widespread discrimination would return in the absence of civil rights law. It's another question if there was a good reason to make the laws in the 1960s, but even if there was one, they have served their purpose and are no longer needed.
- As a libertarian, I generally prioritize freedom over equality; I oppose outlawing action A while action B is legal, if A doesn't leave anyone worse off than B, as it would punish a victimless action. If some white people are working for a company that only hires whites, that doesn't leave black people worse off than if none of them are engaging in any economic activity, which would be legal to do. It fails to benefit black people, as some alternative actions would do, but it doesn't hurt them.
- Generally, in a free economy, some companies will refrain from excluding people based on race/sex, as it's against their interests to leave cheap labor unused. If those companies outcompete more racist/sexist companies, more companies would adopt their policy, even if not all companies would stop discriminating. This would likely lead to a not too oppressive environment even without anti-discrimination law (while Jim Crow was, to a significant extent, enforced by laws).
Besides, there are of course middle grounds between the current system, and repealing all civil rights law.
One version, perhaps within the Overton window, would be to leave in place a narrow anti-discrimination law that makes it explicit that requires proof of discriminatory intent is required, statistical discrepancies or hostile speech (other than speech planning a violation of the law) can't be used as evidence, and it applies to historically disadvantaged and advantaged groups equally. One may worry that some courts may still find a way to twist it into mandating affirmative action; but if culture shifts rightward to the point where seriously curtailing civil rights law is feasible, it's perhaps less of a concern.
And even Hanania primarily advocates executive and judicial decisions as the realistically feasible ways to curtail the effects of civil rights law, each of which would leave at least basic anti-discrimination law in place.
I think this is basically what Thomas Sowell also advocates--keep laws against explicit discrimination and restrictive covenants and such, but get rid of affirmative action and disparate impact.
My observation would be that there was an improvement of racial relations from the 1960s to the 1980s (peaking with stuff like Cosby Show and Eddie Murphy movies where black people were portrayed as just, y'know, *people*) then things got slowly worse.
My theory: there was an assumption in the 1960s that if you removed all the (obvious and real) discrimination and segregation then blacks would eventually catch up with whites. At first they did, so everyone was reasonably happy, but after a single generation this process stalled, which caused renewed frustration.
> I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason
And that's a great example of why rationalists never win. This entire situation with the right is an example of what amazing things can happen if you simply use every single tool at your disposal.
The ends justify the means. If you don't understand that, you are always going to lose to people that do.
But sometimes people want to have honest discussions and think clearly about stuff, rather than work their most powerful dark arts spells on one another. This is a place where we're hopefully doing more of the honest discussion thing.
I completely agree of course. The comment you're responding to here is an observation about how the world works, not how I want it to work or how rationalist communities work.
Your comment is self-defeating - actual amoral psychopaths following "ends justify the means" reasoning don't *say* that they're doing that, they talk about how nice and principled they are. You're still being too honest!
Please explain? Are they the one's jailing people for years for a political protest and breaking 300 years of political precedent by trying to jail a presidential candidate?
I think it's more "how you'll inevitably be described by anyone who disagrees with you" than a charicature. And since people know this, they avoid letting themselves get pinned to one (even if their actual view is a reasonable version of it).
Churchill was a hardcore eugenicist and hereditarian, but definitely did not love Hitler and want to marry him. In fact he hated Hitler for perpetrating a genocide of the "most remarkable race".
I wonder what the book says about what would seem to me to be a crucial "why" aspect: the international one.
To me, it seems like the reason for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, has been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways.
Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.
The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went "Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad.
It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are. Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade, the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine.
Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.
I agree on the Cold War context, but it wasn't that "credible" to give such credit to the USSR. They claimed to be anti-imperialist because they opposed the existing western colonial powers, but they were imperialists themselves and punished minority groups under their rule for membership in said groups.
Yes, of.course - the point wasn’t what happened, the point was what it looked like. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars etc just didn’t lead to internationally spreadable photographic moments in the same way as segregation.
Katyń wasn't targeting an ethnic group. It was targeting a military elite of an occupied country. The country in question was an ethnostate, so the elites were of one particular ethnicity, but it wasn't their ethnicity they were targeted for.
This is not to deny that, behind its internationalist facade, USSR cultivated ethnic divisions and did lots of awful shit to its minorities, Poles included. It's just that Katyń in particular just isn't a good example of that, the USSR just happened to do a lot of awful shit in general.
But all of that is illegible, especially before the Internet. What's legible is "Unlike Western Imperialists, who have a 150+ year history of enslaving and exterminating people, the Soviet Comrades are normal ordinary everyday people who have overthrown their imperial overlords and are now spreading the light of the revolution everywhere."
What did the Soviet Union have as allies? The previously colonized South and Southeast Asia, the previously colonized Middle East, the previously colonized Africa. What did the US have as allies? Western Europe, and whatever puppets they could install in South America and Southeast Asia. A bunch of satellite kingdoms in the Arabian Peninsula, and Israel (but only after it lost its underdog status in 1967, when it was an underdog in the 1950s and early 1960s it was very much still a Soviet darling) in the Middle East.
Not that I believe any of this, but you have to admit that they had a pretty good case relative to the ideological and media atmosphere of the 1950s/1960s/1970s. Of course they are unoptimized for an internet connected ACX commenter in the mid to late 2020s, a Polar Bear would make a terrible Sahara animal too.
Or it could be the opposite of that, depending on how you see the causality. Did Americans decide that Soviet Union was evil *because* it was communist... or did they decide that communism was evil *because* it was the ideology of their enemy?
In a parallel reality where Soviet Union somehow magically decided to stop expanding after WW2, maybe all communist and socialist countries would be considered "weird, but our allies", kinda like Saudi Arabia in our reality.
>or did they decide that communism was evil because it was the ideology of their enemy?
Could be. I don't know how much control my rulers (writing from the usa) actually have on the press, and how much of the demonization of my rulers' current enemies is direct, top-down propaganda. There is obviously _some_ of that (and it has happened in past conflicts as well, to the point of renaming foods - remember "freedom fries" when our rulers got into a squabble with France).
>In a parallel reality where Soviet Union somehow magically decided to stop expanding after WW2, maybe all communist and socialist countries would be considered "weird, but our allies", kinda like Saudi Arabia in our reality.
Possibly, but, historically, our right wing got bent out of shape over e.g. Medicare. I'm guessing that having an example of a Communist state with gulags and show trials was helpful in pointing out to the electorate that, no, Sweden and Denmark etc. are _not_ totalitarian state, look a little further east to see what a totalitarian state looks like.
_Without_ that example, I think our right wing would have attacked moderate policies more fiercely than it did. Of course, I can't run the experiment and find out...
Saudi Arabia is a strange case. If Iran wasn't there (or were still under the Shah) and the oil wasn't there I suspect that dismembering a journalist and being the home of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers might have weighed more heavily in my rulers' alliance with them. Politics and economics make strange bedfellows... I wish I had a crystal ball to see what happens to that alliance a century from now, presumably post-oil, and when Iran's government will probably be something completely different (and possibly the Saudi government too, on that time scale)...
Well, Australia and New Zealand are the "Previously colonized" categories except they were never decolonized, and Japan and South Korea are the "Puppet states" category except they are two hell of puppet states.
If you're in the Soviet Camp, there are always perfectly legitimate facts you can point to in order to say that the alliance of the USA is the USA plus a bunch of broken remnants from WW2 and some of their former colonies. You would be perfectly right.
Many Thanks! Certainly Japan, while under occupation post-WWII, was a puppet during that period. Later on, particularly in the 1970s and then in the 1980s, much less so - especially in the role of economic competitor.
>Well, Australia and New Zealand are the "Previously colonized" categories except they were never decolonized
That's fair. As an American, while none of my ancestors were here during the colonial period, since the USA started as 13 colonies, I view colonies in a positive light, as the starting point for a nation that _did_ send men to the Moon. Of course, I can see why e.g. people who were under King Leopold II's thumb at one point, would feel differently.
"It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are. Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade, the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine."
Ah yes, imagine the horror of Sri Lankans besieging the American embassy because the Chicago Fire department no longer practices affirmative action. And I heard China built a stadium in Kenya which is a threat to America somehow.
It's easy to make some policy practiced on a global scale like this to look ridiculous by just referring to small-scale examples.
Certainly there are American public officials who have been tasked to pay attention to things like the image of America in Sri Lanka or the Chinese influence to Kenya. One might imagine that the potential global implications of the wave of African-American radicalism inspired by segregation might be evident when talking about a country with a history of fighting with a radical Marxist-Leninist group called "Tamil Tigers", a name inspired by (I believe) Black Panthers.
Repealing civil rights law wouldn't mean declaring that black people are morons, wouldn't mean there would be no more successful, rich and famous black Americans, and wouldn't mean the status and treatment of black people would return to the Jim Crow status quo (both because people have become much less racist in the meantime, and because part of Jim Crow was enforced by state law, which would remain unconstitutional).
While most developed countries and many others have anti-discrimination law, in most they are nowhere near as expansive in practical effects as the American ones, and they are not generally getting any significant criticism for that. If anything, one international aspect of the whole thing is that America is culturally exporting its craze. I guess it would get occasional criticism if it didn't have anti-discrimination law at all (sort of like what it gets for not having hate speech law), but having a narrow anti-discrimination law that doesn't de facto mandate affirmative action, like most countries do, wouldn't even have as much effect.
Also, the more anti-racist America is becoming, the more people are convinced that it's full of systemic racism, because ever slighter incidents of (alleged) racism are getting ever more attention, and because one of the tenets of anti-racism is that racism is a pervasive problem. Foreigners also hear about those accusations, and don't know how little they have to do with reality. There were African countries calling the US hypocritical for calling out their human rights violations, while the Floyd protests supposedly "showed" that America had serious human rights issues in its treatment of black people. If anything, if civil rights laws were repealed, and culture shifted to the right to the point where people, for instance, don't assume racism whenever a cop kills a black person, America would be perceived as less racist.
And yes, government-incentivized racial discrimination is a human rights violation. Better foreign relations cannot justify it if it's against whites, any more than it would justify discrimination against blacks in a world where that were the norm.
>Repealing civil rights law wouldn't mean declaring that black people are morons, wouldn't mean there would be no more successful, rich and famous black Americans, and wouldn't mean the status and treatment of black people would return to the Jim Crow status quo (both because people have become much less racist in the meantime, and because part of Jim Crow was enforced by state law, which would remain unconstitutional).
A number of the promoters of this repeal implicitly or explicitly believe that black people would, whether for cultural or genetic reasons, be destined to lose status after this repeal (and white people to gain it), and explicitly advance this repeal precisely to give the whites a better position in the great game of society. Whether this reflects the motivation of a majority or not, those voices would certainly be amplified by anti-American movements looking to gain power in their own countries.
>While most developed countries and many others have anti-discrimination law, in most they are nowhere near as expansive in practical effects as the American ones, and they are not generally getting any significant criticism for that. If anything, one international aspect of the whole thing is that America is culturally exporting its craze.
America is the global hegemon and as such obviously shoulders the burden of mantaining the West in toto in a different way from many other countries. Generally speaking, more power other countries (like UK) have in the Western system, the more pressure they feel to maintain a good global image, as well.
>While most developed countries and many others have anti-discrimination law, in most they are nowhere near as expansive in practical effects as the American ones, and they are not generally getting any significant criticism for that. If anything, one international aspect of the whole thing is that America is culturally exporting its craze.
But is there concrete evidence that America would be actually considered, globally speaking, *more* racist (systematically or otherwise) than in the 1960s?
>And yes, government-incentivized racial discrimination is a human rights violation.
The point of this post, I believe, was a discussion of *why* these policies exist, why are they advanced by the Powers that Be, and this "why" is not particularly dependent on what the moral status of such measures is.
Black people would be somewhat even more underrepresented in universities and prestigious jobs. But that's much harder to point fingers at than the legal discrimination and segregation of Jim Crow, and not that much easier than the present day, somewhat lesser underrepresentation.
One interesting thing is that this is an anti-woke book whose main thesis will be heartily agreed to by the woke. "Of course wokism has its origins in the Civil Rights movement, duh", they will say.
"I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here."
Hanania believes it should be legal (and perhaps normal) for superiors to extort sex from their subordinates; I believe he's been rather open about this (but even if not, I think it's clearly implied).
Obviously, all this can be justified from certain libertarian POVs, but my personal read of Hanania is that he finds the ability to extort sex from underlings actively desirable, something that a successful man like the one he dreams of being should be entitled to, and not just a regrettable concession to the existence of free association.
You have a better memory than me. In that section he talks about "an employer mistreating you", which is does not sound actively desirable, then adds that he doesn't "believe allowing freedom of association would lead to women prostituting themselves as the norm" and justifies opposition to rules against it because "It's difficult to imagine a ban on quid pro quo sexual harassment that did not run into gray areas". You could be right about what he's actually thinking, but he's making a more libertarian than Nietzchean argument there.
That said, yes, I am substantially reading between the lines of how he has commented on many issues over the years. I don't for one moment think that he actually sees women prostituting themselves in such a manner as a bad thing, at least as long as he can imagine himself the beneficiary.
I loved this review. My contributions would be that:
>Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result.
This DEFINITELY happens with the parts of the federal bureaucracy that I am involved with. I have daily contact with federal bureaucrats, and the recent hires/promotions are wildly more "diverse" (out of all proportion with the population honestly), and of very poor quality. So you have a lot of 55-65 year old white male civil servants of very high ability and intelligence, being replaced by pretty low capacity 30-40 year old minority women of startlingly poor intelligence and ability. On paper they have similar credentials, but they are not similar caliber people. In general obviously, there are exceptions in both cases. The preference HR policies clearly have *something* to do with it.
In the off chance some skilled white or Asian man finds his way into the civil service, you often find them leaving to go make more money as a consultant because their career is going nowhere and they are getting passed over for promotion by their idiot admin with the right diversity characteristics (I am only half exaggerating). So now you have this ineffectual federal staff who does little work, and is surrounded by a cloud of not very diverse consultants who are needed to get things done (due to procurement rules/preferences typically the owners of the consulting firms are also fairly diverse, but the consultants/SMEs themselves less so...after all somebody needs to know what they are doing).
And on the "disparate enforcement" front I would have the following nonsense to report.
One rule that is very common with federal awards is a rule requiring that all hiring on construction projects must *attempt* to first hire low income and disadvantaged people. I won't get too into the exact details, but we will leave it at that.
You need to have a plan and a policy and records for how you attempted to achieve this goal and reach out to these groups in your hiring, even if you were unsuccessful.
You might ask what about if I am hiring a lawyer or an engineer or an architect? Do I really want to hire a "low-income" engineer? YES! It includes all hiring. But wait I don't want to mess up my RFQ for a contract lawyer with a bunch of nonsense attempting to target "low-income lawyers"? Too bad!
And as far as "low-income construction workers" aren't we also supposed to pay prevailing wage rates (basically union rates), if we are paying that much anyway, we aren't ever going to find the low-income workers the most qualified. Well you have to at least try! OK how hard do we have to try? Who knows?!?!?"
What is the response to this nonsense that is basically not implementable?
Well there is little to no enforcement from the bureaucrats and almost no one takes the rules seriously, until the bureaucrats are mad at someone and want to nail them and then suddenly they act like of course everyone is expected to follow this rule that 98% of people aren't following.
A friend of mine in construction attended a "women owned business" social meetup. Not a single woman attended. All the businesses were 51% owned by the wife.
Consulting where governments (federal/state/local) are the main customers. (Well and the main main customers are other consulting firms, I subcontract as an SME a ton).
I've had the same experience in federal workplaces with newer hires showing shockingly low levels of intelligence and skill. Unlike what some other commenters said about people either "producing, or they're out", typically these people are rarely let go unless they do something egregious and will instead coast by for the entirety of their careers doing next to nothing. A handful of highly productive employees and contractors carry the lion's share of the workload. In my work area, I estimate that 10% of the people do at least 80% of the total work and 100% of anything even remotely complex.
Although thinking about it more, we do have explicit quotas (called targets) and that didn't save us from anything. Although so much of our culture is taken from America, maybe there was no escaping it
It seems to me that the fact that HR departments are one of the two primary bastions of wokeness in American society lends some degree of credibility to the title argument.
I haven't read the book and am no scholar of Title IX, but I'm a researcher at a university and accordingly was required to take a (surprisingly informative) course on Title IX. While the legal concepts underlying the evolution of Title IX law are impressive, they demonstrate a certain mad genius that has led to Title IX extending to domains very very far removed from women's sports.
This book is fine on CR law sucking, but we all know Moldbug already explained the origins of woke more than a decade ago in a very readable and thoughtful 3.5 million word series of blog posts, lol.
I have read the same news stories as Hanania, but it is all so contrary to my professional experience that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. I've been working in business for 35 years have never, even once, seen an unqualified minority or female worker get hired or promoted. In my field (engineering consulting) you either produce, or you're out. My current company talks a really woke game and we have to take sensitivity training but the real story is that you had better work hard on profitable projects, or else. Plus, most of my clients are government agencies, and so far as I can tell it's the same with them. They have high standards, and people who don't meet them don't last long and certainly don't get promoted; I've never worked with a minority or female project manager or contracting officer who wasn't professional and hard-working. So far as I can tell, the wokeness in the air is just blaph and nobody pays it any real mind. Likewise, all of my employers have had bans on dating fellow employees, but I've witnessed three marriages among people who were both working for me.
On another note, my brother once went to golf camp and everybody else there said they had to learn to play golf because it was the only way to get ahead in their companies. In this as in all other ways, I can't see how corporate life has changed much at all (except, thank the Lord we don't have to wear jackets and ties any more).
And where was this? My guess is that Hanania is right about this stuff being common, but wrong about it being effectively enforced at a national level.
I have read the same news stories as Hanania, but it is all so contrary to my professional experience that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. I've been working in business for 35 years have never, even once, seen an unqualified minority or female worker get hired or promoted. In my field (engineering consulting) you either produce, or you're out. My current company talks a really woke game and we have to take sensitivity training but the real story is that you had better work hard on profitable projects, or else. Plus, most of my clients are government agencies, and so far as I can tell it's the same with them. They have high standards, and people who don't meet them don't last long and certainly don't get promoted; I've never worked with a minority or female project manager or contracting officer who wasn't professional and hard-working. So far as I can tell, the wokeness in the air is just blaph and nobody pays it any real mind. Likewise, all of my employers have had bans on dating fellow employees, but I've witnessed three marriages among people who were both working for me.
On another note, my brother once went to golf camp and everybody else there said they had to learn to play golf because it was the only way to get ahead in their companies. In this as in all other ways, I can't see how corporate life has changed much at all (except, thank the Lord we don't have to wear jackets and ties any more).
An interesting read on anti-Civil Rights (or at least, anti-Title VII), is Richard Epstein's:
Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws
I read it about 30 years ago, so I'm not 100% sure how well it holds up, but I recall it being a useful look at the topic, with a ton of citations to case law and other papers, if that is of interest to people.
My honest opinion is we'd be much better off with straightforward quotas, alongside predictably scaling taxes based on how far you deviate from the desired proportions. This could be adjusted on some regular cadence with new targets released enough in advance that companies could try and act on them.
What I think would be really good about this would be that it would set the full might of capitalism to the task of recruiting from disadvantaged groups. You wouldn't have to hide what you're doing, you could just advertise, "HEY! We need to hire 20 women. Put your hat in the ring." And then the company could just honestly assess applicants and take the best they can get from each category. If there are pipeline issues, companies in the industry would have strong incentives to spend money on improving the pipeline. Or if companies can just test applicants the normal way, they could use testing to find candidates who are more qualified than they seem based on legible credentials. And this could all be done without sacrificing the needs of communities that have legitimately been treated poorly through US history.
That might give some improvement, but it still wouldn't do away with the core problem of diversity hiring. If a company said "we need to hire 20 women, put your hat in the ring," then from that point on, any woman who worked there would be under a shroud of illegitimacy; people would have a good reason to suspect, *whether or not it was actually true,* that she was unqualified and only got hired because she was a woman.
My hope is that it would feel different if the hiring is still clearly competitive. Like she wouldn't be hired because she's a woman, she'd be hired because she's the best woman who applied.
But yeah at the end of the day, it would have some of this effect. That just seems far less corrosive to me than having to secretly pretend that's not what's going on.
I don't think the pre-Civil Rights Law corporate workplace was a bastion of chumminess and meritocracy either. And it's hilarious to look at the mid-20th century corporate culture in the US and think, "There was a bastion of innovativeness!" Those were the folks who almost ran the US auto companies into the ground, until they got saved by "voluntary quotas" imposed on foreign competitors.
I understand that the remark I'm about to make does not constitute an argument against Hanania on wokeness. It's cheap ad hominem. But yikes! The guy deserves it.
In a tweet he made last year (https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1711179945052098742) he made the claim: "Pretty sure if you gave me a year I could write Shakespeare quality work. Like if someone hadn't read all of Shakespeare and you randomly gave them me or him, on average they couldn't tell the difference." I suppose we should all feel privileged to know someone who is only a year from greatness.
That, just by itself, causes me to add an extra layer of doubt onto everything that he suggests, unless he explicitly says that it's someone else's idea.
I think any top 10% percentile motivated writer could do this with a few caveats. Like, they could almost certainly produce sonnets that would fool people. Plays would be harder (because you need a lot of period appropriate knowledge about the material reality of Shakespeare's world and not just the language to be able to write convincing narratives).
I'm pretty good at poetry. I bet if I spent an entire year practicing, reading, and studying Shakespearean and other period poetry, at the end of it I could produce some sonnets that non experts (and especially randos) would have basically 50/50 odds at guessing are Shakespeare or not.
It's important to remember that, forasmuch as we consider Shakespeare elite today, his contemporaries certainly did not! He mostly produced lowbrow plays to entertain the masses, largely by putting new twists on old, familiar stories. (Taking the old Danish legend of Amleth, about murder and revenge, and mixing a ghost story into it; adding quirky side-characters into The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet; rewriting the perfectly legitimate king Mac Bethad as a usurper and tyrant under the influence of dark powers, and so on.) He's remembered today, not because his works were particularly original or high-quality, but because they were *entertaining.* He wrote to entertain the masses, and he succeeded!
Hot take: "the modern-day Shakespeare," then, would be the guy who took the Hero's Journey — the oldest, most well-worn narrative in the history of storytelling — and mixed in elements from sword-and-sorcery pulp fiction, samurai films, and WWII dramas, set the whole thing in space, and managed to bedazzle the whole world into thinking he had come up with something wildly original.
I'd say the entire dichotomy of highbrow/lowbrow is kind of nonsense, but that's getting way off into a tangent. My basic point was more that the Romantic idea of an artistic "genius" is crap. Like any other craft, there is a just a sliding spectrum of talent and the thing that makes somebody a top 1% percentile writer overlaps with things that make people talented generally (intelligence, perseverance, obsessive focus, hard work, etc.). There are many thousands (probably millions) of people alive today capable of writing Shakespeare level poetry no matter what skill level he actually was.
It seems like that gets answered in your own original comment:
"Like if someone hadn't read all of Shakespeare and you randomly gave them me or him, on average they couldn't tell the difference."
This seems about like the same test I was proposing. He's basically throwing flack at the entire idea of a singular artistic genius whose genius comes down to something like "he possesses a mystical affinity for words which is why everybody was enraptured by him, and yet only an elect few, themselves with magical word affinity, can identify it." Artistic genius as much as it exists looks more like Taylor Swift and is some mixture of craft talent, personal charisma, good marketing, luck, timeliness and a bunch of other factors. Hardly anybody could become the full package deal of what Shakespeare was today (just like most people can't be Taylor Swift), but many people could write Shakespeare level poetry. There are many people who could write functionally interchangeable Taylor Swift type song lyrics.
*Edit* A silly example that kind of drives the point home. Think about how many high quality Elvis impersonators there are.
I didn't say I was just going to put in a few thous and thees though. I said I'd read and practice for a year and I'm specifically saying I think I could fool educated non-experts. Furthermore, the reason I couldn't fool experts isn't because Shakespeare has some magical skill I lack but because he has idiosyncrasies I lack that an expert is going to be super plugged into. Just like I'm going to be much more likely to notice something off about an evil doppelganger of my sister than her co-worker is who is in turn more likely to notice than an acquaintance from church who is more likely to notice than a rando.
Beyond that, if Shakespeare's quality is something only highly educated people can recognize the whole argument for his greatness falls apart. The argument for his greatness is that he has a singular way with words that people in his day and down through all the ages since have recognized. Not just some cabal of experts. People in general. Nobody tries to get 10th grade public school students to examine and appreciate the singularity of the equation for relativity. They just get told Einstein was brilliant. But they *do* have to read Romeo and Juliet, supposedly because there is something timeless and singular and beautiful about it that they can understand without specialized training.
And beyond even this, it's downright baffling to me how worked up people get when you won't accept that Shakespeare was some like von Neumann of writing or just won't accept that there even is such a thing as a von Neumann of writing. (If there was it would probably be something more like being a brilliant writer in multiple languages. Or else being a brilliant artist in wildly different media - like being a great painter, writer, & singer). I don't dispute he was some top 10% percentile writer. Probably even a top 98% or 99% percentile writer. He clearly also possessed other qualities that made him good at *celebrity* a la Taylor Swift like I already said, which makes him more singular. But that doesn't mean any number of bang up writers today aren't his equal in craft. And many of like fairly "meh" quality (Rowling, Stephen King, et al) absolutely match or exceed him in celebrity.
He's evading the issue and so are you. You don't have to believe in the magical mystical affinity crap to believe that Shakespeare likely was a good as it gets, and considerably better than most. One doesn't have to go overboard into bardolotry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardolatry) to maintain that Shakespeare was of the highest quality.
Your assertion that "many people could write Shakespeare level poetry" is empty assertion. I'm quite willing to believe that there have been and are other poets of that caliber. But that "any top 10% percentile motivated writer" could do it. I want proof.
I think judging quality in these matters is very difficult. Who's the fastest sprinter? We can measure that. Who's the best boxer? That's trickier. If we're talking about living boxers in fighting shape, they can fight. But was Muhammad Ali better than Sugar Ray Robinson better than Mike Tyson, that's much trickier. Two different weight classes, three different eras.
Judging writers is much more difficult. Hanania's claim isn't so much wrong as it is meaningless. The same with your claim about the top 10%.
If there's no such thing as a "top 10% percentile" writer in craft skill because it's impossible to measure writing quality, then it's also completely impossible to say Shakespeare is the highest quality. All you can say is that he was a really popular writer in his day who got enshrined on a pedestal and maintained relevance because of said pedestal long after his death. Rather like Homer or Mark Twain.
But I will add that the mere existence of Shakespeare apocrypha and/or fraud accusations shows that there is nothing so immediately singular and identifiable about his flavor or quality that even experts who study him their whole life 100% agree.
I never said he wasn't a fantastic writer. I haven't actually read enough Shakespeare to make any kind of personal assessment about him. I liked Julius Caesar in high school. That's about what I've got. Even going with a very exclusive definition of "fantastic" I said fantastic writers are like 1 in a million rare and not 1 out of every human who ever lived rare or even 1 out of every age rare. And I think the "fantastic writer" threshold is actually way lower than that. I base this on having read many other writers who are billed as mystically fantastic and among the best who ever lived (Mark Twain, William Blake, Charles Dickens, etc.) These people are extremely good writers. I can name some decidedly less known people (say, Ursula K Le guin off the top of my head) who I'd absolutely place in their caliber. At any given moment, there are *many* people in this league alive.
I obviously can't prove it. If there was an eccentric bajillionaire who would fund my finances for a year at wage parity, I'd be willing to try it.
It's also a bit strange how few comments (or the article itself) are mentioning Hanania's pretty famous reveal as a former hardcore white supremecist online troll. That doesn't feel like an ad hominem for someone now advocating for the dismantling of American civil rights law.
Yeah, this is bizarre. Dude is very obviously intellectually dishonest, and people are just choosing not to notice. There isn't even any solid reason to believe that he's stopped being a hardcore white supremacist online troll under another name; it's not like his public beliefs have changed meaningfully.
You shouldn't trust anything Hanania says, because his real agenda is spectacularly vile and stupid. Many of the things he says are just camouflage for, or deceitful attempts to implement, that agenda.
> Many of the things he says are just camouflage for, or deceitful attempts to implement, that agenda.
...And it is looking increasingly likely that those attempts will be successful. You don't win a culture war through rational debate. You win by taking power by any means necessary and eliminating the opposition.
Because, dipshits that we are, we actually believe the bullshit we spout about everyone being given an opportunity, and arguments taken on their merits.
I share your frustration, but there's no alternative to it. In order to protect all those things that Hanania wants to dismantle, we have to give him the same level of courtesy as anyone. Even though there's plenty of evidence that he doesn't deserve it.
The circa-2010 woke turn feels like it was a convergence of factors, including but not limited to millenials starting coming into positions of influence and the rise of Tumblr. But I think Hanania would say that the conditions for millenials to get a political-correctness focused education and for Tumblr to have become the hotbed of social justice thought that it eventually became are mostly downstream of civil rights law.
I think a big hinge point for this argument is the role of academia. Did academia start the wokeness (probably due to cultural residue of the 1960s) or was it just a bit player, becoming woker because that was what the job market (and therefore students) demanded? I think both mechanisms exist and reinforce each other.
I am a big proponent of academia being the "reservoir" for this stuff, and particularly the "studies" departments. You had a few departments at most schools non-stop churning out "woke" people for decades. Women's studies, AA studies, native studies, sometimes sociology or criminology.
Even in the late 90s these departments were just overflowing with this nonsense and the other departments thought it was just as silly then as it is now. But I think there was this assumption it would sort of stay in its ghettos, or maybe slowly wither and die because its ideas were bad. Instead it used its rhetorical power to slowly conquer the school admins and other departments.
Then I think that social media sort of worked as an accelerant to spread the ideology/religion (it really is a surrogate religion) like wildfire especially among the young (who are always primed to find things wrong with the world and injustice).
I think one of the biggest disservices we do young people is not teaching them to do basic research on "new" ideas. When you think you've discovered something new and mindblowing, do some quick checks to see if it's been thought of before and what its history is.
Weirdly, this is a _good_ use case for large language models. Even though they hallucinate and get facts wrong, if one just wants to find synonyms (or, more to the point, equivalent _phrases_, which a thesaurus can't give you), an LLM can help. Of course, then one needs to use a real search engine to find real references.
Meh I think that is tied to the rhetorical power of redefining words like "violence" and "harm" and "racism".
When you figure out the trick of radically expanding the definitions of "harassment" or "racism" and having academic articles you can point to to back you up, you then get to call people at work racists with a straight face and workplaces have to take it seriously.
Another favorite is redefining stress as "trauma." I've even heard trained, professional psychologists commit that egregious abuse of our language, and it's honestly a little bit scary, because it means they're being formally taught that in school, which is the precise opposite of the antifragility model they should be learning!
"The Origins Of . . . Inequality" section has a glaring (and repugnant) omission.
Black people are poor, and poverty more or less predicts rates of everything else.
They aren't poor because they are stupid. They aren't poor because of their culture. They aren't poor because of racists. They are poor because their parents were poor, and poverty takes generations to escape.
If you care about black people (if you care about humans generally) then you should care about poverty.
Editted to add:
I am not talking about it being hard to escape temporary set backs. If you took a well raised rich person, someone educated and provided with excellent examples of how to sensibly navigate life, and wiped their savings then many of them might quickly recover.
The point is that if you grow up in a generationally poor household you likely aren't provided such role models, and you are likely exposed to significantly higher stress during key developmental milestones. You aren't in an environment that nurturs or encourages the right behaviour. This dynamic becomes a generational issue, as you then likely pass on similar problems onto your children.
What is this claim you're arguing against, that the success sequence can take someone from poverty to "just above the poverty line"? You're refuting a claim that, as far as I can tell, was never made, and it appears to be predicated on the notion that there are three basically adjacent categories: poverty, "just above the poverty line," and "generational wealth," which is far out of reach even though there's apparently nothing in between it and "just above the poverty line."
To put it simply, nothing you just said makes any sense. Mind clarifying a bit?
>I’m still never going to catch up to someone who inherited millions of dollars or a family home or business and is just collecting the compound returns on that.
Sure, and neither will I, but that is a tiny fraction of the white population.
>will always be way poorer than white people with generational wealth
Its funny I was born poor in housing projects and made it out pretty easily, as did almost all my friends who actually attempted to do a half decent job at school.
The ones who fucked around with drugs/drinking or were shitheads did not. There were a few exceptions, but I bet you could have 80% predicted who would "make it out" at age 12, and probably 90% at age 16.
1) Take school seriously.
2) Don't get anyone pregnant until you have a stable income and a marriage.
You can always find an exceptional individual, but that doesn't necessarily make a difference on the statistical level.
Consider an alternative hypothesis, where people are on some kind of bell curve. The ones in the middle (the majority) end up about as rich or as poor as their parents were. The outliers on one side end up much richer, and the outliers on the other side end up much poorer (and if it is impossible to end up much poorer, they simply end up dead before they can reproduce).
If this reflects the reality (maybe it does, maybe it does not), you could always find a smart kid from a poor family who says "I just followed the common sense, duh" after ending up middle-class. But the thing is, most people from poor families do not end up there. On the other hand, a similarly smart kid from a rich family would end up with a fortune instead of mere middle class. The time and effort one spends reinventing the middle class lifestyle on their own, someone else can spend to invent something even better.
It would be easy to verify this by looking at all of the poor people who immigrated to America and seeing if they are still universally poor generations later.
I think there has to be something more going on than just "it's hard to come up out of poverty." It seems like other racial groups have arrived generally very poor and then quickly risen. Though I do think it makes a huge difference that most families arriving from other racial groups are self-selecting.
This runs into the problem of non-poor black performance. In fact, non-poor blacks are the primary beneficiaries of Affirmative Action on campus, and then as a result in corporate hiring. Harvard et al are making aesthetic choices about how they want the graduation photo to look like, not actually trying to achieve any sort of real diversity.
OK, the quadrilemma Scott poses here -- I have a memory of some other writer posting basically a very similar quadrilemma recently, just framed a bit differently. It was... I forget, Matt Yglesias? Noah Smith? Josh Barro? Someone from like that cluster of political writers, pretty sure. Was it on Substack or on Twitter? Gah, I wish I'd saved the link. Just I think it would be amusing to compare the two and how they delineate and frame the options.
I think everyone quoting Havel and similar second-world dissidents (slash elite aspirants and subsequent regime change winners) would do well to remember they were operating on a very grass-greener-on-the-other-side mentality (and then, as the new elites, on a "works for me" mentality).
What Havel describes is not "communism", it's just how hierarchical relations work, always did. For us common folk, basically nothing changed. (Except that modern capitalism destroyed industry, and with it organized labor, and severed social ties, so it's much harder to organize and resist, both actively and passively. The more alienated from fellow humans you are, the bigger pressure for you to conform and never stand out.)
Hanania, in particular, would do well to remember that the same is true for the times past that he glorifies (or seems to, per Scott's description, I've not read much of Hanania himself, admittedly). Sure, mores changed. (And I'd assume he liked the old ones more.) Sure, the intra-elite competition got worse, and the entire elite class more parasitical.
Still, you don't need idealistic explanations where materialist ones perfectly suffice. For real origin of wokeness, consult Turchin and his theses on elite overproduction. Everything past that - all their slogans, rallying flags - is just window dressing, a distraction from what's fairly regular and universal middle class norms of conformity.
The thing I enjoy about Hanania is his uncomprimising self-awareness.
Other conservatives try to claim that Civil Rights movement was fine and good and it's this modern wokeness thing that is a problem and a perversion of the civil right and MLK himself would be ashamed and so on. Hanania refuses to delude himself like this. He is very explicit: yes, wokeness is the product of civil rights and therefore civil rights protections have to be repelled.
He is ready to actually follow his conculisons of the cliff. Why yes, he does care about pronouns more than genocide. He refuses to hide this from himself and engage in regular double-think. In this way he is such a breath of fresh air among conservatives.
What (based on your review) Hanania 'should' be angry about is not woke culture but rather the fact that lawyers have captured every part of Americas decision making. The US has the 2nd highest number of Lawyers per capita in the world. I recommend reading The Captured Economy if interested.
Twitter used to ban and censor prominent right wing voices often. It led to a left wing culture on the platform. Then twitter started to ban and censor right wing voices infrequently. The culture moved right. Civil rights law was acting in a similar way for the broad culture. Take out a couple leaders, most others fall in line voluntarily, and the few remaining dissenters are easy to round up. But, none of it works if you don't have a cudgel, as people prefer truth ceteris paribus.
For another example. The CDC and other government bodies shilled the COVID vaccines for people with prior history of the disease. We got a tiny minority of vocal dissenters. Most experts either went along or stayed quiet. This created a consensus so strong, it is still taboo to discuss openly.
"The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen."
"Princeton University’s Asian American Students Association seeks to empower undergraduates with greater awareness of AAPI political, social, and cultural issues on campus through our speaker series, social events, open discussions, and alumni networking." https://aasa.princeton.edu/
"You had to act enthusiastic about the communism,"
The NLRB has had to take repeated measures to insist that employees in American workplaces can't be compelled to occupy a particular emotional state while at work. So I would say this is perhaps not a blow against communism specifically.
Religions also demand emotional rituals, with the consequence that undercover atheists have to emotionally disconnect and contort themselves into pretending that they're enthusiastic about the rituals.
Spoke to an Spanish major about a paragraph I found interesting, this one:
> Hanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway - the much-remarked upon rise in Hispanic white supremacists seems like a weird yet promising sign here.
I think in a book that's being critical of civil right's laws as an institution should point out that the history of this is a little more nuanced when you remember that we never have had a true neutral point in terms of civil rights. Her response:
"In 1954, Hernández v Texas altered the classification of Mexican-Americans in order to give them protection against discrimination under the 14th amendment. As the population of Mexican-Americans grew, the United States classified them as white. However, when they brought forward their concerns regarding racist and discriminatory practices, the government ignored their claims since they were white and therefore not protected under the 14th amendment like black americans. As a result, MexicanAmericans made the argument that they were a class apart from white Americans. Many Mexican Americans feared that arguing for a change in classification would result in the mistreatment equal to what African Americans were experiencing at the time. The “class apart” argument was formed to demonstrate that while they were classified as white they were still treated as “others” by white society. Stating that Mexican-American activists demanded to be classified as “white” ignores the complex history of racial classification in the United States and the subsequent challenges faced by Mexican-Americans in their fight against racial discrimination."
I think the original paragraph definitely hides the fact that white / non-white was a pretty bad binary to be on one side of socially, but you needed to be on the other side of it for legal protections to apply.
If you can link the civil rights movement and laws to the critical woke academic crowd, you have the link. That crowd's ideas were expanded and implemented in the Obama administration through disparate impact, especially in education and law enforcement. With the federal government peddling this it quickly worked it's way through the media, HR departments, and ultimately the family rooms of previously rational Americans.
I don't have the link off the top of my head but I imagine there is something there.
I’d like to correct a big misunderstanding (source: worked at the EEOC for a number of years):
Scott says: “(here “the applicant pool” is an abstraction, often but not always the same as the general population, which is poorly defined and which bureaucracies can interpret however they want. It’s definitely not the same thing as the actual set of qualified applicants to the business!)”
This is simply not true. Companies are required to track and maintain records of candidates. When the EEOC considers a hiring discrimination case, they obtain this data and can use it to see if there is a statistically significant difference in hiring rates between applicants who are in the protected class and applicants outside the protected class. Ideally, the expert the EEOC uses can account for job-related characteristics of applicants (previous experience) and the characteristics of the job applied to.
(This is part of why there should not be hard quotas, job-relevant characteristics are sometimes correlated with protected class-status.)
If the company does not have quality applicant records, the EEOC needs some benchmark to compare the share of protected class members to. Usually, this is the share of the protected class within the geographic vicinity of the firms locations who work in the firm’s specific industry. This is obviously imperfect, but here are a couple of relevant points:
(1) In almost all the cases I was involved with, we heard directly from former employees or often HR personal from the company about specific issues, and there was substantive anecdotal evidence that discrimination of some form was happening. Usually, this anecdotal evidence is pretty serious, and I think it’s reasonable that this shifts your priors. If there are very large differences between the share of workers in the census and at the firm in the protected class, it seems reasonable to say the company should be able to explain this.
(2) The company really should be keeping track of its applicants! If they aren’t, or they don’t give the data they have (illegal) the EEOC has to do something.
(3) The shortfalls I saw were almost always pretty large. We aren’t in a situation where, oh, the Census shows 30% of men are servers, but in your restaurant its only 27%! It was more like: the Census shows 30% of men are servers, you have 3 male servers across all of your 20 locations. The court uses the same cut-off for statistical significance on proportions tests as most research papers (.05 p-value) anyway.
Are there reasonable criticisms of these methods? Of course. But we had to try to reach the truth the best way we could, or at least to do a thorough job of analyzing the data and then let the judge/jury decide from there (Though most cases ended with mediation).
The issues with using disparate impact are mitigated by the fact that the disparate impact measure has to be job-related. It would be inappropriate to have a test for whether a person could lift 50 .lb boxes for a computer engineer role, but you probably should have a pre-employment test for that if the job is a construction worker. Yes there are issues with this measure, and yes it comes down to argument and precedent, but it’s probably better to use this imperfect method than allow firms who want to discriminate an easy get out of jail free card with spurious requirements.
There are always going to be tradeoffs in the way you set rules, (I personally don’t know how I feel about background checks, its seems reasonable for employers to screen on this, but then again, people deserve second chances), but I think this idea of the EEOC as incompetent/SJW crusaders just does not match my experience at all. It’s easy to make caricatures when you only focus on the extreme downsides of any tradeoff.
“but it’s probably better to use this imperfect method than allow firms who want to discriminate an easy get out of jail free card with spurious requirements”
Do you have an alternative suggestion of what to do? So let's say we have some plausible anecdotal evidence of discrimination or there is a big discrepancy between the share of some protected class at the firm and the share at other firms in the same industry/location.
Competitive markets take care of heavy discrimination because firms are punished with high labor costs. For discrimination whose costs are smaller than a firm’s current competitive “moat” we simply accept that the costs of fixing it are not worth it.
We do this for all sorts of problems. With enough authoritarian power I could ensure that nobody in the US was obese, for example. But nobody thinks it’s worth it to send troops into everyone’s house weekly for weigh-ins and pantry audits.
We’ve all just come to reflexively assume that even low-level discrimination is worse than nuclear holocaust because anyone born in the last 50 years has been raised with that message.
"The court uses the same cut-off for statistical significance on proportions tests as most research papers (.05 p-value) anyway."
That's actually pretty bad. If you were to look at an employee group across 10 different protected classes, you would have a 40% chance of at least one false positive.
First, some of the examples of how everything is disparate impact actually seem objectionable things which should not be happening. For example, complaining about using which college you attended for screening quality because they discriminate against Asians sounds crazy until you realize this is just a less extreme version of complaining about using college screening back when colleges and universities were racially segregated and whites went to the better universities. Admittedly, this is less persuasive if college and university isn’t just good for signaling, and they actually teach valuable job related skills, such that white graduates genuinely make better recruits. You could still argue that having more blacks recruited, even at the cost of quality would be better from a welfare maximizing standpoint because it would break the racial cartel and the vicious cycle of blacks not getting good jobs and hence remaining poor and hence having fewer opportunities, which would be better in the long run, but these are speculative arguments with empirical premises which might reasonably be doubted by a skeptic. Obviously, currant universities discriminating against Asians isn’t quite as bad as racial segregation, and most alternatives to university screening would involve a far greater expenditure of resources and effort, so one might well conclude that university screening is still socially optimal, and this is only one example among many, but the point is that plenty of Richard’s parade of absurdities aren’t all that absurd on closer reflection. I don’t have the time to do this for more of the examples, but I hope this illustrates what I am gesturing at.
I am less persuaded on the harm of civil rights law and affirmative action. Most of the evidence against it in the book, judging from Scot’s review, is anecdotal, and I’m always suspicious of those, because it’s too easy to chary pick an unrepresentative sample, especially for something on this scale, as any policy affecting the hole of the US will have at least thousands of false positives, no matter how good of a policy it is, thanks to sheer scale. It needn’t be deliberate, Richard hangs around other conservatives, and circulating horror stories of problems caused by policies you don’t like is something ideological communities of humans always do, so he is likely to be exposed to a non-representative sample. Admittedly, as a liberal, I might be biased against Richard’s arguments, and in my country disparate impact is usually employed to argue that e.g property qualifications for voting or prohibiting consensual same sex intercourse is unconstitutional, so I could overestimate its benefits in the American context, so take that into account when reading me.
My understanding of Duke power was that it created a rebutable presumption if there are fewer minorities (as a proportion) selected than are in the applicant pool. So if there is some perfectly good reason why you expect fewer minorities would be qualified, such as them having fewer opportunities, you can explain it to the judge or jury. The trouble in Duke power was that the justices weren’t persuaded that there was a reasonable relationship between performance on the test and job performance, and other tests have been upheld since because they bore a reasonable relationship to job performance. My steelman of a conservative would argue that this basically results in you only being able to get away with having fewer minorities if the judge/jury, who are not experts in your market, think what you are doing is a good idea. I would contend that the judges/jury are not likely to be biased in any particular direction, as half the population is conservative, and like half the judges in America are conservative. Also they are not idiots and know they aren’t experts, and will do obvious things like listen to experts and defer to common industrial practice. Richard appears to dislike deferring to common industrial practice in a market, but I fundamentally do not expect a well functioning competitive market to settle on crazy common practices that are costing them lots of prophets. To be clear, I am not denying that there will be some loss of value, rather, I am arguing there will not be a substantial cost in terms of economic value to the policy. Also, as Scot mentioned, if it really is costly for you, you can always lawyer up like Wallstreet. Like how a carbon tax won’t stop any use of carbon if it creates enough prophets. I don’t worry too much about rumors of what the government is doing because there will be at least hundreds of people who know about any important governmental action, and because when millions of dollars depend on finding something out, and the information is not that hard to find out, the true answer tends to be found out in short order. My main disagreement with my steelman of a conservative is that I consider having fewer minorities than in the applicant pool to be a non-insignificant amount of evidence of discrimination, where as he doesn’t, do to thinking racism is largely a solved problem, and believing in race realism more than me.
Regarding affirmative action, this is my thinking regarding it. We think that the government should stop people from discriminating on the basis of race, but not other factors like age or height, because statistical discrimination on the basis of a proxy will often be efficient, because it saves the administrative cost of deciding each case on its individual merits, and we expect firms, universities and government agencies to know their needs better than the legislature. What makes race different? Statistical discrimination on the basis of race has some desirable properties from the point of view of equity, as it will drag up those members of a group who are likely to need more help, since lack of merit is correlated with poverty and facing more racism, both of which reduce one’s opportunities. These underprivileged members will be artificially dragged up by more privileged members of their race who will tend to be more meritorious, if they are judged on the basis of their race rather than individually. Since a rational firm in a competitive market wouldn’t do statistical discrimination if it wasn’t economically efficient, we have seemingly a situation where both equity and efficiency are aligned so why is this bad. The obvious answer to me is that there was a widespread pattern of non-efficient discrimination on the basis of race in the recent past, so there is a reasonable suspicion that the discrimination isn’t actually efficient. Since my rationale for banning racial discrimination is true of discrimination against blacks, but not true of discrimination against whites, I am cool with affirmative action. My steelman of a conservative would agree with most of my analysis but argue that there has not been any widespread inefficient discrimination against blacks for half a century, while arguing that most affirmative action programs are economically inefficient, and indeed, bad from a utilitarian point of view, so there is in fact a widespread pattern of inefficient discrimination against whites. This opens up the pretty thorny question of whether affirmative action is good or bad from a utilitarian point of view. I haven’t been able to find many studies on this. I found one 1999 study that reported major benefits from affirmative action in universities, but a single study on such a contentious subject proves nothing, and these hot button issues tend to have dozens of studies on both sides. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any more studies on the subject, even though this seems like the sort of subject that would have several studies on it. Richard Posnar mentioned in an article in the 90s that there was some evidence that affirmative action in favor of women in academia had produced positive effects on quality, which I am inclined to give some weight, as he was dead against affirmative action at the time, but I also don’t trust this few studies, especially when they took place so long ago. If anyone is familiar with the literature on this topic, do let me know about the state of the research. There is also the complication that guessing from first principles, affirmative action might have different impacts in different fields. For example, affirmative action in an essential industry or service like medicine would likely be bad, because drops of quality in an essential field will cause far greater losses in utility. Meanwhile, affirmative action in a luxury industry like Yacht manufacturing might be net positive because the smaller cost wouldn’t be able to outweigh the benefits. I would also advance another line of argument, namely that affirmative action is analogous to welfare to the poor. Sure, the way its done is inefficient, but fundamentally, if Bob and Marten are equally well placed apart from the fact that Marten faces racism, do to which he has less social capital and may be disadvantaged in various other ways, than I expect that one dollar will give Marten more utility than Bob, because Marten has fewer options he can choose between, so the increase in available options caused by more money is more valuable to him. My steelman of a conservative would counter argue that firstly, there is no prevalent racism in today’s America, so the average person’s race will not affect their social capital. Secondly, he would argue that social and monetary capital are not fungible, and that I am misunderstanding how diminishing marginal utility works. He would argue that if agent A has less of resource X than Agent B, than yes, one more unit of X is more valuable to agent A, but if both agent A and agent B have the same amount of X but agent B has more of resource Y, than an additional unit of X will not give any more utility to agent A than to Agent B.
"Even though Arabs and Muslims are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country, especially after 9-11, they didn’t have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white. According to Hanania, the government’s dividing line for white vs. PoC is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about eg Uzbeks. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American and seems salty about this."
Just have to pause here and add - Scott, you didn't have a "Middle East" category on your survey of where your readership lives, either! As someone who lives in the Middle East, I found this very annoying. I had to choose between Europe, Asia, or Africa. I don't even remember which one I selected. Hope you fix it for next year!
It's a big country. They might get some looks where I live, where there is a near-zero Muslim population. But I really doubt they'd be meaningfully discriminated against. That's not one of the two groups of people that many Americans tend to have a problem with.
I don't participate in the survey, but if the categories were "North America, South America, Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa", then indeed the Middle East doesn't belong, any more than "Western Europe", "The Balkans", or "Southeast Asia" belong. The categories are top-level continents, it doesn't make sense to single out special ethno-linguistic-cultural regions.
But if the survey did have areas like The Balkans and Southeast Asia, then it does make sense to single out the Middle East too.
I'm trying to remember more specifically - I think the question said something along the lines of: "If you identify more with a different area, select that area instead." My husband also remembers having the thought that the Middle East was missing, so I think it is real?
This a form to file for emergency relief funds from the USDA. Applicants must certify that they are part of a socially disadvantaged group to qualify (there are other qualifying groups but this one is relevant to civil rights law.)
"A socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher is a farmer or rancher who is a member of a group whose members have been subject to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities. Groups include: American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian Americans, Blacks or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and women (for those selecting a group that includes gender). Note that if applicant only checks "women" without also selecting the other category the selection does not make applicant socially disadvantaged for conservation programs."
Note being a woman doesn't count unless the applicant also specifies that they aren't white. So here we have a program for giving aid money to farmers with a big No Whites Allowed sign. You might come to the conclusion that this is race based discrimination. Don't worry though, the USDA isn't allowed to do that kind of thing and even tells you so on the form:
"In accordance with Federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, the USDA, its Agencies, offices, and employees, and institutions participating or administering USDA programs are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity (including gender expression), sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, family/parental status. income derived from a public assistance program, political beliefs, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity, in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA (not all bases apply to all programs). Remedies and complaint filing deadlines vary by program or incident."
Get it? Just specify that you are part of a certain race/color/national origin and/or sex to qualify for this program, but also the USDA is legally forbidden from discriminating on the basis of those very things in its programs.
OK, first of all, Mexican-Americans at the time of the passage of federal civil rights legislation were far, far from being "white lite a la Italians" in any important sense. Discrimination was real and widespread. Obligatory muh lived experience: my grandparents deliberately didn't teach my mother and uncle Spanish because at the time, having a noticeable Mexican accent would hinder their career prospects even more than just having a Spanish surname. That was a bit less oppressive than what happened to *them* growing up--my grandfather was beaten in school for speaking Spanish--but still pretty oppressive.
(It's 2024 and non-immigrant Latinos are now close to that status if not already there, but these laws were not passed in 2024.)
>For example, after some Chinese people got beaten up a few years ago, there was a campaign to #StopAAPIHate, as if AAPI were a natural category,
I remember seeing street marches, stickers on lightposts, and freeway banners around that time, but it was always "Stop Asian Hate." Maybe the people engaging in the campaign on a grassroots level didn't get the memo that they were supposed to use the clunky bureaucratic initialism? Or maybe Hanania (or Scott? unclear to me who is making this argument) is confusing a hashtag for an organic campaign; I have no doubt that both existed.
>Obligatory muh lived experience: my grandparents deliberately didn't teach my mother and uncle Spanish because at the time, having a noticeable Mexican accent would hinder their career prospects even more than just having a Spanish surname. That was a bit less oppressive than what happened to *them* growing up--my grandfather was beaten in school for speaking Spanish--but still pretty oppressive.
I had had the idea this was a not-uncommon experience for non-Anglo descendants all around the United States in more assimilatory times.
Interesting! At the last all-hands company meeting that I attended before I retired, on my aisle in the meeting room, there were conversations in English, Hindi, Korean, (probably) Mandarin and possibly others.
Dad grew up in the 1940-50s. There was peer pressure to assimilate, and he actively refused to speak his parents' language. He regrets not being able to speak it now.
Many Thanks! Sorry that he was pressured to be monolingual. I'm not good at natural languages myself, but I'm happy to have co-workers conversing with each other in their first languages. Roughly speaking, everyone in the company coded in C/C++...
I'm a criminal trial lawyer and I thought I'd call out a specific example of something I kind of loathe in coverage of legal cases. There's no real name for it, maybe we need a long German word, it's related to something my evidence professor called "brickpicking" so maybe we can use that.
So, instead of the Diaz trial, let's imagine a murder trial. Defendant is on trial for killing Victim. At this trial, the government uses 6 key pieces of evidence
1: Defendant's cellular phone records, which put him near Victim's house on the night of the murder
2: Defendant lied to police about ever knowing victim
3: a video shows Defendant threatening to kill Victim
4: the fact that Defendant owns the same make and model of gun that killed Victim
5: Victim's mother, who testifies that a shadowy figure roughly the same height as defendant killed victim (she didn't get a good look at him)
6: Defendant signed a confession that he killed victim, which he now denies
So, Defendant's obviously convicted at trial, right? Given these facts, it's unwise to get upset at this conviction by saying that 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 "was used to prove defendant was guilty" and this says something bad about murder trials generally or this case specifically. That's not how evidence in trials works. There's no such thing as a smoking gun and lawyers put on tons of evidence in a given trial, it's how the evidence links together that satisfies a jury, rather than any one fact in isolation. Sometimes a side even puts on a fact (5 is in an example) which doesn't seem to prove very much. Play around with these six facts. Which combinations YOU find convincing beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe even all six combined wouldn't convince you.
This is why trials tend to involve an enormous amount of evidence of varying degrees of strength. Evidence professors often analogize building a case to building a wall. A single brick in isolation doesn't do anything, but if you cement a lot of bricks together, it makes a wall that can stop a car. It's dumb to criticize the strength of the wall by finding a single brick and going "that brick is so small, how could it possibly be that this brick could stop anything" (see, brickpicking).
I think a lot of the coverage of the Diaz case by the Hanania's of the world is like this. He's getting upset that a particular piece of evidence was used at one particular trial, and he's treating it like it's the ONLY evidence that was used at this trial or a piece of evidence the juries found particularly significant. He doesn't know how significant that evidence was, and indeed its unknowable (the Diaz trials were big, we have no idea what the juries found significant)
Wait Juries? Trials? Yeah, that's the other thing, my understanding is the Diaz case involved two separate trials. two different groups of people got together and all agreed that Diaz deserved millions and millions of dollars. I admittedly know very little about this case, I have no idea what evidence was admitted at either trial and for what purpose...but I also think Hanania knows less about this than either jury, both of which was composed of a random cluster of very different humans, both of which saw both trials, and both of which concluded Diaz deserved millions of dollars. I very much doubt they did so based in part (to say nothing of primarily) on the fact that a particular racial slur was used by black employees, and even if they did this would say *absolutely nothing* about what functions as persuasive evidence in other cases like Diaz's.
"Equal opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts--not Congress or the courts--were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination.
Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn't take "affirmative action" to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan's threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues."
Hanania is a really bad faith person and Scott gave him way too much benefit of the doubt.
Fundamentally, reading a book like this you shouldn't really have the attitude of, well, I don't agree with this pro-workplace sexual harassment stance, but I do agree that the race-based preferences for admissions in colleges is bad. It's just a very weird attitude to take when the subtext (and occasionally the directly stated claim) is that he thinks the great replacement is real, women are annoying whiny bitches and race realism is obviously true.
I know Scott likes to be in good faith and avoid doing the low decoupling thing of looking for subtext and association, but the subtext with this one is so overwhelming that it feels like you're being intentionally dense if you don't realize the book very clearly providing cover for insinuating all sorts of Great Replacement type stuff.
Again, I can tell why Scott didn't want to do this because unscrupulous wokesters will say "you're giving cover to white supremacists" any time you say anything less than maximally progressive. But we're all adults here and should be able to tell when someone's actually idea laundering vs just stating a contrarian position.
By all means evaluate the thesis as well, I'm not saying don't look at what he's arguing for, it's a decent argument about an important topic, but slap a giant unambiguous wanting label on this, rather than giving the most hyper literal direct reading of he once says he "supports weak forms of race realism".
Is it absolutely beyond the scope of imagination that somebody who supports an idea that's pretty much universally hated when writing a mainstream book might hint at his real views rather than stating them outright?
Relevantly, Hanania is a crypto pro Russian weasel who spreads loads of lies about Ukrainian Nazis and said they'd fold in a week after the invasion after first denying it would happen, and he used to write for a far right [literal neonazi](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-origins-of-woke-book/675348/) website. Again, that doesn't make his argument wrong and it deserves a fair shot but this is relevant to determining whether he might have much more extreme views.
Aside: A ton of people were predicting Ukraine would quickly collapse once Russia invaded. I think most experts (or at least the people who look to me like experts) were surprised.
I neither know nor care whether Hannania is a "crypto pro Russian weasel," FWIW. I spent the early 2000s being "objectively pro-Saddam" and "hating America," so YMMV.
That depends. Did you say that Saddam Hussein clearly had a right to invade Kuwait and anyone who said otherwise was being willfully naive? Or were you worried that the US wasn't good enough to pull off a complicated nation building plan even if Saddam was objectively evil?
There's a difference between (in my view wrongly) but rationally saying that it's not worth protecting Ukraine given the risks, and thinking that the west is morally degenerate and Russia represents a bastion of manly virtue that we should let ourselves be cucked by because it's no less than we deserve.
Hanania (and he'll freely tell you this himself) is deeply contrarian and seems to like picking fights with people. He mentioned in one of his articles that he used to be deeply anxious, and kind of mentally trained himself out of it over the course of years. Probably he overcorrected way too far, and the resulting combination is a man who is drawn to arguments that are totally unacceptable in polite society and a complete disregard for what other people think of him for making those arguments. This makes Hanania an interesting outlet for ideas, even if you vehemently disagree with a lot of his takes, which I think basically everyone will.
His argument on women is more that society doesn't know how to deal with women who use their emotions as a weapon. Men have been at the pinnacle of power for so long that people are used to dealing with weaponized masculinity, e.g. a man punching someone out to win an argument is stigmatized. But a woman can break down in tears and scream about how ideas make her feel unsafe and this is sympathetic. Excessively masculine and feminine outbursts are both totally disruptive to reasonable exchange of ideas, but one is ok and the other is not. Make of that argument what you will, but "annoying whiny bitches" it is not.
As far as the race angle, race realist is probably putting it mildly. Hanania is definitely in camp 4; black people are 85 IQ and efforts to ameliorate this are a waste of time. I don't think this is contentious after reading some of the stuff he wrote over the last few years, and if anything his views now are less extreme than in the past. Tying this into the immigration angle, he is actually quite pro-immigrant. Mainly because it reduces the relative portion of black people, as far as I can tell.
That "great cultural turn of around 2010-2015" matches the time where, according to another recently published book, all kinds of "the kids are not all right" mental health curves started going up. (The book says you can start to see the effect around 2012.) And the thing it blames is everyone getting internet-enabled smart phones and doomscrolling social media all the time, which seems to be a fertile breeding environment for bad memes in the same way a wet market is a good environment for coronaviruses.
Allow me to address the least important point: Di-az. In English it's almost always written as Diaz, but in Spanish it's almost always written with a diacritic over the i: Díaz. So imagine that the immigrant dad, trying to fit in, spells his name the American way, Diaz. Now the son, realizing that you can fit in just fine in America with an unusual name, spells his name Díaz. All good, except that some newspaper somewhere along the line doesn't properly capture the diacritic symbol, and instead of í, that paper writes i-. Boom: Di-az.
That's a good observation. I don't think it needs any ethno-assimilative or ethno-distinctive speculation, though. Simply suggesting that, at some point, a diacritic was mis-transposed to a hyphen, would be enough.
Trying to determine motives for anything these two plaintiffs did would seem to be a wide and fanciful quest, based on what I have heard about them.
PS -- interestingly, in Firefox, searching here for "Diaz" offers the option to "() Match Diacritics". I'm not sure searching for "Tesla" offered the same. EDIT -- yes, diacritics is an option for any search so never mind about that. BR
I follow Hanania on Twitter, and find him intentionally abrasive and weird. His two compulsions seem to be (1) contrarianism, (2) reminding everyone that he is much smarter than everyone else.
Having said that, this review seemed to mostly reinforce the point that civil rights law actually is terrible and forces companies to be racist liars with large, wasteful HR departments. I kept thinking, "I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" as Scott pointed out all the flaws in Hanania's argument while leaving intact the point that the federal government assigns us to arbitrary racial categories and threatens to destroy companies if they hire on merit, or even decline to hire criminals because "racism".
I think many of Scott’s issues with the book go away if you disentangle WOKISM from PROGRESSIVISM.
To me Progressivism means “expanding rights for marginalized groups” and wokism means “a culture where everyone tries to make themselves look more progressive than everyone else”
Civil Rights Law created that culture since in order to avoid getting sued for discrimination you have to “look more progressive than the next guy”. Also the internet created the culture too since with the internet it’s a lot easier to be preformative and a lot easier to spread alleged acts of non-progressivism - hence the need to be performatively progressive.
So going through Scott’s Objections:
Question 1. Where did the woke judges come from?
Answer 1: They were not woke judges. They were progressive judges. Progressivism existed before wokism and created the civil rights law to begin with.
Question 2: How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots and The George Floyd ?
Answer 2: It didn’t. But it caused the corporate reaction to the riots.
Question 3: Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice
Answer 3: Once the culture “to be performatively progressive” exists it effects Biden too.
Question 4: How did gay, lesbian, and transgender people win their rights, normalize their identity?
Among companies wokeness seems rather anticorrelated to lawsuit exposure since companies with high profit per employees (and low percentage of groups potentially successfully suing according to anti-cra) are far woker than low profit per employee, high minority/groups potentially successfully suing according to anti-cra companies (because lawsuit-risks is a minor factor in wokeness and doesn't compare at all to the social stuff and internet).
Google 73790 / 180895 = 0.4079 mio profit per employee
Walmart 11290 / 2300000 = 0.00490 mio profit per employee
Home Depot 15140 / 463100 = 0.03269 mio profit per employee
Maximum punitive part of fine according to civil rights act: 0.300 mio
(Plus another massive effect the percentage of groups potentially succesfully suing (= who aren't white/asian males) is vastly lower at Google (and would be even lower if not for diversity hiring).)
So to compensate the punitive damage of a maximum fine Google loses less than the profit one (0.735) other employee "makes" per year, while Home Depot loses the profit of more than 9/one working 9 years and Walmart loses the profit of 61 employees.
(edit: sry dont know how to remove the gap between a lot of the lines (theres no gap in the editor itself))
Also CRA influence should decline over time since the fine is fixed (there has been more than 100% inflation since cra of 1991). And of course many areas are much less under CRA like contracting or ngo-grants (eg Ballmer's Ballmer group funds black-led non-profits which would be illegal as criterion otherwise),
wokeness startet/explodingly increased in 2010s while civil rights law got rather weaker (inflation + more conservative judges ruling against it) and other countries with different laws show similar trend.)
The reason for wokeness is probably the internet, e.g. even group perspective wise groups that spend a lot of time there like journalists (basically living there), academics, tech etc (even if otherwise heterogeneous like highly male and paid in tech) get very woke (idk why maybe one factor is because taboos are high-engagement/good twitter gossip, racism is an high-brow acceptable taboo, and the twitter-created taboo-evolution is enforced (= aside from making people more woke themselves theres also more punishment for non-woke) on non-participants through journalists/wikipedia and google-search)
I agree that it falls short on tying in the causality between civil rights law and wokeness, but the bit about how civil rights law has changed the workplace is very insightful. He paints a very neat model.
“But as the decades unfolded, green (progressives) increasingly began veering into extreme, maladroit, dysfunctional, even clearly unhealthy forms. Its broad-minded pluralism slipped into a rampant and runaway relativism (collapsing into nihilism), as the notion that all truth is contextualized (or gains meaning from its cultural context) slid into the notion that there is no real universal truth at all, only shifting cultural interpretations (which eventually slid into a widespread narcissism). Central notions (which began as important “true but partial” concepts, but collapsed into extreme and deeply self-contradictory views) included the ideas that all knowledge is, in part, a social construction; all knowledge is context-bound; there are no privileged perspectives; what passes for “truth” is a cultural fashion, and is almost always advanced by one oppressive force or another (racism, sexism, Eurocentrism, patriarchy, capitalism, consumerism, greed, environmental exploitation); each and every human being, often including animals, is utterly, absolutely unique, and absolutely of equal value (egalitarianism). If there were one line that summarizes the message of virtually all of the truly prominent postmodern writers (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, etc.), it is that “there is no truth.” Truth, rather, was a social construction, and what anybody actually called “truth” was simply what some culture somewhere had managed to convince its members was truth; but there was no actually existing, given, real thing called “truth” that is simply sitting around awaiting discovery, any more than there is a single universally correct hem length that it is clothes designers’ job to discover.”
Great article, but I idk why accepting iq differences in the races would make someone on par with Hitler. I hate Hitler but I am not blind to the IQ data.
Yuck. My feeling is that I want all entities granted with special authority (Government, employer, school/teacher during my school-years) as far as possible from my personal life. I just do not want to pollute personal life where relations are (or should be) as symmetric as possible by mixing entities whose relations to you are by definition asymmetric. Structurally asymmetric.
This is (was?) the whole justification behind anti-harassment laws. And now you want to put companies back in your inner circle? Those are not friends, they never were and if anything, there are less and less so in the modern world. They are not even human.
The only exception is parents when I was a child, a relation both asymmetric and personal...which should be a recipe for very bad outcomes. It sometimes is, but fortunately most of the time our instincts and genetic altruism (Hamilton rule) makes it work.
This is a really good comment -- appreciate your perspective.
> I’ve worked at 90%+ white places that didn’t care about diversity and those are the ones where there is no company loyalty or friendship and everyone is just trying to get as much money as possible before they’re pushed out.
It's perhaps at this point that we should remember Sturgeon's law: 99% of everything is shit.
If Wokism is the majority, then 99% of Woke companies is shit. If 1950s style mad men corporations is the majority, then 99% of 1950s style mad men is shit. When a society is religious, the 99% of all shit is the traditional pathologies and failure cases of religion, like discrimination against women and obsession with taboos. When a society is secular, 99% of all shit is the traditional pathologies and failure cases of secularism, like atomized individuals with no communal support networks and obsession with secular taboos.
The majority - simply by being a majority - incurs a penalty against itself: It's the default. All of its nakedness is visible like nothing else, all of its flaws amplified.
I disagree. Scott's style is awesome.
Right - he is an engaging writer, and his meanders are a good thing to read when one is stuck in a queue.
Scott's writing style is why I've been reading his writing for the last decade, not everyone has to like it.
Yeah, I agree with something like that, although I think it might have started before Tumblr on real blogs.
A friend says they're hoping someone writes a real "Origins of Woke" which traces exactly how the ideas went from the small blogging ecosystem of ~2010 to NYT, etc.
See my comment above-- there's evidence of the ideas from the 50s, some very local takeover in the 80s, and I still have no idea how it became a major movement for the general public.
I have a notion that a lot of living in peace has to do with tacit accommodation, and because it's tacit, it's very vulnerable to verbal atack.
"[I]n non-verbal conflicts, correct ideas give advantage.
War keeps us sane."
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1127995103585267712
Online socialization is entirely verbal, and perhaps therefore more hostile. Given the rise of the internet this could explain a lot.
So, I don't think I'm qualified to write that book, and if anything I'm less qualified now than I was twelve years or so ago, since it's been a long while since I've brushed up on the source material. But I think I'm better versed in what went into it than most people, and I'm prepared to at least take a stab at a substack comment on the subject.
My impression, as of around 2009, before people identified "woke" as a thing, and before the social justice subculture that gave rise to the term had really solidified, but at a point when it was distinctly trending in that direction, is that the movement was essentially a result of academic ideas filtered through a specific, mostly online social context. While a lot of people, especially back then, would argue that the academic basis of the movement was sound, but often interpreted poorly by radical ideologues, my impression, as someone who read a lot more of the actual academic work than most, is that this was a mistaken interpretation, that the academic work actually *was* written largely by radical ideologues in the first place, and simply dressed up in language suited to an academic audience.
I still identify as much more left wing than right wing, and this was even more the case at the time, since the far left end hadn't moved nearly as far away from me at that point. But, my impression is that at least as far back as the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a balance between the left and right wings on issues of racial and gender justice etc. where both sides essentially held to the norms of trying to enact their desired changes via collective political action and measured civil disobedience, with the left wing making more or less continual progress against the right, until the left wing decided to defect first.
This began in academia, with writers who framed the issue of racial justice essentially in terms of existential warfare. Basically "we are opposed by a group of ideological enemies who are trying to destroy us and everything we represent. The mechanisms of gradual change collective political action and measured civil disobedience are fundamentally aligned against us in the favor of our ideological enemies, thus we have to break away from those and fight with tools which fundamentally favor our cause in order to be able to effectively defend ourselves." Because the writers in question were academics with cushy university positions, their actual mechanism of political action was writing books arguing people ought to do these things, which were mostly only read by other academics and ignored by the general populace. But when social justice started becoming a major component of the online subculture which was incubating in the mid to late 2000s, although only a minority of people actually read the work of actual academics on the subject, people who did were extremely influential in the movement, and ideas which originated in academia propagated to fixation through it.
In the earlier days of the social justice movement, there were separate strains which cooperated on object-level goals, but disagreed over big-picture questions like "should we frame social agendas in terms of Us vs. Them conflict drawn around identity groups, or in terms of alignment with philosophical goals?" and "should we attempt to move towards progressively more colorblind ideals of egalitarianism, or ones which consciously privilege minority groups?" The identitarian strain eventually became more or less hegemonic over the movement, partly I think because it's an easier sell based on ordinary patterns of human thought (we've been engaged in identitarian tribal conflict for the entirety of human history,) and partly because almost all the academic underpinning behind the movement actually argued in support of the identitarian strain.
I personally started to distance myself from the social justice movement around 2009, while remaining broadly aligned with its object-level goals, in large part because I started reading enough of the academic philosophy behind it to realize that the academics other people were treating as foundational figures (even if most of them didn't actually read their work) were essentially arguing that we needed to abandon the societal institution of liberalism because it was fundamentally aligned against the goals of social justice, while failing to acknowledge that the mechanisms of liberalism had been producing consistent incremental gains for social justice for the last several decades.
"The identitarian strain eventually became more or less hegemonic over the movement, partly I think because it's an easier sell based on ordinary patterns of human thought (we've been engaged in identitarian tribal conflict for the entirety of human history,)"
This doesn't explain why many white men in educated circles also support this identitarian wokeness; if anything, it would predict the opposite.
Although it doesn't entail equal treatment or respect, people of non-minority groups have always been at least able to achieve "ally" status within social justice communities. My impression is, participation from white men *did* go down as the social justice community became more identitarian, but it still has something of an "only game in town" advantage. If you genuinely want to achieve object-level goals in the sphere of racial/gender equality etc, you don't necessarily have any choice but to bite your tongue and cooperate with the social justice community.
Apart from that though, I think that a lot of people never really learn to critically analyze arguments from people they feel ideologically aligned with. Picking holes in the arguments of people we already disagree with comes naturally (although for a lot of people this essentially takes the form of "this thing you said is offensive and bad, therefore you're wrong.") But my impression is that a large proportion of people will just nod along and go "Yep, sounds right" to pretty much anything they hear from an identified cultural ally, unless it touches points they've learned to identify as offensive.
I spent years participating in the social justice community, and would often hear people say things which could be interpreted as misandrist, or prejudiced against white people, etc. But there was a standard set of arguments for why these things didn't reflect actual prejudice which jived with my experience. I didn't read the people around me as actually being hostile, I saw that as a bad-faith misinterpretation of the points they actually presented. But over time, I accumulated enough experiences contrary to that impression, and my sense of the intellectual underpinnings of the movement changed enough as I read more of the academic work behind it, that I stopped feeling that level of charity was warranted, and it really changed my personal experience of the emotional tone of the movement. It was kind of like a figure-ground perception shift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure%E2%80%93ground_(perception)) where everything took on a different meaning than before.
I think, as the social justice movement has become more identitarian, it's become more difficult for white men within it to maintain that non-hostile impression, but it's certainly not impossible, especially if the only alternative they see to being in it is to join another group they already identify as hostile.
Yeah, to my mind the most noteworthy thing about SJ is its *illiberalism*, and, in particular, how it made illiberals out of many former liberals. If I see a book titled "The Origins of Woke", I would expect it to talk about that!
(Of course you've touched on how it did that in your comment below -- most people just aren't used to thinking too critically by things said by those who seem to be on their side. That's how I fell into it. But like -- this is something worth very much talking about!)
>Yeah, to my mind the most noteworthy thing about SJ is its _illiberalism_
Agreed. One noteworthy facet of this is speech/language policing. There was an interesting analysis of language policing at a woke Canadian university (Waterloo) in a short video on YouTube recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2g2oE0Q6fc . It is rather Orwellian...
I mean this stuff was running rampant in specific college departments in the late 90s. It definitely was entrenched there already.
I mean, it’s not like it started out of nowhere in online communities of the early 2000s - but it’s antecedents before then are several separate movements, some of which had long been opposed to each other. Civil rights law is one important aspect (and the origin of the concept of intersectionality, which ironically was intended to specifically *undo* the idea that members of multiple oppressed groups were the victims of additive oppression, but ended up being interpreted as precisely its opposite).
Good look with the Something Awful reference. The first time I remember encountering these ideas was in 2007 on the anti-SA forum SASS (https://encyclopediadramatica.online/Something_Awful_Sycophant_Squad), which correctly pointed out that the entire SA moderation and admin team had drifted over time to super sensitive social justice warriors.
SA was one of the most popular sources of online culture during that time, so... the influence was wide.
Nominative Determinism strikes again!
Interestingly, I was going to say Hanania's missing element could just be graphs like these: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-internet-users-in-the-United-States-from-2000-to-2019-Internet-World-Stats_fig3_348660091 - i.e. affirmative action laid the groundwork for this, then people connected, coordinated, and used it much more aggressively.
I feel like that's basically what you're saying, except that what I'm (ignorantly) ascribing to Hanania here and what you're saying disagree on the cause. I guess in Hanania's framing, wokeness was inevitable once affirmative action existed in the legal framework; whereas in Dee's faming, wokeness was not inevitable once affirmative action existed, but is a separate phenomenon that then seized upon the tool. I'm probably doing both of them an injustice with that, mind.
(To be clear, I'm not in the US and avoid most social media, so I don't particularly have opinions on this either way, I just immediately thought 'the internet' when Scott referred to the cultural turn between 2010 and 2015 and asked "Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015?".)
I would say that while Civil Rights Law might not have spawned Woke, it did Midwife it. You say it was just a tool for woke to pick up, but without that took Woke could not have forced the capture of the institutions the way it did. The true cultural capture came from every major company hiring DEI departments which forced it to toe the line and put the weight of the company towards the side of Woke and be used as a tool to silence/purge the anti-woke in order to fully capture it.
If Woke was JUST a cultural thing it would be vexing as shit, but you could ignore it. When it is a required element of every large company, school, etc you have to pay attention to it.
Yeah. Once there is a big bludgeon id pol progressives can use to force their ideas on everyone, it doesn't matter all that much who came up with particular radical ideas. *Someone* was going to come up with them anyway.
For a liquid cooled below its freezing point to freeze over, it needs a nucleus around which further crystals can form. But in most circumstances there will be one, so it's reasonable to identify cooling below the freezing point as the cause of the freezing, rather than try to search for the nucleus. Quibbling about who invented the more radical woke ideas, rather than identifying civil rights law as the cause of wokeness, is like correcting someone who says a lake froze over because the temperature is -5°C.
Very much agreed! And the legally binding group identities from affirmative action boosted the divisive identity politics with direct financial incentives.
When did companies hire DEI departments? The woke inflection is clearly from the mid 2010s so your explanation needs to explain what changed around then. My opinion is that Twitter/Social Media led to the increased appearance of stories (with some real examples) and then corporations attempted to appease their employees with these policies (but not actually doing that much).
Her article at The American Conservative (https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tumblr-transformed-american-politics/) is decent length, as such things go, but it does leave a lot of unanswered questions- like why did people listen to Twitterati at all? Why did fandom adopt such virulently hateful concepts out of niche academia?
I think most of the people in racefail (when social justice came to livejournal) were adults, not teenagers.
Wait, how was Stross involved? I don't know fandom drama well but the summary of racefail Scott linked does not mention him.
That was when I first noticed something unusual was going on.
Oh come on, really? The idea that some people on internet forums took over half the world's social institutions just seems...a bit riduculous. I find Hanania's explanation slightly sensible but quite vacuous, the equivalent of saying the American Revolution led to the FDA: yes, the second wouldn't have happened without the first, and the first laid the groundwork for the second, but there was obviously a further major leap that had to happen.
The actual origin of wokeness seems to me so blindingly obvious, that I just assume it's obvious to everyone, and it kind of seems like everyone's in some conspiracy to avoid mentioning it. It's really bizzare.
I mean, look at the dates mentioned in this thread. It was just starting to solidify in 2009. It developed over 2010-2015. 2010. 2009 again.
What could *possibly* have happened to cause all this...?
As I recall, the most intellectual, eloquent, and fashionable white Democrats disproportionately supported Obama over Hillary in the primaries - by a larger margin than other upper-middle-class white Democrats did. (And they thought it was particularly cool that he was half-Kenyan.)
Does anyone's recollection differ? It would be almost impossible to find appropriate survey or donation data on a group I've defined in such a subjective way; my guess is that commentary from that era, as well as our own recollections, are the best we can do.
If I'm correct, then it seems the story started before Obama became president. I think it's a complex story, in which I would give civil rights law a supporting rather than a starring role.
Historical nitpick: it's less that Tumblr infected LiveJournal so much as LJ users were forced to move to Tumblr as LJ got increasingly difficult to use starting around 2009-2010. The migration had more or less completed by 2012. Tumblr being so much more of a "modern" social media platform where it was easy to repost content and you got a random jumble of posts instead of a carefully-curated set of friends made it much easier for social justice thinking to spread.
I think the whole shift to showing users a melange of content instead of a staid list of people the user chose to follow was a big driver of that sort of thinking. It allowed ideas to spread, upped controversy, and drives that sort of "we must purge this!" was of thinking.
> A book called Civil Rights Law Is Bad would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days.
I'm unable to parse this sentence. Is there a word missing after "would"? Or it referencing back to something I'm missing?
He's imitating a pause in speech where he changes his mind mid sentence, for rhetorical effect. Imagine the dash was a period and the first sentence was just left unfinished.
For Scott: if that was your intent, the way I do this is I make su-- well, I add the dash to a partially-completed word that's part of a natural sequence of words so that it's obvious I've stopped mid-thought and started anew.
So in this case, I might say "A book on Civil Rights Law is Bad would be a terrib-- okay, I admit...."
Please don't do that, Scott. I could understand you just fine.
It's correct though (well using an actual em dash instead of two hyphens)
The kind of dash is a completely separate issue. I don't think that matters either.
That's overdoing it on a blog post. On Twitter or something it would be fine.
I thought the point was that he had no idea at all what it would do, so there's no word to start
Thanks for clarifying!
> the article links to another famous case, where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application
Does anyone have a link to this? I did some searching and couldn't find any concrete references/credible sources. Just some off-handed remarks but no actual case history.
I don't have a great link, but the off-handed remark I found was https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/local/2015/12/25/texas-fires-back-feds-criminal-hiring-efforts/14940357007/
Ain't it funny how these "travesties" are never quite as simple as they're portrayed by the anti-woke crowd? Yet hardly anyone is prepared to do the investigative work to arrive at something approximating truth when it's so much easier and more entertaining to just keep repeating anecdotes that make their way around the internet. Oy vey.
What was the relevant difference between that link and the earlier summary?
Relevant difference? Tricky question - we can factually say that Scott got the gender of the purported Hispanic female wrong, but the relevance would seem to be that it is a "famous" case that nobody seems to have a great link to, and so resists any sort of validation. Journalistic stealth edits make things a little tricky; easy to see that Scott has now dropped some of the editorializing and added that link to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, but I don't see the link from the previously-mentioned Washington Examiner article. Might've been there before, or maybe I'm just blind?
[Puts on Morpheus dark glasses]
What if I told you that was true of almost all "travesties" pushed for ideological purposes?
(Example: The details of the Michael Brown shooting.)
The McDonald's hot coffee case is a great example: turns out the coffee was literally scalding and caused third degree burns and the company had been warned about the problem hundreds of times!
Right. And, that most of the elderly plaintiff's damages award was thrown out by the judge anyway. She ended up actually getting her direct medical bills covered plus not much more.
Liebeck v. McDonald's has resulted in a fascinating "backlash to the backlash" phenomenon in which misleading and exaggerated claims about how the case was "frivolous" gave way to misleading and exaggerated claims about (e.g.,) how Liebeck's damages award "was thrown out by the judge." The plaintiff's damages award was not thrown out by the judge. The jury awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages, which is the total amount of what people think of as "actual damages" (medical bills, but also pain and suffering). That amount was reduced by 20% because the jury found Liebeck 20% at fault for her own damages. The judge did reduce the separate $2.7 million dollar punitive damages award against McDonald's to 3x the compensatory damages award, or $480,000. That amount was (as the law requires) added to the compensatory damages award for a total award of $640,000. This was a substantial award for the time. The parties ultimately entered into a confidential settlement while an appeal and cross-appeal were pending, but the important point is that neither the compensatory damages award nor the reduced punitive damages award was ever "thrown out by the judge."
"The judge did reduce the separate $2.7 million dollar punitive damages award against McDonald's to 3x the compensatory damages award, or $480,000."
I said that "most of" the jury's award was thrown out by the judge. A reduction from a total of $2.9M to a total of $640,000 fits comfortably into my personal definition of "most of". YMMV of course.
And then of course a third or so of the final amount goes to the plaintiff's attorneys, and then the punitive damages portion is fully taxable as income. Hence "she ended up actually getting her direct medical bills covered plus not much more."
Strong disagree. The original reaction to the hot coffee case was the correct one.
Thank you. It drives me insane that this is so rarely said.
It's a case where there are enough facts favorable to each side that one's opinion can potentially go back and forth like a tennis ball based on which facts you've encountered. Opinions can also differ depending on what ideological lens you're viewing the facts through.
The range of plausible possibilities a reasonable person would expect when getting a coffee is anywhere between room temperature and 100°C. And the question isn't the extent of the burns, but whether McDonald's should have been considered responsible for them. IMO no, and the tendency to impute this sort of not-explicitly-assumed responsibility for not-directly-caused harms has a lot of cost to society. The lawsuit may not have been frivolous in the existing legal system, but the existing legal system is too litigious.
McDonalds advertised how hot their coffee was, their customers wanted hot coffee, and the government shouldn't have the right to punish restaurants for producing things their customers want in the way that they want them which don't injure third parties.
Yes we can say "The Thin Skull standard means..." but I'm explicitly opposed to that standard.
We shouldn't have to have dull knives, lukewarm coffee, or any semi-functional product just because a few people can't use it correctly.
Of course coffee is scalding! It's coffee! It's made with boiling water! And yes, McDonalds had been warned about the "problem" of coffee being hot hundreds of times, just like they've probably gotten frivolous complaints about hundreds of other things hundreds of times.
If you order coffee at the drive-through, put it in your lap (!), and then try to open it by pulling the tab toward you (!!) while not making 100% sure you're holding it firm with the other hand (!!!), all the while knowing you have mobility problems...and then you sit in the spilled hot coffee for 90 seconds because of aforementioned mobility problems (!!!!), you don't get to blame McDonalds for your own carelessness. Yes, it sucks that that it happened, but Liebeck's lawsuit was frivolous. The initial public perception of the lawsuit was exaggerated, but not wrong.
All normal coffee is scalding and can cause third degree burns. McDonald's was holding their coffee at 180°-190°F, which is the temperature recommended by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. Liebeck's lawyers argued coffee should never be served hotter than 140°F (60°C), which is quite cool for serving coffee and I don't think any coffee chain serves coffee that cool.
If you ever poured boiling water into a teacup and given it to a friend, you've given them something hotter and more dangerous than McDonald's coffee. There are many dangerous activities we accept as normal and worth keeping and you shouldn't later get sued just for doing normal activities.
So your argument here is *literally* "everyone else was doing it"? Didn't your mom ever have the "if everyone else was jumping off a cliff" talk with you?
In all seriousness, though, what possible merit is there to serving a beverage hot enough to even burn the tongue, let alone melt skin and cause 3rd degree burns?!?
Because people don't want to drink 60°C coffee. It's not "everyone else is doing it". It's following the recommendation of coffee experts. Coffee chains don't serve 60°C coffee because they'd lose their customers.
What's the merit of having a kitchen knife sharp enough to slice your hand? Or sitting by a campfire that could cover you in burns if you trip? We do slightly dangerous things for our enjoyment and drinking hot beverages is one of them.
All that aside, even if society does one day decide that some now normal activity is actually too dangerous and must be stopped (say we decide kitchen knives must be replaced with safe scissors and food processors), the way to go about it is for the regulatory body to ban it and then penalize anyone who keeps doing it. You don't just randomly penalize one person/corporation for using kitchen knives without first announcing the new norm.
The merit is that the coffee stays hotter on your way to your destination, so it's at a good temp when you drink it. You can always ask them to put ice in it if you want to drink it sooner.
This is just one way of doing things, but that's the answer to your question.
Looks like this might be an appealate brief, at least:
https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_files/eeoc/litigation/briefs/freeman.html#_Toc120287278
At a quick skim, seems to be a standard case of the EEOC suing for the use of criminal and credit checks as it does - this particular case is allegedly built around an individual who was rejected on credit grounds that failed to match Freeman's explicit criteria.
Was this a game of telephone where the defendant's attorney makes an inflammatory statement about the sought relief that gets included in poorly-sourced blurbs, which Scott repeated as the focus of the whole case? The chain of attribution is pretty shaky here.
Ok, I'm spending way more time on this than I should (whole minutes!) but whatever. Here's the appellate decision:
https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/published/132365.p.pdf
Story seems to be that as Step 1 in the suit is that the EEOC needs to establish a prima facie case of discrimination, and that it relied on an expert report to do so. Problem was, the expert report sucked really bad, was excluded by the trial court, and Freeman moved for a summary judgement that was ultimately granted. EEOC tried to submit an amended report but it sucked too. Case dies in the crib and any argument about the sympathetic Black applicant or the mis-aimed relief is irrelevant. EEOC appeals, appellate court narrowly holds that the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded the report, and that's whole ballgame.
(And Judge Agee concurrs specifically to say that the EEOC fucked up this case *extra* hard.)
Oof, that decision totally rips the EEOC a new one. Excellent find @Dan L, and thanks for doing the research and posting here!
So either way the entire story is nonsense and no one was compelled to (nor did the govt attempt to compel anyone to) ignore prior attempted murder when hiring.
So 1.5/2 of the examples tested from (former?) nazi Hannannia are made up.
Maybe Scott should reflect on the credibility of the source before doing a review.
The example was from Scott. I feel like Scott owes an explanation or a hyperlink for this example. the whole claim looks really extreme to not source: "Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application" I can't imagine making the claim without linking the source, there is no such claimed link in the article, or on the internet archive...
>Although the book provides lots of examples about how the laws here are unfair and outrageous, I can’t bring myself to care about college sports enough to give it the same subtopic status, as, say, the hiring process for all the corporations in America.
While I agree that it's not as widespread in effect, Title IX (especially during Obama and Biden years, with a brief hiatus during Trump) has/had much more widespread effects at colleges than just sports funding.
Obama Administration's Title IX guidance (the "Dear Colleague" letter) eviscerated what little due process there was regarding campus sexual assault and essentially removed presumption of innocence in favor of presumption of guilt. Also- why are colleges "investigating" in the first place and not, you know, police? When you hear complaints of "campus kangaroo courts," you have Title IX interpretation to thank. Related to the other civil rights topics, this Title IX guidance had massive disparate impact (https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2019/01/21/black_men_title_nine_and_the_disparate_impact_of_discipline_policies_110308.html) and that lead to a partial walkback even during the Obama years, but mostly wound up in a weird position of balancing special interests (no rights for the accused but also can't suspend too many black guys).
>Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument.
You cover it with the repetition of glaring omissions, but for the exclusion of the progressive's counterargument has at least two reasons: A) he's not writing to progressives, and B) only a certain kind of progressive will buy that particular brand of "solving racism with more racism is worth it" argument. I considered including Ezra Klein's support for the "completely terrible" (his words) Yes Means Yes law above (https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-terrible-bill-and-i-completely-support-it) but it fits here too.
Title IX is also why schools across the country are allowing self-identified transgender students to use whichever bathroom they would prefer and other related items. Even rural conservative schools are being told by the legal system that Title IX requires it, even beyond the guidance from the feds.
Good point, it is more far-reaching than I pointed out too.
>Also- why are colleges "investigating" in the first place and not, you know, police?
Because the police investigate on whether or not to send someone to prison, and campuses investigate on whether or not to impose academic penalties.
The idea that groups other than the police investigate things is not weird. HR investigates employee complaints. Parents investigate stories where both children say the other one broke the vase. Investors investigate company's reports and statements to decide whether they have a strong future. Etc.
And we hopefully aren't surprised when campuses investigate plagiarism or cheating charges, or other matters of academic integrity.
Assuming campuses need to respond to one of their residents raping another resident, why shouldn't they investigate before making a decision? What should they do, make a ruling *without* investigating, just flip a coin?
Of course, police can *also* investigate if it is reported to them. Two organizations investigating the same thing for different reasons as pat of different processes using different methods of investigations and different standards of evidence and etc. is not at all weird, if they both have a reason for their own investigation to exist the way it does.
> What should they do, make a ruling *without* investigating, just flip a coin?
Rape is a crime. What they should do is stay out of the investigation of criminal matters and leave it to the criminal justice system, which is far more competent at it. This is a win-win for colleges: If the person is convicted, they don't need to impose additional "academic penalties," because they will get locked up and no longer be a student, and if the person is found not guilty, the school doesn't get egg on its face (and potentially expose themselves to lawsuits) by their incompetent investigation and punishment of a wrongfully accused student.
This just misunderstands or ignores reality in too many ways. Examples:
1. Criminal investigations of rape typically take 8 months to 2 years to go from initial report to final sentencing, and can go years longer if there's an appeal process. Should the aledged rapist stay on campus with their alleged victim for that whole time? If the aleged rapist finishes out their education and graduates during the 2-4 years the criminal investigation and trial process is ongoing, that's the same as the campus having *zero* response to sexual assault cases.
2. Not every victim wants to file a police report. Necessary evil or not, being the victim in a criminal prosecution significantly tears your life apart, for the months or years that the process is going through court. Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus. Police actually investigate only a small number of reported sexual assaults, and few of those investigation go to trial.
3. The goals of a campus investigation are different from a criminal investigation, and therefore follow different rules and use different standards. Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups. Many witnesses are more wiling to talk to campus investigators than police. Campus investigations are designed to protect students rather than punish offenders, and therefore use a different standard of evidence when making rulings. Campuses need fast resolutions to protect students, police can take years to make sure justice is done correctly. Campuses are just severing a business relationship with a client, police are a government wielding its power against its citizens, again this justifies different standards of evidence. Etc.
Why doesn't the same logic apply for rapes that occur OFF campus, where they are far more likely to occur? Isn't it still unjust for rapists to be in vicinity of their victims elsewhere? You've really come up with an argument for our criminal justice system to be much speedier.
If you lived on a commune where membership was determined by a contract that you signed which agreed to binding arbitration by members of the commune for things like assault, then yes, that would make perfect sense.
But as I said like 7 times in the post you're responding to, *the government* has to balance the benefits of speed and decisiveness against the dangers of abusing its power, threatening liberty in general, etc.
Basically we grant the government a monopoly on violence, in exchange for them being extremely restrained on when and how they are allowed to use that violence against citizens. The extremely meticulous trials with very high standards of evidence and very restrained court procedures are all part of that, and that's a general public good that's insanely dangerous to erode.
No, the delay is not a genuinely public good. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/ Innocent people plead guilty often because the process (lengthened in an attempt to be pro-defendant) takes so long that they actually lose less from the plea bargain. It's an unintended result that serves nobody other than lawyers billing more hours and even they likely wouldn't have endorsed it if they'd known what would happen.
> Criminal investigations of rape typically take 8 months to 2 years to go from initial report to final sentencing, and can go years longer if there's an appeal process.
OK, that one sounds like a legitimate problem. How about putting some effort into fixing it, rather than just making it someone else's problem, with all the attendant collateral damage?
> Not every victim wants to file a police report.
You can fix that one with better training. Teach girls that they need to report sexual assault immediately, teach them what not to do in the immediate aftermath that would ruin the evidence, etc. This is the reason we teach people about what to do in case of various other emergencies: our natural instincts are often wrong, so we drill the right course of action into their heads so they'll do the right thing rather than the instinctual thing when and if it ever happens to them.
> Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus.
Again, this is the instinctual-but-wrong thing, and is actually kind of a horrifically selfish attitude if you think about it and analyze it for a few moments. "I don't want to have to deal with this guy myself, even if it means letting him go free and be able to victimize other women down the line. At least it won't be my problem."
Most victims who think this way probably don't consciously think about it in such callous terms, and I'm not going to accuse them of doing so. But the effect is exactly equivalent to this level of callousness, which is why they need to be taught and trained beforehand to be aware of it and not make that mistake.
> The goals of a campus investigation are different from a criminal investigation
Yep. The goals of a criminal investigation are to find the truth and see justice done, while the goals of a campus investigation is *always* first and foremost to avoid embarrassment to the school.
>How about putting some effort into fixing it
We've been trying to get police reform, on this topic and many others, for decades (centuries? probably centuries.).
I'm still actively engaged in agitating for that. But it's a slow process, and there's not a lot of political will behind it today.
How long should campuses keep letting their students get raped while waiting for that reform to happen?
If the police process isn't sufficient to protect campuses *today*, then why shouldn't campuses do their own investigations *today*, and stop when they become unnecessary?
>You can fix that one with better training. Teach girls that they need to report sexual assault immediately,
See again about investigations and trials often being horrific for the victim and ruining their lives for years. This is perhaps an difference in beliefs about an empirical fact that is decisive here. All I can say is I've heard this to be the case from many many sources I trust over my life, I'm not interested in tracking them down for you today, and if it were to turn out that I'm wrong about this then yes the calculation would be different.
And yes, this is another police reform thing that is very very actively being worked on by police reform groups and feminist groups and etc. But not there yet.
>while the goals of a campus investigation is *always* first and foremost to avoid embarrassment to the school.
Man, you are getting too cynically brain-poisoned by Bryan Caplan or whoever. The world actually includes a lot of people who care about people in their immediate community not getting raped, and are very motivated by trying to stop that.
Bill Maher made a career out of this type of professional cynicism, and there's a reason he looks like an idiot today.
Another problem is the massive gap between what the campus calls rape and what the police call rape. Are we talking "he roofied me, tied me up, forced me" or are we talking "the sex was meh and he hasn't called back so I'm retroactively removing my enthusiastic consent a week later"?
I'm not saying that a campus should do *nothing*, but they tend to jump to extreme options, lacking any due process or consideration of the accused. I get that you, like Ezra Klein and the state of California, don't give a rat's ass about them, their life is a sacrifice you're willing to make. Replacing one injustice with another *systematized* injustice does not justice make.
Sort of amusing because I would've expected you to be on the side of the accused in pretty much any other case. Fascinating how this subset of activity throws a wrench into that.
>The world actually includes a lot of people who care about people in their immediate community not getting raped, and are very motivated by trying to stop that.
Used to be that's what pissed-off brothers were good at, but that has its own set of problems, yeah?
> Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups.
Title 9 explicitly doesn't apply to "private groups" but to colleges that are accepting public funding. If your little exclusive club wants to have no due process that's fine, but the vast majority of institutions of higher learning in the USA are public bodies.
>Campus investigations are designed to protect students rather than punish offenders, and therefore use a different standard of evidence when making rulings.
That's simply not true. If it were, the accused would be able to complete their courses online, or after the accuser completed their time there.
>"Police are restricted in how they can gather evidence and what can be submitted in court for good reasons relating to liberty and avoiding the abuse of power, but which don't apply to private groups."
Public universities, at least, are *not* private groups and therefore the good reasons for restricting police *do* apply to them.
"Should the aledged rapist stay on campus with their alleged victim for that whole time?"
Campuses are usually pretty big places.
Just wanted to let you know I'm happy to see you around again. I always used to enjoy your posts on reddit (and possibly ssc?) for being reasonable and arguing a position underrepresented around here.
I don’t see why you’re happy, given the atrocious quality of the comment you responded to. Unless you enjoy seeing trainwrecks and consider them an “underrepresented position”?
So you're unhappy with darwins post. Good for you, I don't care?
If you're upset and looking for a fight on the internet then maybe consider if that's worth your time. Its certainly not worth mine.
Funny how, throughout your post, you treat the *alleged* rapist as guilty.
(How *dare* they continue to have access to their education?! How *dare* their accuser have to file a report?! Guilty until proven innocent!!)
It’s genuinely mind-boggling you don’t realize how unhinged you sound.
Yeah it's called 'a premise', comes up a lot in hypothetical discussions.
Anyway this was all from 3 months ago, you doing ok?
In 1920, Major League Baseball investigated whether eight members of the Chicago White Sox had colluded with gamblers to throw the World Series. It found that they had, and banned them permanently from baseball. Separately, a court was investigating whether the players had broken the law, and acquitted them. So the professional investigation resulted in professional penalties, while the criminal investigation did not result in criminal penalties. Should baseball have stayed out of the matter, and let the players continue playing since they were acquitted?
Charming as ever. Nice to see some things never change.
>Assuming campuses need to respond to one of their residents raping another resident, why shouldn't they investigate before making a decision?
Considering the Title IX guidelines for investigations are quite possibly *worse* than a coin-flip for the accused, seems like a good argument for returning to sex-segregated colleges.
Investigation of non-academic offenses should be handled by the appropriate authorities. If the problem is that an assumed victim doesn't want to live in the same room/floor/building as the assumed perpetrator, then whatever, move one of them, not a big deal. If the assumed victim doesn't want them on campus *at all*, that's a much more serious demand and beyond the scope of the university.
From below:
>Necessary evil or not, being the victim in a criminal prosecution significantly tears your life apart, for the months or years that the process is going through court. Some victims don't want their assailants to go to jail, but do want them off campus.
And... getting long-term suspended or expelled from university *doesn't* tear someone's life apart? Not to the same degree as criminal charges, sure, but it's not exactly a slap on the wrist that might entail years worth of lost education and tuition.
>And... getting long-term suspended or expelled from university *doesn't* tear someone's life apart? Not to the same degree as criminal charges, sure, but it's not exactly a slap on the wrist that might entail years worth of lost education and tuition.
If I were factually innocent, I think I would rather be criminally charged and deal with all that entails, than have my entire college career exploded without recourse.
Sort of a tossup IMO and depends on the factors like the specific jurisdiction, but yeah, you would probably have more recourse in the justice system even if the whole process is tedious and miserable.
The actual reason (I suspect) is tied to the history of Universities (https://historyofphilosophy.net/medieval-universities). Universities have always had an aspect of protecting students from the law (e.g. underage drinking on Campus). This means the university has to investigate these crimes because they don't want police presence on campus.
> Universities have always had an aspect of protecting students from the law
And have always also had a reputation for producing graduates who act as if they think they're above the law. Hmm...
Similar letters also eviscerated the discipline and safety structures at a lot of districts when they were basically instructed by the Obama DoE that any regime of behavior correction that didn't have racially proportionate outcomes would put them at grave danger of lawsuit.
>So everybody gets more and more woke, with no end in site.
That should be 'sight.'
> That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian.
Really? I'll just say, this is far from a universal experience, and "Asian" is every bit as made-up a category as AAPI.
My wife has a story from when she was at college, attending a course taught by a Chinese-American woman. When a Japanese-American student tried to take the class, the teacher strictly forbade him from being in the class and ordered him out of the room entirely, because he was Japanese and Chinese people have long memories of atrocities committed generations ago. And the teacher got away with it free and clear, for reasons that would be too doxxy if I were to elaborate here. Not a hint of "Asian solidarity" here!
> Like I said with What We Owe The Future, it’s probably unfair to review this book qua book.
I think you're right. I haven't read it myself (yet; you've piqued my interest now,) but from your description, it sounds a lot like a book that assumes a fair deal of context and is expanding on it. For example, a fair percentage of its target audience has likely read Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals." (Have you?) Sowell makes the explicit case that Hanania doesn't have to here (because Sowell already made it) that "Civil Rights Law (from 1964 on) Is Bad."
Sowell lays out the progress of African-Americans in assimilating into broader American society and closing various gaps in their standard of living compared to white Americans, aided at times by various civil rights laws. (The 1964 one was definitely not, as this article claims, the original!) And then the 1964 law happened, setting up a bunch of bureaucracy to help things along, and all that progress that black Americans were making suddenly hit a hard wall. By the 1980s, with the "help" of a lethal combination of bad policy and cocaine, they were "advancing" backwards, giving up decades of real progress.
Post-1964 Civil Rights Law Is Bad, because not only does it create all of the devastating knock-on effects described by Hanania in his book, *it does so while also doing harm to its own stated goals rather than advancing them!*
In terms of Asians, I think most Asians I know think of themselves as Asian to some degree. Obviously the Chinese and Japanese don't get along, but neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white".
The salience of "white" is not a constant over time. It's not true that "The Irish Became White", as they were always so legally, but intra-racial inter-ethnic differences were more salient in the US long ago.
How is this different from "Asian"?
I don't think South Asians previously lumped themselves together with East Asians. On the other hand, Middle Easterners are legally considered white, and previously they & Europeans wouldn't lump themselves together, and now Middle Easterners are politically mobilizing to get a separate category.
How many Middle Easterners and East and South Asians do you think would agree that that is "the most salient part of their history"?
MENA is now a US census category. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/middle-eastern-north-african-census-category-rcna145621
> I don't think South Asians previously lumped themselves together with East Asians.
They don't do that now, either.
That might be the more politically active ones, which also seems to be more common in South than East Asian Americans.
Do most Indians consider themselves “Asian”? Do Cambodians? Philipinos?
An “East Asian” category might make sense to some degree but AAPI is vastly broader than that.
In my experience, 'feeling Asian' is a 2nd/3rd gen American construct.
2nd and 3rd generation Americans are sufficiently disconnected from their home culture, that they more so 'pick' their culture/race than grow up in it. They are told they're Asian, so they choose to be Asian. 1st gen immigrants or culturally integrated 2nd gen Americans never use blanket race identifiers.
They are honest in their belief in being East-Asian or South-Asian. But, a Japanese-American's sincere belief in East-Asian solidatrity is a manufactured belief veering on offensive to any person actually from East-Asia.
Imagine Germans speaking for Ashkenazi Jews because they're both white and eat Sauerkraut.
> neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white"
Which gets to what the categories really are : "To what degree can a random white American (majority demographic) tell you guys apart?" and "To what degree can you tolerate seeing yourself reflected in another person?".
Not sure where you draw this opinion from ?
Chinese, Arab and Indian immigration patterns are nothing alike. In the US, Chinese diaspora first came to the US as manual labor in the 1800s. Indians didn't arrive until the 1970s, and are actually in the midst of a massive tech-driven immigration wave unlike China, which seems past it. Arabs follow neither narrative. Their immigration stories are grounded in refuge or fleeing persecution. Japanese and Korean immigration worked very differently, as they both ended up as vassal states of the US immediately after WW2.
What common immigration patterns are you pointing to ?
> Imagine Germans speaking for Ashkenazi Jews because they're both white and eat Sauerkraut.
That… was the normal situation pre-Holocaust? Like, many people didn't know they were "Jews" for Nazis until they checked their grandparents' birth certificates.
How many?
Wasn't one of the biggest complaints against the Jews that they maintained a separate identity and refused to integrate into mainstream German society?
The _complaint_ was there, but it had seemingly stopped reflecting reality somewhere before WW1. I mean, there were always _some_ minorities on outskirts, but the integration was far bigger than propaganda would ever give credit for. For instance, obviously the integration was the reason they had to switch from religion to race: there didn't remain enough non-Christened Jews to have the wide-scale attack they did in the first place!
There's a more complete description for each country of Nazi-occupied Europe in the back of "Eichmann in Jerusalem", but I think the general trend was that rich urban Jews had a tendency to become indistinguishable from their neighbors, and in places intermarry frequently, and sometimes even convert to Christianity. While poor rural Jews were more culturally distinct and kept to themselves (probably often due to bigotry by poor rural locals). I hate to say this about Nazi domestic policy, but that book helped me make more sense of it, of the Nazi sense of Jews as a xenomorph-alien threat.
(Giger was Swiss-German , right? I bet someone could write an interesting essay tracing a line from pre-WWII antisemitism to chest bursters.)
> "If the most important event in the recent history of Jews hadn't happened, then things would be different.".
Yeah, duh. (the dismissiveness is mostly for effect. Sorry about that, I'm feeling edgy today)
_______________
Often, Immigrant's most serious concerns have to do with these exact neighbors. Forcing a large intra-continental identity onto immigrants, creates a false sense of unity. It makes it difficult to talk about inter community tensions.
The South-Asian-Commitee at Harvard is structually unable to comment on South Asian matters because the 2 main cohorts (Pakistanis and Indians) disagree on all policy goals. You'll hear platitutes like "India and Pakistan should strive to live together', which is the sort of naievete you expect from elementary schoolers.
The Arab-American-club will similarly talk about peace and cease-fires even with the Saudis and Yemenis want nothing to do with each other. Jordanian Americans and Egyptian Americans will lecture Israelis on 'fair treatment of Palestinians', because the Palestinaians are now part of the greater 'Arab American community'.
Uber drivers are my favorite people to talk to. They're usually 1st gen immigrants, far too overqualified for their current job and talkative. Their biggest complaints/policy goals always have to do with neighboring cultures that are part of the same 'race'.
If I (an Indian) had to make a list of what identities I feel, then Chinese and Pakistani would rank as my bottom 2, despite being the 2 other big umbrella identities in the Asian race.
Categories make sense when they share traits in common or have common interest. Other than appearances, what traits or interests do these racial grouping share in common ? Hell, in the Asian tent, even the appearances aren't shared.
I agree, but why club them together into Asians at all. Why not have unity among all americans?
If race is used as a tool for affirmative action, then we already have fine grained statistics to dole it out at the national level. Why the need for blanked categories ?
Which comes back to my original point. A random white american who dislikes Chinese people for appearances, also dislikes Taiwanese and Japanese people for the same reason. The categories are thrust upon them by racists. Not of their own choosing. That it is the main utility of race.
And if that is true, then you might as well create races accordingly. East-Asian, Brown, White, Arab, SEAsian, Black and Mixed.
As more people intermarry across races, Mixed will become a larger category. If your nation is already (many Mexicans, Brazillians) and were cool like that, then assimilate into the mixed category. You don't need your own special section.
This is directly relevant to the fact that groups are fractal. Of _course_ we have strongest feuds with those who are relatively close to us but differ in some important-to-us way (cf. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/). Serbs will hate Croats, not Chinese. But this doesn't mean that someone who notes the similarity between Croats and Serbs is wrong. Same, I'm afraid, is largely true of India and Pakistan: they are at each other's throats, but they do share similarities important for interacting with them.
Another example: probably the _most_ alienating identity for a New Yorker who wants to control all guns is your stereotypical Alabama redneck who says "six guns is the _minimum_ to hold in your house". But _both_ of them will care about gun control much more than most non-US citizens, so the statement "for Americans, gun control is a hot button issue in an unusual way" is (with all the usual caveats about stereotyping) true.
> 2 main cohorts (Pakistanis and Indians)
What's up with Bangladeshis? Are there not enough of them, or do they stay out of that sort of politics, or something else?
I think it’s interesting how much someone who is otherwise seen as “race realist” is also acknowledging the important points of racial constructionism, noting that “Asian” and “Hispanic” and “white” are very clearly artificially constructed around their edges - though it’s notable that he doesn’t seem to make the same observation about “black” (particularly given the major genetic differences between west and East Africans and many groups within each region, as well as the cultural differences between parts of Africa, and descendants of slaves in different parts of the Americas).
Also, I believe the 2030 census plans to move “Hispanic” to the “race” category and create “middle eastern/North African” as a sixth race, addressing some of the more notable divergences between the legal/official racial categories and the social racial categories that have grown up with them.
Vast majority of ADOS are of west African origin. And they make up the vast majority of the black population. Slave trade stopped in 1808, whatever distinction existed amongst the West African populations that they came from has blurred to the point where similarly whether one is English, German or French American is meaningless. Yes there are certainly large and growing Somali and Ethiopian diaspora communities but I don’t think omitting that distinction is as large an omission as the one Scott highlights, omitting that he’s a race realist in the first place.
The idea that the specific boundaries are socially constructed doesn't contradict in any way that race correlates with any particular genetically determined trait. The only reason it may seem remarkable that a "race realist" takes a social constructionist view is that social constructionism is sometimes pushed as a motte, with the bailey being that a particular genetic trait cannot correlate with race [when the social constructionists want to argue it doesn't], and in any case race is an obsolete, pseudoscientific, racist concept [when you talk about race in a way they don't like]—which don't actually follow from the motte.
Most people are "color realists" and would say that there is clear and significant difference between color green and color blue, despite the fact that it is impossible to draw a clear consensus boundary between green and blue on a rainbow or color wheel - the boundary (or the number of colors separated; e.g. the languages&people's which split what's blue in English into two separate concepts) is arbitrary and artificial, but that doesn't mean that the differences aren't there.
> but neither do Russians and Ukrainians and they still (at least in America) share a certain identity as "white".
Maybe in America they adopt this bizarre kind of self image, but definitely not in Europe. In Europe it sounds rather out of place. Yes they share multiple identities (Slavic, Ruthenian, Orthodox, Eastern European), and maybe even 'white' - but probably more in the sense of 'white' as opposed to 'Caucasian' (meaning Chechens, Dagestanians etc)
Sorry for honesty but such misguided and ignorant offhand race remarks from Americans annoy me immensely. I feel like you Americans are doing it all the time and thus forcing your ridiculous categories down the throats of Europeans, far outside the realm of those categories' applicability.
He even included "in America" as a caveat, and you still have a problem with his assertions, which as an American I can verify as true? He's not talking about Europe. He made that clear.
Japanese basically committed holocaust level atrocities on the Chinese. Chinese are taught from early age their war crimes in WWII. Jew, married to Chinese. Feel neutral/positive to present day Germans. If I had gotten her 'cultural education's likely would not.
Yes, I'm aware of this. There are good reasons why the Japanese Empire allied with Germany in World War II; the more you look at the "State Shinto" religion guiding them at the time, the more they look like natural allies of the Nazis.
But as you say, today's Jews (quite reasonably) don't look at today's Germans as Nazis. And today's Japanese are likewise not State Shinto-ists... but all too many Chinese people continue to look at them as if they were!
The big difference is that Germans are well versed in their WWII history. Japanese never learn from their government authorized schoolbooks about their country's escapades in China, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The official Japanese government response is to play down or deny atrocities. The information (eg about medical experiments and bio warfare) exists if people seek it out, though.
If you are interested, The Wages of Guilt by Ian Buruma, who speaks both Japanese and German, contrasts the responses of the two countries. Some Japanese people even believe that Jews and Japanese were the biggest victims in WWII. Yet more Chinese people died during the Nanjing Massacre than ever died of the impact of the atomic bomb, Buruma says. Of course, official Japanese believes that is an exaggeration too.
The elderly Korean women, former "comfort women" forced into prostitution, who sat outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul for so many years? They volunteered to be prostitutes or their claims for an apology or compensation were covered by the 1965 peace treaty with South Korean.
I was in Japan in 2018 when San Francisco erected a statue honoring comfort women from the Philippines, China and Korea. Sister city Osaka promptly broke off a 60-year relationship saying the claims were historically inaccurate. I recall when a Japanese history, maybe 20 years, found an imperial army document ordering round-ups.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/04/osaka-drops-san-francisco-as-sister-city-over-comfort-women-statue
I know about the massacres, but I've heard recently that most of the "comfort women" were hired employees, though academics who have written as much got cancelled.
The last time I looked at this (20-ish years ago, so this may well be out of date), the majority of the women were forced, but most of them were only used for a short time - a few weeks, often. The long-term permanent organisations tended to use hired employees who did have a choice. And they did the majority of the work.
It is simply not true that the Japanese do not learn about Japanese war crimes during school. And yes Japan did settle all reparations claims with both China and South Korea.
>Japanese never learn from their government authorized schoolbooks about their country's escapades in China
I never know what to make about these claims because I was also repeatedly told US schools didn't teach the truth about slavery or the civil war or the native expropriation, and yet in my really actual school in the 1980s and 1990s those were the two MAIN topics my history books covered.
So much of the justification for CRT is sold to me as an antidote to a form of schooling that in my school district probably hasn't existed since the 70s or maybe earlier. I am positive my 1980s history textbooks would be CRT approved, with an effort to make black Americans ~40% of the content and natives another ~20%.
FWIW the Japanese people I have personally known seem well aware of their WWII history, and that makes sense since there are themes pointing to it in much of their media as well (those references wouldn't make sense if people didn't get them).
Matt Yglesias likes to say that the frequent claims that people weren't taught certain things in school is just people not remembering their schooling.
I remember walking through Sproul Plaza at Berkeley years ago when a group of Japanese teenage girls came off a tour bus and waited around for their tour to begin. An Asian-American student walked up to one of them and said "My family is Korean. Do you know what your people did to my people?" The Japanese girl looked like a deer in the headlights. I walked on so I didn't hear the whole list of (admittedly true) atrocities.
I would be a deer in the headlights too if a random person in a foreign country started speaking to me in a language I (likely) didn't speak particularly well about something that happened decades before I was born.
Even if I was reasonably familiar with the history that would be a challenging and uncomfortable situation to navigate as an adult let alone as a teenager.
I mean, the Chinese _also_ committed holocaust-level atrocities on the Chinese, multiple times and notably more recently. Not quite sure how that fits in, though.
Ouch. That even holds true going back in time, although the 20th century seems to have upped the pace.
To a certain degree.
There have always been tyrants, since the beginning of human history. But they didn't always have automatic weapons, artillery, and the like, and they also didn't have modern agricultural techniques that enabled the sort of massive population base that you need, by definition, to kill off a massive population.
Germany was kind of special in how the next generation was handling the crimes of their parent generation in the 1960s. The latter generation won that culture war eventually. Acknowledgement of the crimes committed by Germans in the Nazi era is totally mainstream. High school covers the Nazis and their crimes at least twice in history. On the 27th January, of course the German chancellor visits Auschwitz and asks for forgiveness. The bigger KZs in Germany have long been turned into sites of documentation and remembrance.
There is not a lot of stuff I like about being German, but the Erinnerungskultur is one of the things I like about Germany. Being rightfully ashamed of its past was also what was required to sever ties with Prussian militarism, which went quite well for Europe.
I am not an expert on Japan, but I think that it is not as open acknowledgment of their crimes may not be as common as in Germany. (OTOH, they also seem to have left their military expansionist phase mostly behind.)
Of course, post-war Japan was not exactly an ally to mainland China in the way Germany turned into an ally of Israel. So the framing of "this was the past, and the current generation is not likely to repeat their father's crimes" is probably stronger in Israel wrt Germany than it is in China wrt Japan.
I've thought, since I first heard that "Oriental" was offensive and to be replaced with "Asian" that it was far less descriptive, lumping together Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian, Iranian, Russian, and many more, all together. Yet it commonly still refers basically to Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Who would call a Russian "Asian"?
It varies quite a bit by region. I've heard that when Americans say "Asian," we think of East Asians: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, etc., but when British people say "Asian," they tend to think of *South* Asians: Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, etc., because the British Empire used to have some pretty significant colonies there so that's where their strongest cultural ties to Asia lie.
Yeah, this is correct, indeed British people tend to avoid saying "Asian" for East Asians, which is why you'll hear Brits say "Oriental" more often than Americans - either because the particular Brit in question is older and hasn't updated their language (it was acceptable more recently here than there), or because they are fishing for "East Asian" and not finding the right phrase.
Because of the colonial history, there are far more people of South Asian origin living in the UK than people of East Asian origin: about 7% of the UK population is in the census categories "Asian (Indian)", "Asian (Pakistani)", "Asian (Bangladeshi)" and "Mixed (White and Asian)". About 1% are "Asian (Chinese)". About 1.5% are "Asian (Other)", of whom rather more are South Asian (Sri Lankan, Afghan, Nepali/Gurkha, Tamil, Kashmiri, Sikh) than East Asian (Filipino, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian).
I've literally heard a Brit saying "I mean, obviously Japan is in Asia, but the Japanese aren't really Asians, are they?" - which is clearly just to say that they're not the prototype of Asianness in Britain.
If you were ranking parts of Asia on how obvious it is that they're geographically located in Asia, Japan would be near the bottom of the list. It's literally outside the continent.
Oh, I dunno. Referring to Benjamin Netanyahu as Asian would be much more confusing.
I use 'Far Eastern' to avoid the 'Asian' problem here. Though, I don't use it much because it's rare that I'm not talking individually about Japan, HK, China etc. Same for Pakistan, I'll specifically refer to it as it's very different to e.g. India and makes up the vast majority of our 'Asian' population.
Yeah, if you know enough to realise that "East Asian" or "Far Eastern" is a better term, you are probably having a conversation on a level where you're breaking it down in more detail anyway.
Pakistan + Bangladesh + Indian Muslims (quite a few of whom emigrated to the UK instead of going through partition and tend to have difficulty describing themselves in terms of the post-1947 states) form a majority of all Asians in the UK, but Pakistan alone doesn't at all. Bangladeshis in particular really resent the assumption that all South Asian Muslims are Pakistani, especially if they / their families emigrated after the War of Independence.
There are an awful lot of people of Indian descent in the UK, ie people who tick "Asian (Indian)" - these are mostly Hindus and Sikhs. The population is very concentrated in certain areas and if you don't go to those areas, it's very easy to think that the prominent people like Rishi Sunak are from a much smaller minority than they actually are.
As recently as the 1950s, if you took "Oriental Languages" at university, you would start off with Biblical Hebrew.
> because the British Empire used to have some pretty significant colonies there so that's where their strongest cultural ties to Asia lie.
That's not why. (Well, not directly.) It's because that's who's in Britain. The reason they're there is that the cultural ties made it easy for them to migrate, but the cultural ties aren't an independent reason.
Not a Slavic Russian, but many citizens of Russia are Turkic by appearance and Turkic or Mongolic by language (see Buryat, Kalmyk, Tuvin, Yakut…). Coincidentally (not), the Turkic peoples are more widespread in the Asian part of Russia, while European Russians are, well, colonists there. And, of course, those Turkic peoples would be included in Asian.
I don't mean to nitpick on this, but Siberian and Far Eastern peoples in the Russian Federation are *by far* not limited to Turkic or Mongolic peoples, with peoples exhibiting characteristics most Americans would find "Asian" speaking Tungusic, Uralic, and Yeniseian languages, among others. I would be reticent to describe these groups as Turkic by appearance.
The only reason I go in on this is because Pan-Turkists also like to make overrepresented claims about their connections to these people groups. Sometimes this even extends to native Americans.
"You are technically correct. The best kind of correct" (c).
Uralic situation is more complex though, both in terms of geographical Europe/Asia (much of Uralic spread is west of Ural!) and in terms of typical facial anatomy, so I went for the more obvious examples. As for Yeniseian, those quickly near extinction: the only living language is Ket, and there are ~1100 Ket people and 153 Ket speakers by the last census.
True enough that most of these languages aren't putting up the numbers of e.g. Bashkirs, though the Turkic languages as well as Buryats and Kalmyks are seeing declines in fluency as well. If it were just race we were talking about, linguistic decline wouldn't be a relevant factor.
I wonder how edge cases like Bashkirs are considered in the US demographic system (if at all?). Striding the Urals, many looking more European, many looking more Asian. In the end I suppose it comes down to whichever the immigrant chose to identify with - I have Filipino friends who identify as Asian, Pacific Islander (when they are split), Hispanic, and White. Turkic ethnicities are one of the hundreds of glaring cases revealing the lack of reality of those categories, with the "Turk-ness" generally being tracked by language more than blood.
Well, as someone who actually lived in Russia and looked at all this, you are definitely more likely to lump together a Turkic-/Tungusic-/Mongolic-looking person with Chinese and Japanese than with anyone else. For instance, we have both Uzbeks and Tajiks as gastarbeiters (immigrant workers, often illegal or quazi-legal), and, well, the difference is striking once you start to look for it: Tajiks are Iranian, they look like Iranians and Indians; Uzbeks wouldn't look too out of place in China. Not to deny that there still are significant differences (population groups are fractal!) and certain intersections, but in the widest sense, there is a relatively clear (but see below) divide. That may explain why in Russia, the term "Mongoloid" still remains popular: there just isn't a short alternative handle for "indigenous Siberian and non-Iranian Central Asian peoples, Chinese, Japanese, Corean, and Native American, who all look similar with their narrow eyes and glistening skin" (Pacific Islanders would also belong here, but, of course, they are rarely seen in Russia _or_ in the media usually available in Russia).
And then, of course, many of Russia-dwelling peoples are actually what would be called "mixed-race" in American context: some of their ancestors are Turkic or adjacent, some are Slavic (and in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, there would similarly be mixed children of Turkic and Iranian peoples).
Hmm, do descendants of Genghis Khan form a noticeable subgroup?
Of Genghis Khan personally? I doubt that. Of wider Mongolic spread? Yes, Kalmyk (Mongolic people found in Caspian steppe) is the most obvious example.
Many Thanks!
>Of Genghis Khan personally? I doubt that.
I was surprised too.
>By the classical definitions of evolutionary fitness, Genghis Khan is among history's elite. The Mongolian ruler reportedly sired hundreds of children with a great variety of women—a feat of genetic propagation which echoes even today in the 8% of Asian men who still retain a nearly identical version of Genghis's Y chromosome.
( from https://www.science.org/content/article/genghis-khan-not-only-man-leave-huge-genetic-footprint )
and 8% is sometimes large enough to be a noticeable subgroup...
I mean, maybe genetic analysis would bring it out, but it isn't like it would be sufficiently written on their face.
> Who would call a Russian "Asian"?
Someone in Central Europe who is openly racist and also really hates Russians.
Speaking as someone who is ethnically-Chinese, I completely disagree that we view ourselves as being a separate race to Japanese people. I see myself as East Asian, and I get the same impression from the other East Asians I know. The really artificial grouping comes when you combine South Asians, East Asians and Pacific Islanders into the same group.
Where on South "East Asian" stops? Are Vietnamese included?
Vietnamese would be Southeast Asians in modern terminology, or Indochinese (meaning exactly the same thing, the region between India and China) in older terminology.
Historically they were heavily Sinicized in a way that the rest of Southeast Asia wasn't, but they were still obviously part of a cultural grouping with the rest of Southeast Asia.
There's the Sinicization you mention. There's also Mahayana Buddhism historically predominating in Vietnam and China, while the rest of mainland Southeast Asia was predominantly Theravada.
What important things does Vietnamese culture have in common with all or much of the rest of Southeast Asia? I think of the language family and the European-colonization-to-civil-war trajectory, but I take your comment to imply longstanding similarities in social behavior, and I simply know too little about this region to identify them.
It varies, but in my experience younger Asian-Americans, specifically second+ generation, do identify with "Asian" as a group. The Chinese hostility towards the Japanese is definitely real, but I think it's a much smaller factor for more Americanized Asians.
Gardens are a source of interest in this way. We have a sunken garden here, the whim of a single parks department chief and a couple of assistants and some convicts circa WW1, created out of a disused quarry when, uh, Asian style was fashionable as part of I guess the Arts and Crafts movement. It's kinda cool if not perfectly successful, it being hard or impossible to grow things and create shade out of bedrock
It was called the Japanese Tea Garden and they managed to locate a Japanese guy who worked at the US Army base and installed him and his family to run the tea house concession.
By WW2 sentiment apparently dictated that these incumbents leave and be replaced by a Chinese family.* The name of the garden was changed to "Chinese Sunken Garden".
In the 80s with feeling about identity politics shifting to the treatment of Japanese the original name was restored - although the sign over the entry remains "Chinese Sunken Garden" because it was executed in an entirely local Mexican variant of "faux-bois" born of all the quarrying hereabouts, examples of which craft are fiercely preserved.
The name was perhaps less important than that it had been allowed to deteriorate, but a big fundraising campaign spruced it up.
The best feature is a shade pavilion thatched in palm, probably when originally done, from the state's only native palm.
I thought of all this when I visited the wonderful Bellingrath Gardens and found that one of their more recent additions was one of these gardens - what used to be called either a Japanese or an "oriental garden" - and it less successful than other parts of the garden, which goes to show that it's best not to try for everything, perhaps; but what was funny was that they had met the dilemma of what to call it, with utter panic, and settled on "Asian-American Garden" lol.
*We are very changeable and hot-tempered down here. For instance, when Robert E. Lee rode through town, having left his post at Fort Mason, in order to resign his commission, the locals stripped him of his uniform. I can't remember if they did so just because he was still Union-garbed and they were already Confederate sympathizers - but I doubt it, rather, there being a lot of federal troops here and to the west, and otherwise mostly Germans and a few Mexicans; or if they did so because they were mad at the sight of him, knowing what he was about to do. I'm sure these facts are known but the takeaway is always the same, it's a quarrelsome, rather stupid breed.
My problem with "Asian" is that everyone seems to think of East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) when it often means Indian and in my experience that's rarely what people think about.
South Asian at least should be its own category, even if we're being extremely broad.
Especially when you get US-UK crossover in readership, that seems to be the big gap in what constitutes Asian.
Or if you have geologists in your readership, considering tectonic plates... :-)
I try to avoid un-modified "Asian", except when talking about US Census-type stuff. East, South, Southeast, and Central all seem to work as modifiers. Not sure what to do about the islands between Asia and Australia, though.
There’s a good case to be made, in terms of both continents and cultural regions, that Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia are five separate subcontinents attached to Central Asia.
Culturally speaking, the islands between Asia and Australia are nearly all populated by speakers of austronesian languages (as is the southern tip of mainland Southeast Asia), though there are major cultural differences between the Philippines, Malaysia/indonesia, New Guinea, and the rest of the pacific islands.
Great point, I strongly agree with that five-"continent" framing. Notably, all the other continents have around 0.5-1 billion people, and Asia has 4.6 billion.
And also, that model almost perfectly coincides with historical religion as well, respectively Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism.
(If you exclude Japan).
For what it's worth, last month there was a post on Moly’s Substack (https://weibo.substack.com/p/040624-you-know-how-expensive-it) where the US Govt's decision to split the "Asian" category into more distinct ones was interpreted by many Chinese-American commenters as a prelude to a planned genocide, no less.
Wowwwww... just wow.
I think this experience is way less common now. I’ve never met a Chinese person who hates Japan and I’ve met quite a few who quite like it.
Borrowing descriptivist words, I think Asian as someone from the continent really isn't useful anymore (or ever been), because it tries to unite too much people that have nothing to do with each other. It's like "African" trying to unite people from Tunis, Nigeria, and South Africa, but even worse. So, Asian meaning East Asian (or South Asian as someone from UK said), is the most appropriate meaning it can has, and tons of people have unconsciously use it like so.
The idea that companies don't hire based on merit is ludicrous. Every person we hire spends 8 hours being interviewed and quizzed. This was true at my last five companies. Two of them had more than 20k employees and four were U.S. owned and based. Even before my post-college career, it was clear that hiring was based either on ability or potential. If you aren't being hired based on ability then you are applying for a job that requires none.
What kind of engineering? I didn't say that it was 8 hours of quizzing for all STEM positions. I said it was 8 hours of quizzing for all Semiconductor Engineering positions I have familiarity with. I did not say that anecdotes are useless. If your position is that "X is true everywhere" and I can show you that "X is not true here," then you should consider that "X is not, in fact true everywhere."
Scotts post suggested that it was no longer possible to hire based on merit. One counterfactual should make you question that claim. I was providing that. I do not believe that every company works the way I have described. The later post where I was objecting to anecdotes was objecting to using them establish a universal theory.
I think you haven't quite digested Scott's statement of Hanania's point the way it was intended. Neither is trying to say that nobody hires based on merit anymore. The point is that, since it can be construed as technically illegal to hire on merit, the regulators have a broad ability to prosecute anybody they want. So, in fact, everybody is still hiring based on merit, mostly, but also doing as much supposed woke signaling and under-the-table discrimination as they can, to try and avoid the prosecution that everybody is vulnerable to.
Showing that organizations still hire based on merit reinforces their point, rather than weakening it.
Unlike many of Scott's posts, I found it somewhat difficult to determine where he actually stands on the issue. He did say, "It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit." This was what I was objecting to. I think it is at least an overstatement and possibly completely false. We have had a substantial part of the commenters state that their company hires based on merit. Are all those companies just playing Russian roulette with enforcement? Seems unlikely. My _suspicion_ is that the same people who especially dislike DEI also distrust the government and are thus assuming that it is government and not corporate decisions that are driving many DEI hiring decisions. This isn't to say that enforcement has no effect. And, it is just a suspicion.
EEOC only filed 25 systemic discrimination suits last year (and 13 in 2022). This does not seem like much of a deterrent.
US only dropped two nukes on Japan ever. This does not seem like much of a deterrent.
I don't think he's saying that no merit is involved, just that it doesn't go as far as it used to in some industries.
What industry are you in?
Semiconductor, specifically design but hiring process is pretty similar for the other technical positions as well. I have not been involved in hiring administrative or other nontechnical staff.
As I said in the post, I think there might be a tech industry exception, though I don't know how much semiconductors resemble other tech companies.
There definitely used to be a tech industry exception - or rather the tech industry was flagrantly violating CR hiring rules and getting away with it because it was so new and shiny and prestigious. Google's famous interview questions were thinly disguised IQ tests and other companies had similar practices. Of course the result was massive disparate impact. However, Griggs vs Duke Power Co does allow employers to use tests narrowly tailored for the job, and possibly EEOC bureaucrats could not figure out how to argue that coding-based tests like Google's are not legitimate or that hiring good software engineers is not a compelling enough business interest to set aside disparate impact requirements.
I don't think the EEOC is being disingenuous when they think a company is discriminating. Their perspective is coming from the side that sees actual discrimination, often hidden behind convenient stories. Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
That said, I don't think the EEOC has an actual problem with merit tests like Google having someone write code for a coding job. They have a real problem with mission-creep tests (like requiring that coding test for lower level employees) or anything that might be a hidden way to discriminate.
I think they also have some true-believer "woke" types that really think that any disparate impact is hidden discrimination, but for legal reasons this is significantly less prevalent than in other "woke-adjacent" contexts.
> Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
...which was quite adequately remedied at the appeals court level. The plaintiffs got everything they could have reasonably wanted. But the EEOC didn't want to fix the problem they were ostensibly suing over; they wanted to use it as a premise to push their social agenda, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, and we ended up with one of the most damaging rulings in history.
I wrote about this in some detail last year: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/the-most-significant-case-youve-never
Also, if tech hiring is biased in any direction then it's primarily away from white people (and towards Asian/Indian people) so EEOC doesn't care so much.
Does it matter? The market fixes this over time, for reasons discussed above.
The old Microsoft and Google questions (The IQ Brain Teasers) were bad interview questions. The switch to normal testing of skills that happened in the industry was better.
Bad in what way?
As someone who worked at Google 2006-2009:
At least at that time, nothing like that kind of IQ Brain Teaser questions were ever used. It was pretty much 100% coding tasks.
The fact that the exact same questions were attributed to Microsoft earlier makes me pretty sure this is a viral myth that spreads because it's good story, not because it's true.
Oh, did you mean questions like "how many marbles fit inside a whale"? I meant exactly the coding quiz. Develop a priority heap on a blackboard, leetcode problems using twisted dynamic programming and other tricks, stuff like that. Speaking from experience, in practical software work you need to solve problems like that maybe once a year. Most often you just get an existing solution from the virtual shelf, or at worst implement an algorithm from a book.
I heard (at Samsung, from people fleeing Intel) that Samsung was still meritocratic in this way / the nepotism was all pro-Korean nationals in a way that totally ignored American racial categories, but that Intel had 'gone woke' in its hiring / promotion.
Because at the American fab, approximately none of the local hiring pool is Koreans, and so it's only relevant if you're trying to get very high up the corporate ladder.
Also because if some foreign-headquartered companies discriminate in favor of the nationality of their origin, that results in discrimination at various different directions at different companies, and (even if there is more such discrimination in favor of some groups than others, which is likely) yet other companies, such as domestic ones, practice no such discrimination, and (if they weren't incentivized to practice affirmation either) they would provide employment opportunities to whoever isn't favored at any of the foreign companies. That has much less overall effect on anyone's employment prospects than government-incentivized affirmative action all in favor of the same groups everywhere.
Ah, yes, the infallible Hanania “golden gut”. The anti-empiricism in the book is the tell-he is just writing another propaganda piece, designed to advance his priors. Sort of like Chris Rico, without the smarts or glibness.
Did you mean to write "Chris Rufo"?
Seems like one of those phenomena like Bullshit Jobs where everyone is certain it's happening, just not in their own job or anything they have direct experience with, but someone out there definitely
You can believe me or not, but I just got an email from someone in a pretty important field saying that affirmative actions and de facto quotas definitely happen there but they're too scared to post it publicly even under a pseudonym.
I used to work for a major DoD agency where the recruiters bragged about how many minority candidates they were able to attract … way beyond what would be proportionate.
There were obvious pressure and incentives to do well at that, and merely having the proportionate minimum would make one less competitive for promotions and such. Gotta exceed the standard!
There’s a whole little industry of recruiting companies that specialize in helping minority candidates land great tech jobs by finding and coaching them (veterans are also a legal minority here.) The companies really want qualified minorities for legal reasons if nothing else.
There are both material incentives and ideological motivations in play here for both any given org’s leadership and HR types. But those aren’t entirely separate variables because they feed off each other.
Do you really find an email from a random person to be convincing here? The people I see complaining about affirmative action at work are people who see less experienced/competent minorities doing better than them. However, the reason they, themselves, don't excel tends to be some mix of laziness, unreliability and antisocial behaviors. Their vehemence in objecting to affirmative action seems to be mostly a means to downplay their own shortcomings.
I think you're doing the bulverizing thing again - I've heard this from lots of different people, including hiring directors, and the person who sent the email seemed pretty successful. See also all the comments on this post; the above comment seems like an outlier.
The pattern you describe would also be present if there was a real, widely-known problem, but the people with more social skills and better impulse control were being proportionately more careful not to admit it anywhere a snitch might overhear. What sort of experiment would effectively distinguish those hypotheses?
I can vouch for that happening at a small federal contractor. We were told to track race of applicants and present that information upon demand. The implications were clear, even if not spelled out, and we followed through on hiring racial minorities as much as we were able.
Oh it is definitely happening in my world where I provide subcontractor consulting for the federal government a lot (for larger firms) and get involved in a lot of hiring at cities and states and to some extent the federal civil service.
I don't doubt you that someone said that. But as it doesn't match my own experience I have to doubt whether that person is reporting accurately, or whether their experience reflects general prevalence
The general problem with arguments that there's a large group of people who would agree but aren't saying anything is that they're unfalsifiable. Like false consciousness or a silent majority. The same evidence can be equally explained by a small number of people reporting who assume their experience generalizes.
It's obviously hard to definitively prove one way or the other of people are unwilling to speak publicly. Maybe a sufficiently anonymized survey would get at that? I imagine someone must have done one on a relevant question given how much of a hot political topic it has been
A corporate lawyer friend told me about layoffs at a big company.
It was made very clear that those let go had to conform to racial quotas.
...wat
That you don't see this all the time everywhere confuses me.
Everything Hanania wrote is direct experience of mine. I've lived in several of the United States including two major parts of CA.
That you go further and claim it's illusory just makes me question whether you're being sincere.
I have personally witnessed it in the software industry.
We all have. That's why when someone claims it doesn't exist, we all go:
...wat
Sadly, there's rampant gaslighting going on on the subject of political topics these days, *and also* a very broad diversity of personal experiences, so either one is plausible and consistent with the facts.
Doesn't reflect my experience in either government or private sector. Though I'm not in California, which is plausibly an outlier on this given wider cultural trends. Also just general random selection, it's hard to get a sense of prevalence when we're just trading n=1 anecdotes.
When you say you see it everywhere what specifically are you seeing? I
I'm seeing extremely obvious and not-at-all-veiled hints that females, blacks, and latinos should be prioritised for hiring.
I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.
If me hearing about this sort of thing in all those places still somehow is so distant from your own personal experience that you'd qualify it as bullshit that people are making up... I just don't know what to say.
Admittedly, it seems they all have an oversized presence in California, and if somehow this phenomenon is 90% CA, and you've somehow never spoken to anyone who's ever experienced CA, I could see your ignorance of this being a distant possibility. But I also struggle to think that something that's nearly ubiquitous in CA is completely absent in the rest of the USA.
You're missing a gigantic chunk of what's happening to something like 90% of the populace. You might consider getting some information from outside your filter bubble, or talking to someone in one of those megacorps.
It really seems weird to me that he didn’t list academia as another example where people are so dedicated to getting their first choice rather than the second choice that they are willing to pay hugely for it. The prevalence of H1B visas and major international recruitment is a major sign.
There is huge racial and gender bias towards favored groups (racial minorities except Asians; women) in hiring in academia. International hiring is a sign that it's a global market, not that it's cut-throat meritocracy.
I mean this stuff is clearly happening in education, where admissions criteria have been getting progressively mushier (although in recent months a few schools have started bringing the SAT back) and the FAA thing is real. You also have stuff like this going on (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/seattle-tests-prospective-fire-lieutenants-woke-ideology-critical-race-theory-report).
I've seen Bullshit Jobs happening before my eyes, too.
I can name multiple people with BS jobs in my direct vicinity. I'd be surprised if most people can't.
There’s a lot of people that people like to classify as bullshit jobs. Many people think of their own job as bullshit. But this is just Marx’s phenomenon of alienation, happening to white collar jobs now rather than just blue collar ones. Marx noted that step 17 of the assembly line for widgets doesn’t feel meaningful, and the same is true for email 346 in the compliance process. But that’s just because assembly lines and compliance processes are designed to get the job done, not to make the people doing the job (or the people around them) understand that what they’re doing matters.
Only the top 0.1% of society can derive “meaning” from their work because they’re the only ones who have enough money to cover every need imaginable. The other 99.9% have to give up on meaning or find it in a different area, such as spirituality.
This was true for the past 10 thousand years and will stay true as long as we have something resembling our current society.
Rather than announce “Mission accomplished” and go find other work, the triumphant forces of the civil rights bureaucracy became instead the scourge of ever more esoteric forms of discrimination, such as disparate impact, hostile environment due to mean speech, sexual harassment, and disability access. They increasingly intervened in the American workplace in favor of complaining members of protected groups, which cultivated a culture of complaint.
Meanwhile, center-right judges, such as Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell in the 1978 Bakke decision, banned simple, obvious methods to promote now-privileged groups such as outright quotas in favor of more occluded “goals,” with enforcement largely by lawsuits, public and private. This had the unintended result of making affirmative action, almost always a political loser for Democrats, less politically salient. Hanania notes:
Only when civil rights law cannot stealthily prefer some groups over others does it do so openly.
Over time, Democrats figured out that it was in their interest for corporations to be uncertain what exactly the governments’ rules are regarding race and sex. This avoided making clear to voters, who, even in California remain strongly opposed to racial preferences, how much of a thumb the government was putting on the scale.
The government tries to keep the public confused. For example, Hanania writes:
"The “EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] Is the Law” poster that a firm is required to place in a conspicuous place informs its workers, among other things, that “Executive Order 11246, as amended, prohibits job discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and requires affirmative action to ensure equality of opportunity in all aspects of employment.” In other words, major American institutions are required to declare within the same sentence both that they do not discriminate and that they practice affirmative action…. To do business with the federal government, one must participate in rituals that both legitimize the goals of the state while hiding the nature of the project."
Likewise, while the press constantly reprints plaintiff attorney’s arguments alleging discrimination against blacks based on dubious disparate impact allegations, the media mostly only reports on institutionalized racial discrimination against whites every five or ten years when a college admissions lawsuit makes it to the Supreme Court. So it is easy for the average American to remain oblivious to how the system works.
I was about to reply: "This needs to be a top-level post somewhere." Then I noticed your name. You probably did make this a top-level post somewhere. If not, I can't wait to see your post on this topic in the near future!
I wrote a long review of The Origins of Woke last year:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-business-of-diversity/
My view also. Also, I work in civil service and the idea that hiring is not based on merit is laughable. In fact, I have never witnessed a racial preference occurring in action.
I’m in the federal civil service (US), and hiring is on merit. Ive never seen anyone hired who wasn’t deemed qualified at the point of hire. Not everyone works out, of course. Just like the private sector.
I did and I have.
My former agency was extremely concerned about imbalances in its minority and gender status and took specific steps to try fixing it. Having recruiters disproportionately focus on hiring minorities is a form of racial preference.
Some parts of government, like the Foreign Service, still have a testing regime similar to the classic one. Of course, so did the FAA and that didn’t turn out well.
Getting rid of the civil service exams lowered the ability to select on people good at testing. Inasmuch as you believe the well-established correlations between standardized testing, general intelligence, and job performance, you’ll be proportionately concerned.
It’s usually not the case that any given employer blatantly jettisons merit. The problem being alleged is more subtle than that.
The more difficult but more defensible options include actively advertising where you believe black applicants may see it, and ensuring (sometimes explicitly as policy, usually not) that black applicants make it to the interview.
Legally and morally, that's much better than an actual quota system, but it will put pressure on everyone involved to nudge a qualified-but-perhaps-not-as-much candidate over someone else. Whether this is a problem depends on your perspective, but it appears Hanania thinks so.
IDK, going from "Civil Rights laws indirectly cause companies to inefficiently allocate HR money advertising at HBCU" to "Civil Rights legislation undermined hiring for merit" seems like a motte and bailey to me.
Both have absolutely happened, though. The more straightforward is just to tell your hiring managers to select black applicants, but that's often too obvious. The less obvious way is to try to influence the candidate pool, but it takes a lot more work and may not actually result in additional qualified black applicants, so some companies don't rest their laurels on that approach.
From my view from slightly outside the civil service this claim is just laughably silly at several federal departments. I don't know maybe you work at a different one, the federal government is a big place. But in my area the diversity hiring/promotion is extremely noticeable, to the extent that the small number of white male staff often end up leaving.
Merit is important, but other factors are clearly taken into consideration. I used to interview candidates for software engineering roles. Usually I would do an interview with another colleague, and at the end we'd give our manager a thumbs up or thumbs down for a candidate.
I recall one case where we interviewed a guy from an underrepresented group, and both of us gave a thumbs down. The next week I was surprised to see him sitting at a desk because he'd been hired. I approached the manager just to make sure there wasn't a miscommunication in our interview feedback, and he just sort of shrugged it off and said he thought the guy was a good fit. It wasn't a meritless hire--he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed.
I can't really say I blame the manager. We were in a client-facing consultancy group, and some potential clients do like to see diversity on a team.
I think cases like this are much more common than either completely ignoring race or merit. Assuming your interview process matches my experience of software interviews, it's not that surprising that the manager might review the feedback with more detail especially since you use the awkward phrase "he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed" and if I were the hiring manager and that was in the feedback I'd definitely consider collecting more information before passing on that candidate (this is based on both existing EEOC law as well as my personal morality opinions on diversity).
How big is the company?
I said 20k employees in my comment. One was 30K when I started but only 6k when I left (19 years later). The other was actually closer to 18K when I started and trimmed down to maybe 16k before it was acquired.
In most government service, your vita won't even be considered if you don't have the professional background required for the post. This is why some who work in civil service are annoyed when politicians make appointments based solely on one's racial or ethnic or otherwise privileged identity -- with little regard for qualifications.
President Biden has dissed the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding so-called 'affirmative action', and has made cabinet appointments clearly based on social identity, rather than competence. Whether his choice to hire staff whose identity is more important than their qualifications remains to be seen. But voters do notice.
Which cabinet appointments didn’t seem qualified for their job?
Well, the big obvious one is the Secretary of Transportation, who had no relevant experience in transportation, and proved it by sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing while a significant transportation disaster contaminated an American town.
Ones who had relevant experience but notably proved their utter unfitness for the role during the past few years include the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, and the Attorney General.
I think that the argument that representational concerns have eroded merit considerations for hiring on the margins in some fields is plausible, but I agree with you that the widespread persistence of test-like screening and interview processes in a lot of major industries at least somewhat undermines a lot of arguments about the scale of the impact of Griggs v Duke. Now, as Scott notes, a lot of firms that do this are in high revenue-per-employee industries and can afford to lawyer up, but it’s worth noting that their lucrativeness also increases the potential financial rewards for successful litigation. The fact that the sources of the biggest potential anti-discrimination lawsuit jackpots aren’t really worried about this should probably lead us to update.
How widespread? I've been in the tech industry for a good long time, and changed jobs rather frequently, as is standard practice in this industry, and not once have I been given an IQ-style test as a part of the interview process, even in the one sector that's been specifically called out as an outlier where these things allegedly do still happen. (Even more specific coding-skill tests are relatively rare in my experience.)
I've had to do programming exercises, but nothing like the standardized tests I took before applying to college.
Weird-- literally every technical-flavored job I've ever applied for has made me do some sort of coding or math assessment-- sometimes an interview where you answer brainteasers, sometimes a timed programming test, sometimes a technical interview, sometimes a homework assignment which involves a more complex task. These don't necessarily look like an IQ-style test, but the tasks involved are generally difficult enough to impose an effective IQ floor in practice. (Intelligence alone isn't sufficient to get through, but it usually is necessary.) I work in finance, but my friends who work as software engineers at large tech companies universally report having gone through similar assessment processes-- at least as long as they're applying for individual contributor rather than management-level jobs.
Who mentioned IQ tests?
This is because giving an IQ test would be a terrible way to interview software engineers compared to the normal suite of coding/design interviews (the current suite is not the best possible and I expect changes as both the technologies involved change and people game the interview system but I'd much rather have a random SWE conduct a random LEET code whiteboard problem than have a IQ test administered by the best tester when choosing which engineer to hire)
This seems like a valid take. Also, I know nothing about EEOC, but the fact that they only filed suit against 25 companies last year ( for systemic discrimination) suggests that fear of lawsuits may be overstated as the cause for the trends we are seeing.
I think you may be missing how deterrence works.
I have had to do two "test like" things for a job ever. Once where they gave us a paid for two week training course and then tested everyone to see how much they learned (I think just about everyone passed), and once where it was literally a "can you use excel at a basic level" test.
That is it.
How do you explain the fact that certain large teams at big American companies somehow wind up getting staffed entirely by Indians or Chinese?
Employment discrimination surely _is_ a thing, which various merit-based assessments attempt to lessen but do not eradicate. Plenty of places for bias, whether subconscious or overt, to sneak in.
Employment discrimination is a thing. On the other hand, Fully staffing Chinese and/or Indians would violate DEI. You are supposed to mimic the makeup of the general population and having enough protected groups is usually the concern. Neither East Indian nor Chinese are protected. Like my company (which hires outsized although still less than 5% from both groups), they are hired because they are cheap and capable of doing the job (which in our case involves an EE degree and solid technical skills)
Employment discrimination is a thing. On the other hand, Fully staffing Chinese and/or Indians would violate DEI. You are supposed to mimic the makeup of the general population and having enough protected groups is usually the concern. Neither East Indian nor Chinese are protected. Like my company (which hires outsized although still less than 5% from both groups), they are hired because they are cheap and capable of doing the job (which in our case involves an EE degree and solid technical skills)
I've been waiting for a review of this, and it really sounds like a rehash of Christopher Caldwell's "The Age of Entitlement" - although in that book, Caldwell goes into detail about the judicial decisions and city/state policies that progressive legal activists just sort of made up.
There's some more detail in the book, which I've avoided for reasons of space.
That was also my impression, and I believe Hanania said that only people who haven't actually read Caldwell's book think that, which is fair enough in my case.
I just read it like a month ago 🤷♂️ but haven't read Hanania's new book yet. His one about foreign policy was a pretty good read, and I'm likely to pick this one up.
I'm curious about that foreign policy book. It was my impression that it was a kind of critical public choice approach but in recent months he's warmed up to Pax Americana and intervention
Yes, I found it especially weird how he was mocking social science as a bunch of fakery dressing up lefty biases and now accepts the exact sort of study he used to mock.
He used to be very much against the West helping Ukraine. I don't know if he has changed there.
Yeah, he's pro-Ukraine now. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/steelmanning-support-for-ukraine
That post was somewhat equivocal, but in his tweets he has been more overtly pro https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1782429588355977234
I was curious and clicked the link, but...
> I don’t think there is any doubt that the country would have been better off surrendering a good chunk of territory and pledging not to join NATO in order to avoid a war.
Is this guy living on the same planet? Last time I checked, it was the ex-Soviet countries which joined NATO that avoided a war, and the ones who didn't join NATO (including those who never even had such ambition in the first place) that have various degrees of military conflict with Russia.
Anyway, later in the article he goes "Do I Believe All This? I’m not fully convinced by this argument." So what was the point?
To me the entire article seems like a rhetorical exercise. "Look here, I can steelman the argument of my opponents... I even admit that it has a few good points such as 'respecting existing borders is a good rule in general'... but ultimately it is unconvincing." He signals that he can be charitable, it's just that in his opinion his opponents do not really have a strong point to make.
(Which is a consequence of how he constructed the steelman. Steelmaning is different from passing an ideological Turing test.)
I think I just "got" the title of that book - title IX, etc.? - which I did read or heavily skim. I think a better title might have helped though.
Thanks for writing this. It captures one of my greatest frustrations with Hanania's thesis, which is how it gets the causality completely the wrong way round, i.e. mistakes cause for effect. Everything in the book refutes his basic point. Civil rights law so clearly emerged out of the broader ideological context of America at that time, and is in fact the legal, formal manifestation of the ideology. The law had to be made in racially neutral way for political reasons, but the rationale/premise for Civil Rights law was always rooted in a deeper and specifically pro-black ideology, which neatly dictated the way the law was actually implemented by activist judges and bureaucrats irl. Idea created law, not the other way round.
Hanania even explains this to the reader himself!
“When faced with undeniable evidence in the plain text of the law and historical record, judges have appealed to the higher purpose of the statute. By passing the Civil Rights Act, Congress meant to help black people, so the “purpose” of the law can supposedly allow disparate treatment by race in order to achieve equal results.”
And “Laws are not supposed to be blank checks for courts and bureaucrats to seek out their preferred policy outcomes. Alfred Blumrosen, an official who worked for the EEOC in its early days, wrote with unusual candor about how the agency sought to get around the plain meaning of the law, as he and his allies preferred to see civil rights statutes more as broad “charters for equality” than explicit rules about what government can and cannot do.”
Sounds like ideas > law!
Yeah it seems to me that woke is basically a cultural identity version of marxism based on darwinistic assumptions of life as a zero-sum battleground for competing groups, starting from the level of DNA and going all the way up
Postmodernism dissolved previous systems of understanding the world within universities leaving the petri dish wide open for the woke memetic complex to run rampant
Rather than simply ban critical race theory from 5th grade math classrooms we should carefully design a rich and balanced examination of the concept for high schools, where the arguments against critical theory are carefully constructed and focus group tested for being satisfying and convincing
Marxism = workers controlling the means of production, and I don't think civil rights law gives black people the ownership of the companies that they work for.
Marxism is the belief that the economy is a zero sum struggle between hostile groups, giving workers the means of production was the remedy
Not at all; that's communism.
Marxism is a totalizing moral framework built on axioms of atheism and philosophical materialism, designed to oppose and compete with the traditional Judeo-Christian moral worldview. Communism is an economic system that Marx built on top of these views on morality, but there's far more to Marxism than simply economics.
"the traditional Judeo-Christian moral worldview."
there is no such thing.
Philosophical materialism and atheism are compatible with _many_ different sets of preferences and (where applicable) moral or ethical systems. Ayn Rand would have been quite surprised to see Marxism singled out.
Rand was a Soviet emigrant who brought all her cultural baggage along with her. She stridently fought against communist economics while uncritically accepting virtually all of its philosophical underpinnings. Objectivism is very thoroughly Marxist at its core; all it really does is take a few highly specific points, such as communism and the need to subvert the needs of the individual to the greater good of the collective group, and turn them on their head in a mirror-image extreme.
Rand is anti-Marxist like antimatter is anti-matter or woke leftists are anti-racist and anti-fascist: exactly the same in every way, except for a few specific properties, where they're exactly the same except for being oriented in the polar opposite direction.
Nor communism, nor Marxism, is about believing the economy is a zero-sum game.
Marxism is one of many ideologies that have this zero-sum belief about the economy.
They're clearly moving in that direction with the drive for "equity" over "equality." California's even passed laws seeking to require that private companies have certain racial and sexual quotas for their boards of directors.
Marxism is not the only form of socialism.
Racial and sexual quotas in boardrooms have nothing to do with worker control of the means of production. Marxism would be if every employee was a member of the board of directors.
Couldn't workers just select representatives for a much smaller board even under Marxism?
This would also be acceptable, but less fun
Which are totally unenforceable at the moment, since one or more board members can just say "I'm bisexual, prove otherwise".
I think that woke and Marxism are very opposed in some central ways. Marxism is a materialist philosophy that believes that social class is determined by relationship to the means of production, and that it is morally important for the workers to be in charge because they produce the value. Wokeness believes that social class is just one of many aspects of identity, and that all are interlocked in distinctive struggles and oppressions, with ideology and culture much more central than anything material.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this sub-topic, what you're describing is communism, which is an economic system built atop the foundation of Marxism. Wokeness takes the basic concepts of communism as a struggle between the oppressed class and the oppressor class, and applies them to identitarian categories rather than communism's categories of employers and employees, but it's all the same Marxist philosophy underneath.
It is heavily inspired by it, but it’s diametrically opposed in many ways. It’s not one oppressor/oppressed dynamic through history, it’s now multiple intersecting and interacting ones. Economic oppression is no longer primary. Saying these are the same is like saying that Marxism is the same as hegelianism, or that Georgism is the same as capitalism, or that Islam is the same as Christianity.
The dyed-in-the-wool communists hate wokism precisely because it replaces class struggle with something else. Wokism and Marxism are not the same, as you say, but they burn the same fuel and, in that sense, are quite similar
As an aside, I suspect Hanania's take is pretty clearly motivated by his libertarianism, which biases him towards identifying government as the culprit for the thing he doesn't like.
Correct.
And it’s the correct bias. Because it is a bias toward the truth.
Even if you don’t realize this until you are older and wiser 😏
I think his point is that Idea > Law > Push to the broader culture. That Push portion is what he seems to be calling Woke, rather than the underlying ideology. Using Civil Rights laws, the left that already believed in it was able to get corporate buy in and enforcement.
I think thats the strongman of his point, but thats not at all the way Hanania presents it, as noted by Scott himself: "The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”"
That sounds to me that Hanania does present it as Mr Doolittle suggests: ‘the cultural package of Woke’ doesn’t mean ‘some people have Woke ideas’, it means ‘the culture has Woke elements that people fit in with whether they themselves have Woke ideas or not.’
It seems like instead of The Origins of Woke, the title should be The Origins of Woke HR Departments. The ideas were already in the groundwater by the 1960s through a long winding road of political, cultural and religious influences. Civil rights law doesn't seem to address how activists and intellectuals constructed these ideas, but why companies and college admissions offices pretend to care more about it than they really do.
Agreed
Good point.
>The ideas were already in the groundwater by the 1960s
A peripherally related chronological question:
I have dim memories from childhood that affirmative action was sold as a _temporary_ measure on the route to a colorblind society - and then it never went away. Does anyone else know if I'm remembering correctly or incorrectly?
The 1979 case United Steelworkers v. Weber case judged whether it was constitutional to implement a quota where 50% of workers admitted to a training program had to be black. The holding declared that "the plan is a temporary measure, not intended to maintain racial balance, but simply to eliminate a manifest racial imbalance."
~25 years later, in 2003, Sandra Day O'Conner argued that race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time" and that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today."
Many Thanks!
That's like saying the Soviet Union wasn't communist in 1985 because the government persecuted opposition to communism, but because Marx invented communism in the 1800s. Partly true, but uninteresting. The reason the USSR had anywhere near as many communists for anywhere near as long as it did was that the government enforced it. And the best way to make the USSR less communist was to have the government stop forcing people to profess to be communists.
If we are talking about cause and effect, there is definitely causation in both directions. Ideas → law → more ideas → more law (or stricter enforcement thereof) → more ideas...
If we are talking about origins (as the book's title does), you have more of a point. But even then, if we define wokeness as the more recent and extreme excesses, rather than any racially progressive ideology, it's quite plausible that those wouldn't have gained any significant traction without the culture partly created by the laws.
Right on, his thesis seems tortured at best.
One model for this: a small number of motivated people can get laws passed. These laws then have broader practical and cultural effects across society. The intent of the book under review is to assemble a coalition of individuals willing to push to overturn the law, and (presumably) undo the broader impacts.
This is crudely similar to how we might think about e.g. laws that impose tariffs to protect small numbers of producers.
>Transgender people in particular weren’t covered under civil rights law until 2020, and they still don’t get some of the most-sought benefits like affirmative action.
What sort of affirmative-action applies to some groups but not to transgender people? Is the assumption that identifying as transgender doesn't up ones chances of e.g. admission into a college?
I think, though I'm not sure, that companies are required to report their percent black, Asian, female etc, and will get sued if it's so low that the EEOC thinks it's worth accusing them of discrimination. But they're not required to report percent trans.
I'm not an expert and this could be wrong.
This: "will get sued" is obviously not true. The EEOC filed exactly 143 discrimination lawsuits last year. Only 25 of them are systemic. Are you contending that there are only 25 (or 143) companies in the U.S. without population-equal racial distributions? I find it puzzling that your usual skepticism seems so diminished on some topics.
Are Americans so used now to ordinary crime such as open-air drug use, vehicle break-ins or shoplifting going unpunished that they find it difficult to imagine certain punishment for white-collar crime such as discriminatory hiring? Good heavens. Are you aware that companies have legal departments and/or retain legal services to tell them exactly what they must be doing to avoid getting sued by EEOC (among other agencies)? They pay big money for this. Of course there won't be many suits.
Actually, the logic is here is that a company can't guarantee they avoid getting sued. They are all constantly competing with other companies not to be the ones that the EEOC aims its limited enforcement resources at.
Indeed, but that was not REF's point above. EEOC suits being largely randomly distributed and limited by its resources is completely consistent with what I wrote.
Rather than "largely random", the idea seems to be it's against the least woke big target. Something like truncation selection https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/truncation-selection/
There are 33M businesses in the U.S. So you are 100x more likely to be hit by lightning than to have your business sued by the EEOC. There are no businesses whose racial makeup matches the demographics of the U.S. Some companies are obviously making an effort towards racial makeup. Others are obviously not. That the EEOC is only suing 25 companies (up 50% from the year before), essentially guarantees that _it_ is not the reason why.
Businesses with under 100 employees are not subject to most EEOC rules (which is why hire-by-startup-acquisition is a thing) so your number is actively misleading.
Thank you for making my point for me. So, 99.8% of companies hire somewhat diverse staffs with absolutely non fear of EEOC reprisal (because EEOC cannot sue them) and the remainder (~166K companies) also have no fear of reprisal because the chance of being sued is only 3x higher than the chance of being struck by lightning.
The gist of your (Candide III) point is correct, although the threshold for the application of Title VII is 15 employees. Keep in mind that most states have anti-discrimination laws modeled on Title VII (often with more protected categories) that apply to much smaller employers. The "systemic" pressure on employers is not from EEOC-plaintiff lawsuits but from the many thousands of discrimination lawsuits filed by others, in federal and state court.
It's more like "kill one, terrify a thousand". While the risk of being sued is low, the consequences are devastating.
HR exists as legal protection for employers, and their jobs are incentivized to limit legal liability even when it doesn't make cost-benefit sense. Hearing that another employer got sued for exactly what you are doing has a chilling effect, even if it's unlikely you will actually be sued.
Trans prople weren't a "protected class" (or alternatively they were a protected class since 1964 and nobody noticed) until this case to my understanding.
Before being a protected class it was legally impossible for trans people to be discriminated against, much like it's only possible to experience age discrimination if you're over 40.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/protections-against-employment-discrimination-based-sexual-orientation-or-gender
Possibly, for some time before the Supreme Court ruled on it, company's lawyers were advising them that any litigation would likely end up with that ruling ... and their lawyer might be saying, you don't want to be the one who sets the precedent by losing in court, as that would likely be very expensive.
So it may have been widely assumed that the law meant that before it came be£ire the Supreme Court.
>What sort of affirmative-action applies to some groups but not to transgender people?
All of them unless specifically amended otherwise.
I'd expect there to be less pressure for affirmative action in favor of gay or trans people than other woke-favored groups because they don't tend to be underrepresented in prestigious positions. It does exist in some places though.
> no end in site.
...is this a typo, or a pun?
Anyway, I would argue that "woke" does not begin with civil rights law, but rather that both are the result of the same intellectual tradition. "Woke" attitudes are basically analogous to what was called "cultural Marxism" decades ago (see e.g. Weiner's (1981) "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology"), but since "Cultural Marxism" has been retconned as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, people needed a different name for it. The linguistic treadmill is merciless, especially when dealing with political movements attempting to escape accountability for their past failures (or successes).
> The linguistic treadmill is merciless, especially when dealing with political movements attempting to escape accountability for their past failures (or successes).
Very true! I wrote an article about this last year: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/whats-in-a-name
> The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare.
I don't think that's actually true. I can't find it now but there was a study done on what happened after the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act which found little difference, I believe in the Customs office.
> I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason
It also seems in tension with the Vaclav Havel argument about the indignity of a dishonest society (perhaps that's more a Solzhenitsyn argument).
I found it weird that Hanania seemed to endorse the ban on patronage-based civil service hiring because, as far as I understand, it's part of what prevents Republicans from hiring politically loyal civil servants, which would be the only way to hire civil servants they can trust not to try to sabotage them.
I actually expected the discussion of the civil service act to be the opposite! I was thinking that the civil service act is precisely like affirmative action, where personalized and human hiring practices were replaced by paperwork and process oriented ones to repress the human prejudices but also accidentally repress human ability to notice what matters.
If you could find that article on the effect of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act it would really, meaningfully make my day (or at least meaningfully change my opinion of Chester Arthur)
"Although we find that the reform indeed improved targeted employees’ professional backgrounds and reduced turnover, we show that these changes did not translate into higher cost‐effectiveness in customs revenue collection."
https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/civil-service-reform-organizational-practices-evidence-pendleton#
Coincidentally a couple days ago I saw news that Biden is trying to shift some of the civil service jobs you mention back to skills - based hiring, and away from mandatory degrees.
“"We need to do the work to make sure that the process is set up so that we are evaluating those skills, rather than using shortcuts or proxies for skills, things like college degrees, for jobs that don’t require them,” Shriver said. "
I'm curious how he could possibly get away with this but maybe, as you imply, the only people safe to do this sort of thing at scale is the executive branch itself.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/hiring-retention/2024/04/wh-aims-to-transition-nearly-100k-federal-it-jobs-to-skills-based-hiring/
Is he actually trying to do that, or is he saying he's trying to do that in order to drum up Centralist votes for the election?
That's always the question with a politician.
Actually trying.
> Coincidentally a couple days ago I saw news that Biden is trying to shift some of the civil service jobs you mention back to skills - based hiring, and away from mandatory degrees.
A lot of people are doing that these days. Look up how many different states are doing away with mandatory degree requirements for various positions. It doesn't seem to be a partisan thing either; I just checked and the list includes far-right Utah, extreme-left California, and plenty of more moderate states such as New Jersey and Virginia.
If I had to guess, I'd say a lot of people across the board are just staring to wake up to the reality of eduflation.
Or perhaps it has started dawning on people that in a static or shrinking demographic situation they can no longer afford the luxury of letting promising young people fritter away four to six years at college earning signaling brownie points.
Why not both?
Many states have explicitly been doing this for several years, and trying to pressure businesses to do it too. I believe this has been driven as much by republicans that believe higher education has too much of a stranglehold on the economy as by democrats that think this is one more thing opposing social mobility.
https://www.highereddive.com/news/degree-requirements-states-college-value/706705/
I think wokeness is continuous with political correctness in the 90s, and I even think it's continuous with the broader moral struggle the left feels towards helping African Americans that is hundreds of years old. Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa (1819) included a black person as the protagonist (lets just accept it makes sense to talk about paintings having protagonists) of the painting, which was controversial at the time. The felt moral duty to increase the status and dignity of black people is quite old especially on the political left.
Yes there are many complications and contingencies of why wokeness looks like it does now. But that there is a morally motivated group of people that feel sacredly bounded to end racial inequality shouldn't be surprising given that this has been a feature of our civilization for a very long time. Also it shouldn't be surprising given how sacralized figures like MLK have become in our culture.
Eric Kaufman traces it back even further to anti-majoritarian intellectuals like H. L. Mencken https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/liberal-fundamentalism-a-sociology-of-wokeness/ who is currently beloved by paleoconservatives and regarded as a symbol of racism by the SPLC.
I'm not sure if I can track it down again, but Mencken found he liked southern blacks quite a bit and was helpful to them. When I first read him saying that he liked blacks better than southern whites, I thought he was trolling, but now I'm sure he was sincere.
This should help: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26485502?seq=5
Interesting. I knew he had a low opinion of southern whites, but hadn't heard much of what he had to say about blacks.
I wanted to make the same point. The previous incarnation of woke was called "political correctness" and it existed in late 80s-early 90s. That's when Alan Bloom's book came out. PC suffered a setback when Bill Clinton really wanted to win the election in 1992 and, needing the white vote, came down on Sister Souljah. A period of return to normalcy followed, until the recrudescence of PC as woke in late 00s. It stands to reason that it took about a generation after the original civil rights law/judicial decisions for the first effects to be felt, as new rules and most importantly new hires worked themselves through the system, gaining seniority and influence as their careers progressed. That works out to the mid-80s. The difference between PC/woke movement based on incentives created by civil rights law/judicial decisions and the heady atmosphere that led to "woke judges" in the first place is that the former is largely composed of the beneficiaries of civil rights law/judicial decisions (see: bioleninism), whereas the latter was an extremely white elite phenomenon. Some of those judges doubtless believed sincerely in the inherent equality of all human subgroups on all socially desirable characteristics (an easy extension of Christian spiritual equality), some wanted to finish the Solid South, etc. I'd love to read a good book about that.
I disagree that Bill Clinton vs Sister Souljah was a major setback for PC, I think PC continued to advance through the 1990s across a hundred different fronts.
Due respect, thinking that woke is merely PC on steroids is completely wrong.
The reactions on university campuses after Hamas’ brutal murderous rapist hostage taking terror rampage of Oct 7th demonstrates this conclusively.
Woke is about oppressor-oppressed ideology in our zero-sum power world and the biPoC oppressed being allowed by ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY to over throw their evil rich white capitalist Christian/Jewish patriarchal oppressors.
This illiberal, immoral, evil ideology is not just PC on steroids.
Yes. Highly educated people have been relentlessly indoctrinated with the view that all racial disparities that are unfavorable to blacks are the result of racism. The civil rights laws did not eliminate these disparities. 50 years of affirmative action did not eliminate them. So the woke concluded that it was time to eliminate them by what amounts to brute force. Logical next step.
> The civil rights laws did not eliminate these disparities. 50 years of affirmative action did not eliminate them.
To put it mildly! In his book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," black scholar Thomas Sowell makes the case that such laws and policies have caused real harm to black Americans and actually worsened made the very disparities that they sought to diminish.
I think Thomas Sowell was probably wrong about that.
It's possible. Have you read his work and seen the evidence he lays out? What counter-evidence would you offer to refute it?
No, if you want me to read it you can buy it for me.
So it seems you don't actually have much basis for your belief as of now. But I can give some: Sowell shows that things had been improving for African-Americans prior to the CRA. The reason for this is because of the Great Migration northward where industrializing cities were paying more than the agricultural economy of the south. There is a natural limit to what percentage of the population can relocate from south to north, so the same progress could not necessarily have been expected to continue indefinitely.
>Aside from this, Hanania doesn’t have much to support his claimed thesis - that civil rights laws are upstream of the cultural package of wokeness. He mostly goes with vague, zoomed-out arguments.
What sort of evidence would you expect to find for a zoomed-out phenomenon regarding broad cultural shifts, if not zoomed-out arguments?
>Even the book’s own history of the civil rights movement seems to undermine its thesis. This history, remember, is that Congress tried to pass reasonable and limited laws, and then woke activist judges and bureaucrats kept expanding them into unreasonable power grabs. And that (he says) was the origin of wokeness. But if a movement has already captured the judicial branch and the civil service, it seems like it must have already originated before then.
If the thesis is to explain a broad cultural shift including the acceptance of certain ideas, then proving that those ideas existed before the proposed shift doesn't challenge the hypothesis. Lots of ideas exist. And academia, judges, or other subsets of the population can have sets of ideas that differ markedly from the distribution of ideas in the population as a whole. But that doesn't explain why particular ideas cause broad cultural shifts.
Chris Rufo is the one whose book argues that ideas started in academia and spread from there. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-much-do-intellectuals-matter I would point out that it's "heretical" versions of those ideas. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/heresy/
I'm not sure I'm following your point. I'm familiar with Rufo tracing the evolution of the ideas through philosophers and academies, but if I understood correctly, that's largely orthogonal to Hanania's thesis regarding a broad cultural shift. He briefly discusses the relationship between his book and Rufo's book here: https://www.richardhanania.com/i/134512424/crt-and-civil-rights-law.
It seems like the obvious solution to most of the problems Hanania describes would be to just implement racial quotas so as to get rid of all the kludgey civil rights law stuff. Unless he thinks blacks and other minorities are inherently inferior, in which case the solution would be to maintain a system of white supremacy into the indefinite future. Which of those would he prefer?
But one might argue that if some minorities are lower achieving than whites, it's not because they're *inherently* inferior, but due to the long legacy of historical discrimination, so a third option might be to create a very generous welfare state, maybe through UBI or something, so that the current generation would have a reasonable opportunity to overcome whatever legacy of historical racism still exists without doing the institutional harm that Hanania frets about. But I have a feeling he wouldn't be a fan of that solution.
I have come across a number of anti-AFAM types who would prefer to just pay out money.
What's AFAM?
Sorry, Affirmative Action.
"anti-affirmative action/pro-reparations" occupies an interersting ideological space!
"Just give them money" is a popular alternative to the welfare state's services.
"Unless he thinks blacks and other minorities are inherently inferior, in which case the solution would be to maintain a system of white supremacy into the indefinite future"
How about race-blind meritocracy, is that a system of white supremacy? Or Asian supremacy?
"a very generous welfare state"
All those countries with generous welfare states like Sweden or France surely have no racial gaps. UBI would possibly be the best demonstration of hereditarianism one can imagine.
Race-blind meritocracy, in a society where a certain racial group has an inherited disadvantage, would perpetuate that disadvantage to the next generation, ad infinitum. ("Merit" is not like a condition of one's soul; it's a function in part of the opportunities one has been granted in life.)
That's why I suggested a welfare state as a possible way to address the problem: you could theoretically sand off a lot of the inherited disadvantage through heavy redistribution. I don't think any country has like solved the problem of racial inequality; but that's different from just being content to let it perpetuate.
No country has solved inequality period, why is racial inequality something to pay particular attention to, over all other kinds of groups one could compare? Is the idea that within-race inequality is merit-based, but not between-race inequality?
"Merit is an individual trait"
Ok, so why care if race-blind meritocracy results in different results for different groups as long as individuals are all judged by the same standards?
"inequalities based on race are going to feel less fair than inequalities based on things like skills that people can exercise some control over."
What do you mean by "based on race"? What if skills differ by race, is that an inequality based on race or based on skills?
>Race-blind meritocracy, in a society where a certain racial group has an inherited disadvantage, would perpetuate that disadvantage to the next generation, ad infinitum.
Race-blind meritocracy, in a society where subgroups of a racial group have created subcultures with varying dysfunctional elements, creates an incentive for dropping the dysfunctional elements of the culture, or adopting one of the subcultures that is less dysfunctional. If, in one subculture,
>trying hard at school gets condemned as “acting white”
then let that subculture fall on its face and let another subculture succeed.
> Race-blind meritocracy, in a society where a certain racial group has an inherited disadvantage, would perpetuate that disadvantage to the next generation, ad infinitum.
You'd expect these to fade on their own over time due to diminishing returns, like with the Irish (who used to be a disfavored minority but do just fine for themselves now).
As Scott noted in the article, "inherited, racially disparate, merit" is taboo as an argument for right wing policy, but mainstream as an argument for left wing policy (as seen above)
Why would the solution to unequal abilities be to maintain a system of white supremacy? It seems like the obvious solution to unequal average abilities by group is to hire based on individual ability and interest, and accept that this will sometimes end up with many fields that have different racial/gender mixes than the population. And indeed, as far as I can tell, this is the policy that just about everyone who talks about unequal average abilities proposes.
Woke is a winning political coalition. It gives intellectual cover for minorities to take other people's stuff, and confers elite philanthropy status on the mostly white middle class women who support it.
The counter proposals you suggest are probably winning in a world where they are allowed. Hence the aggressive legal action and cancelation of anyone promoting them as a key tenant of woke.
> Unless he thinks blacks and other minorities are inherently inferior
...Why do you think he 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯'𝘵 think that?
Yeah, I think it's actually pretty fair to want companies to be rough microcosms of their communities, especially in terms of race and gender. But it would be much less painful to just mandate the outcomes we want to see and then let companies figure out the best way to do it for the individual cases.
Obviously there's no objective answer to this sort of question. It's something that democratic institutions would have to hash out on an ongoing basis. Realistically you'd end up with a bunch of hairy rules, they'd get outdated, then someone would come through and clean it up / rationalize it, then it would get messy again, repeat forever.
And like any regulation, you can make a pretty good libertarian argument that it'd be easier and better for everyone to just scrap it and let people do as they please. But I think sone regulations to in fact manage to protect important values from being eroded entirely, even if they're messy and inefficient.
> you can make a pretty good libertarian argument
You can? Can't say that I've ever seen one...
The representation argument cuts in more ways than one. Classically, European antisemites argued that there's too many Jewish doctors relative to Jews in the general population.
I think freedom of association is the better concept.
I agree the book should have been framed and titled as something more like “the origin of woke power” and not wokeness itself.
Cofnas, you, and others rightly point out the woke urge to abuse civil rights law preexisted the law, since it happened so rapidly after it passed. But I think Hanania is right that the legal stick forced corporations to play woke games, in both rhetoric and substance, which strengthened and mainstreamed the power of woke such that it came to dominate polite society even outside any formal connection to employment. In other words, the radicals who had woke ideology in the 60s and beyond were able to have power and influence through the law such that they could establish norms far beyond actual popularity of these views and policies.
Kind of surprised “cancel culture” didn’t come up as something clearly related.
If Hanania wrote “on the origin of communism” and focused on the communist revolution in Russia and the Soviet Union, then he’d be right about what made communism such a big deal, but missing the whole ideological origin story of Marx -> Lenin.
(Also, rein -> reign)
Phillip Magness is the one arguing that the Bolshevik revolution made Marx popular https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3578840
Magness is focused on academic citations of Marx's writings (he could not seriously claim Marx was "unpopular" in the socialist and labor movements before then), but even then you had influential figures like Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Thorstein Veblen who prior to 1917 were reckoning with Marx's work.
It's also rather bizarre that the article doesn't mention the Great Depression and the introduction of five-year plans in the Soviet Union. The Depression caused many academics to believe that capitalism's end was nigh (whether they welcomed this prospect or not), whereas Soviet planning interested a great many people who thought the USSR offered a viable—or at least instructive—alternative to an ostensibly doomed capitalist system.
Magness' argument is that Marx was one of many socialist thinkers prior to 1917, and only became much more prominent than his rival socialist intellectuals afterward.
As for Weber, Marx doesn't even appear in the index of his most famous work from the decade before the Bolshevik revolution, and instead his only mention is in a footnote:
https://philmagness.com/2022/11/john-ganzs-weberian-sleight-of-hand/
It was after 1917 that Weber said the world intellectuals live in bears the imprint of Marx.
Magness has also checked for references to Karl Marx in newspapers, so it's not just academics.
Marx has always been "one of many socialist thinkers." By itself that tells us nothing of his significance. Of the many figures associated with socialism in the 1840s that Marx critiqued (such as Victor Considerant and Étienne Cabet), all of them had been reduced to historical curiosities long before 1917. The October Revolution was bound to increase Marx's stature, but I cannot think of any figure associated with socialism who was more globally influential than Marx by the time World War I broke out.
Magness' article is silly. He admits that "Weber was certainly aware of Karl Marx and engaged him in both direct and indirect ways," yet he triumphantly declares that because Weber's most famous work addresses Marx in an "indirect way" rather than as "the central figure" then this must be evidence that Marx was "comparatively obscure" (even though Sombart, whom Magness writes was the man Weber was mainly responding to in his book, is also described by him as a "quasi-Marxist.")
If we're going to go from academic citations to beyond academia, then Magness' argument *really* suffers. The existence of the SPD in Germany would be enough to discredit him, given the palpable influence of Marxist doctrines on the theories of the SPD's leading lights such as Kautsky, Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, etc. (even Bernstein claimed his revisionism took the form of opposing the "residue of Utopianism in the Marxist system" so as to retain "what is worthy to live in Marx.")
One could extend this same point to other countries, e.g. if one examines the publications of figures associated with the Socialist Party of America in the decade leading up to World War I the impact of Marxism on the thinking and rhetoric of figures like Eugene Debs, John Spargo, Morris Hillquit, Louis Boudin, and innumerable others is clear, whatever one may say about their interpretation of Marx's doctrines.
As for the press, no doubt periodicals like the New York Times weren't very interested in the merits (or lack thereof) of Marx's historical materialism or what have you. But they sure were discussed in such theoretical journals as Die Neue Zeit (of the SPD) and the International Socialist Review (of the Socialist Party of America.) Magness writes in his article that Marx was mentioned in "debates from the socialist far-left" as if such things don't count, but that's silly; these were not the debates of isolated sects.
To be sure, Marxism did have opponents who were avowed socialists. The Fabian Society in Britain is probably the most prominent example. Yet the influence of such reformist individuals and organizations were largely confined to single countries. There was no socialist figure as of 1916 whose theories had such global reach as Marx did.
I did my own ngram analysis of some of the figures Phil cited prior to 1917 https://twitter.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1740143814726312039 and adding Karl Marx to it https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Thomas+Carlyle%2CHenry+George%2CEmma+Goldman%2CKropotkin%2CFerdinand+Lasalle%2CProudhon%2CRodbertus%2CKarl+Marx&year_start=1800&year_end=1917&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 he's still way behind Henry George and about the level of Kropotkin (admittedly I only used the surname of the latter, so if there are other Kropotkins being referenced that could inflate him) and the declining Thomas Carlyle (who had been way ahead of him in 1900).
I do think Marx still qualifies as "comparatively obscure" if people are engaging with a distinctive follower of his but not citing him. Frank Knight is known to specialists in the history of economic thought, but he's comparatively obscure relative to his more famous students Milton Friedman & James Buchanan.
Magness didn't just look at the NYT, he looked at German language publications as well. And he found that the SPD didn't seem to boost Marx's citations that much.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4460785
You do have a valid point at the end: Magness used different authors to compare to Marx in different countries, since figures like Rodbertus & Lasalle weren't notable outside Germany and Blanc wasn't notable outside France. It happens that I just recently read "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers and he discusses how after WW1 he was convinced capitalist society was doomed. He sought answers from various non-Marxist socialists at first, but those were mostly English-speakers rather than the German/French socialists I just mentioned. He became convinced of Marxism after reading Lenin about how the Soviets worked in practice, so score another one for the influence of the Bolshevik revolution.
I wouldn't consider Henry George a socialist though (he himself certainly didn't as far as I know), a better example would be Edward Bellamy, but even his foreign appeal (which wasn't inconsiderable, see "Edward Bellamy Abroad" by Sylvia Bowman) doesn't seem to approximate to Marx's. Neither Georgists nor Bellamy's fans had an equivalent to the SPD or SFIO. As for Kropotkin, he was of course an anarchist; by 1900 "anarchist" and "socialist" were generally quite distinct in what they were referring to.
I'd also wager that far more individuals in the 1900s-10s would be aware that Sombart was influenced by Marx than individuals in the 1960s-80s would be aware that Friedman was influenced by Knight. After all, Knight hadn't been a leading figure in the First International, nor a man whose theories influenced the founders of the Second International. Knight was "merely" an economics professor (which isn't meant as an insult), whereas Marx was known to practically anyone who considered themselves a socialist (or anarchist!) by 1917, whether they endorsed his theories or not.
I can't comment to what extent SPD authors cited Marx in their propaganda and other mass-oriented publications, but a perusal of English-language books of the 1900s-10s by individuals associated with the Socialist Party of America often did invoke Marx as an authority, even if their own conception of socialism mixed bits of Marx with appeals to the Gospels or reformism or what have you. As an advertisement in the July 1916 issue of the International Socialist Review claimed: "You can be a Socialist without reading CAPITAL, but you cannot talk or write about Socialism, nor hold your own in debates with old-party politicians, without a clear understanding of the principles and theories which are explained in this book."
I still think that as far as historical socialist thinkers go, Marx was indeed already the most significant prior to 1917. Within the left, anarchists posed the most important international challenge to avowed Marxists in the years leading up to World War I, but even then Bakunin and Kropotkin's reach seem inferior to that of Marx, even if in certain countries anarchists established a powerful presence (e.g. in Spain and France.)
If we are to bring up individual narratives, I could note that while in prison in the 1890s Debs was given the three volumes of Marx's "Capital" and Kautsky's popular expositions of Marxism to read, and these (along with texts by Bellamy and a few other non-Marxians) made him decide to become a socialist. Samuel Gompers, though he later became a foe of radicalism, wrote in his autobiography of the influence exerted on him as a young man by Marx's writings. Again, while October did much to boost Marx's standing (as did the Great Depression and often idealized portrayals of Soviet planning), Marx was by no means obscure on the left and within the European and North American working-class movements by 1917.
Helen Andrews is also pretty strongly against civil rights law, and has an interesting piece about union-flavored workplaces vs HR-flavored ones: https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-21/against-human-resources
>There is a masculine alternative to H.R. It is called a union. In any given workplace, H.R. ladies and union reps perform many of the same functions. If you have a conflict that needs adjudicating, you want to make sure the company gives you all the vacation days you’re entitled to, or you have a complaint about workplace conditions, you go to them. Underneath this functional similarity, however, the two models of workplace relations rest on very different assumptions.
>The idea behind unions is that workers and bosses are fundamentally in conflict. They don’t have to hate each other, by any means, but their interests diverge, and the best way for them to reach agreement is to have a fair fight by clearly defined rules. This is the opposite of H.R.’s ethos, which is all about denying that conflict exists and finding win–win solutions—or at least solutions that everyone will pretend are win–win after they have been badgered into accepting the consensus.
I am more in favor than she is of pursuing some of the goods of civil rights law, but I agree strongly with her about the benefits of openly acknowledging that workers and bosses have conflicting interests and need to negotiate the middle ground. I really really dislike the "only fight obliquely"/doublethinky mode that she and Hannania identify. I think it does create a culture against truthspeaking.
Hanania is very anti-union, and arguably hates that and the Old Left more than wokeness. I can see some merit in workers mobilizing to achieve goals for themselves https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/victims-and-sympathy/ rather than trying to get some manager to give in to their tears https://scholars-stage.org/thoughts-on-post-liberalism-i/
Is he anti-union, or is he anti-"union shop"? While this is far from a universal opinion, I know plenty of staunch conservatives (mostly older) who are also proud union men. The big point of contention seems to be with forcing people to unionize as a condition of employment, whether they want to or not.
Seems to me virtually all of the problems with unions could be solved by a law grounding the entire concept in radical voluntarism. Five simple principles:
1. Every employee of a private company has an absolute right to join any union that will have them, or to organize a union. (Union-busting is completely illegal.)
2. The right to organize a union is absolute, and is not abridged by the presence of any existing union in the employee's workplace. (If you don't like how your union operates, but you want union representation, feel free to set up your own.)
3. Every employee has a right to refuse to join a union, or to leave one that they are already a member of. Any employee has zero obligations to any union that they are not a member of. (Union shops are illegal, and no forced dues collection from non-members.)
4. No employer is under any obligation to deal with any employee under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement negotiated by a union that that employee is not a member of. (No free-riding. If you want the benefits of union membership, join the union and pay your dues.)
5. Public-sector unions are banned entirely. (FDR understood why they are a horrible idea; why don't modern-day leftists?)
Pass that law — and make sure to vigorously enforce it! — and most of the problems with unions in this country would vanish.
He really does seem to be anti-union:
https://twitter.com/search?q=union%20(from%3ARichardHanania)&src=typed_query&f=top
What is the legal difference between this and right to work states? In right to work states people can voluntarily unionize and the company cannot bust them, but the employees generally don't.
Aside: how did European countries manage to set it up so there are multiple unions for an industry, an employer can employ multiple unions at one time, and the unions compete?
Even in right-to-work states, people don't unionize so much as companies or job sites do. My difference is, if workers want to form a union, they should be able to do so, period. The workers who want it get together, say, "we're a union now," and perhaps fill out some registration paperwork with the local authorities to make it all official, and then those people are a union and any employees who don't want to join the union aren't in it.
This is a very different proposal from the current process of "organizing," which involves all the employees voting on whether they want their employer to be unionized or not. If someone wants to be in a union, and their coworkers don't, why should their coworkers prevent them from having a union, and vice versa?
Just because it doesn't happen that way doesn't mean the law precludes it. I believe it is very possible for people to organize this way in Texas. But it generally doesn't happen (if at all).
How would you restructure right-to-work laws that actually causes the creation of your preferred outcome?
...And the companies should be free to fire them for that. Collective bargaining doesn't mean they get to have infinite leverage.
How about:
6. The company may fire any employee at any time for any reason, even if said reason is related to their union activities.
So... sure, go ahead and strike. But the company is allowed to fire all the strikers and try to find a replacement.
How about saying any given company can fire employees for any reason they like, but they have to spell out their own list of valid causes in advance, apply it with some reasonable degree of consistency, and provide prospective new hires with the list ranked by frequency of application? Similar to the ingredients list on food.
That way, a company which fires everyone at once for trying to join a union, or too many people in general for capricious bullshit reasons, will face difficulty finding replacements and broader reputational costs, but openings for third-party meddling are greatly reduced.
As for improving the employee's negotiating position, my preferred approach is UBI funded by a Georgist land value tax, since it ensures that losing a job won't be a death sentence without putting new burdens on anyone productive.
"apply it with some reasonable degree of consistency"
No good as that's a subjective standard and can thus be challenged in court. But sure, it would be fair if they had to disclose what % of employees got fired in the past 5 years or so. That's an objective metric that's very hard to dispute.
"Consistency" is potentially subjective, but if so challenged, a company would have the recourse of simply rewriting their own policies to be less ambiguous, more precisely aligned between letter and spirit and actual practice, rather than being stuck as dancing monkeys trying to guess someone else's muddled tune.
Of course, there'd still be some room for trickery, things like:
"No, your honor, I didn't fire them for unionizing - just called an all-hands meeting to discuss the subject, with refreshments, and time-and-a-half pay for attendance since it was after regular hours. Then I added a small amount of alcohol to the punch, and fired everyone who took a sip for drinking on the job."
But at least it might be the fun kind of trickery, a devil's bargain where exact-words compliance actually means something. Any weird spike in "drinking on the job" cases, or concomitant fine-print loopholes to enable other contrived pretexts, would still show up in the mandatory disclosures.
Demanding consistency also serves as a check against abuse through selective enforcement on the company's part. Boss who fired unionizers for drinking barely-alcoholic punch needs to spend the rest of his career worrying about radicalized interns smuggling measurable amounts of ethanol into his morning coffee, now that the precedent has been set, and no one to blame but himself.
Meanwhile, places which were actually trying to be fair and honest could hammer out standard terms and policies through something similar to open-source software development, without putting the national legislature in charge of version control.
The power of a union comes from its ability to coordinate and shut down work. Splintered groups of employees that all try to negotiate separately are not going to accomplish anything. Might as well negotiate by yourself, the company would give you the same level of respect.
Well then, you better make sure your union runs on principles that are attractive to enough of the workforce that you end up with that level of power, and that it remains true to them. Ending up with an ineffective union if the workers don't like what it stands for is a feature, not a bug.
It's not just the workforce, it's the people who will be replacing the workforce when the company tries to fire them all for striking. So now you've got to broadcast your union across the general populace to try to stop them looking for work here when you strike.
If you can generate that level of power, you don't need a union at all. Just walk into your boss's office and demand things.
The trick is that negotiating by yourself is pretty workable for high-value employees, just not for cogs in the machine type employees.
I never understand why people think cogs in the machine employees shouldn't be treated like cogs? If they don't want to be treated like cogs they should increase their skillset. If they cannot that is literally what the social safety net is for, to ensure some baseline standard of living.
I don't know if this is a real disagreement with you or Helen, but I think it's a mistake to think of HR modus operandi as a motivating ethos, as though HR departments really are trying to find compromise between the interests of employees and management, rather than being a means by which management advances its own interests, an "alternative" to unions that represents their near-total defeat in the conflict.
I think that's often true in practice, while not always being HR's own understanding of it's role.
And I've seen bad bosses who genuinely don't conceive of boss-worker conflicts "because I'm a good person!" so they're not operating tactically, but still see conflict as nastiness on the workers' part, because why would there be conflict with smol bean me?
Again, I like union-mindset because your boss doesn't need to be a bad boss for *both* sides to have some conflicting goals and need to hash them out.
I think HR departments were created to benefit the employer, but once they exist HR workers have their own agency, and will do things like mobilize for more regulations requiring HR.
Ouch! That sounds very plausible. I'm envisioning a march of united HR employees, striding under the banner of "More Paperwork Now!"
"There is a masculine alternative to H.R. It is called a union. In any given workplace, H.R. ladies and union reps perform many of the same functions. If you have a conflict that needs adjudicating ... you go to them."
The difference is that HR is on the side of the company, whereas unions are on the side of the workers.
I think this is very closely related to the conflict between Marxist leftists and cultural/woke leftists.
Bosses and workers do not have conflicting interests except to the extent that both are being dishonest. The entire concept of a job is a win-win exchange, based on comparative advantage: worker gets money, boss gets money resulting from worker's work. This only fails when one party or the other is being dishonest about things like how much one gets paid, how hard one is working, and so on.
Management in generica and workers in general do not have identical interests. While both would like the company to succeed, thrive, etc - workers don't get paid if the company blows up - there are a number of areas where they diverge. For one, management is more willing to take risks, since they are working for the shareholders (who have a diversified portfolio, so a 1% risk of bankruptcy/mass layoffs is worth an EV of +1.5% stock price), whereas workers generally suffer a much larger downside than shareholders when the company goes bankrupt. You also see companies which just willingly accept enormous churn in order to treat their workers like shit (e.g. Amazon warehouses), which no worker would ever agree to if they were on the Board of Directors. Etc.
It's the other way around. Despite the cliches, the average company is not part of a diversified portfolio, it's usually owned by a single person or small group with an outsized interest in the companies success since they lose their entire investment. On the other hand, employees can simply walk out and get a different job if the company implodes, not even necessarily with a significant pay cut. In most countries, less than 1/3 of employees are working at a publicly traded company (and remember, even publicly traded companies often are majority-owned by a small group, such as the original founders).
Interesting, but then why do worker cooperatives show an overall more risk-averse profile (and successfully risk-averse, since they do better in economic recessions) compared to traditional companies?
I'm unaware of any controversial deleted AI comment.
He's referring to his own garbage AI generated comment that got deleted an hour ago and which probably like 5 people saw.
This comment should have been banned simply for the writing. I don't care if they're typing on their phone, write like an adult, not with "ppl" and "Cuz".
> With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.
AAPI groups have become more common in larger companies, at least in tech for the past few years. I've heard and seen many use the concept in that context.
Based review.
The section about workplace personal relationships becoming more formal doesn't seem right to me, we've had the same trend in the UK without any civil rights law. Unless we do actually have the hidden de facto affirmative action mentioned at the beginning and I just don't know about it.
I've heard some of that has spread to the UK, but as an American I don't know how accurate those claims are.
True, although it definitely feels like workplace relationships are seen as more scandalous (and more likely to lead to disciplinary issues) in the US than the UK
You may not have exactly the same civil rights law, but I bet you have workplace sexual harassment laws and similar. Even Japan has セクハラ.
The UK has the equality act of 2010, which implements the same protected classes and reference to disparate impact that the US Civil Right Act does.
100%. Technically "positive discrimination" is illegal in hiring in the UK. But "positive action" is perfectly legal.
The typical example given is that you can't hire a black person *because* they are black (if say, they were worse qualified than a white candidate). But you absolutely can use "positive action" to hire someone to address a perceived imbalance (level the playing field) if two candidates are equally qualified.
You can also legally have women only management hiring workshops if there is a perceived imbalance in senior leadership (i.e you'd like more women). But you can't then roll that out as a blanket policy at every level of an organisation.
In reality, the line between these things are blurred- no two candidates are ever equally qualified, and there are always trade offs involved. The fiction that you can use race or gender as a tie breaker is useful for organisations to maintain. On the other hand, it definitely doesn't seem to be as bad as in the US- University admissions is still relatively meritocratic, with UK universities aiming to up the numbers of underrepresented groups via extensive outreach, coaching, mentoring etc. rather than workarounds like non-academic credentials. If a minority candidate doesn't get the grades/pass the entrance exam, they probably won't get in. Although, I do note that there are black only (financial) scholarships- not sure how those fit in.
Yes I agree with your analysis, internship programmes are particularly bad for this, whereby you have racially or gender specific ones, like only for blacks or women or something. Regarding university admissions, this is probably the case. Anecdotally, I’m a straight conservative white guy at Oxford, I imagine affirmative action and campus politics in the US means they wouldn’t look very favourably upon an applicant like myself. I hope to apply to the US next year so I suppose I will find out the admissions differences.
Same trend in Japan as well, though minus the racial stuff, since there just aren't enough racial minorities in the first place for people to care about them. Interestingly, they don't call (self-)censoring as a result of these trends "political correctness", they call it "compliance".
Correction:
"Hanania explains the origins of a thing he calls woke which is different in form but similar in flavor to the thing that we in our corner of the internet have been calling woke, while laying out his reasoning for why his definition of woke is better than our definition of woke."
I interviewed Hanania about his book a few weeks back (https://mankind.substack.com/p/a-chat-with-richard-hanania), so let me clarify one point: Hanania is, as I understood it, extremely optimistic about race relations in the US, more so than most Americans I know. He made the point that he thinks not even the divisive US civil rights legislation has done much to drive a wedge among races, with one exception: blacks. For various reasons, black Americans remain separate, distinct, and hard to make part of the American mainstream. I thought it was an important point, and one that will help many understand why racial issues are almost always framed on a white vs black axis, even though blacks are, at 13%, a much smaller share of Americans than Latins are. Also, as a recognized Latin in America (a resident, not an American citizen), everyone please stop writing Latinx. We all hate & despise the term, except professional race grifters.
Didn't those people switch to Latine anyways?
When I first read the book, I had a hard time tracing Hanania's source for the "great view" and "walk-up" claims you quoted. As far as I can tell, it goes back to a 1995 memo by Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (pages 33 to 36, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf) that specifically gives these phrases as examples of information that "does not violate the Act". Sine then, they have consistently been cited as examples of acceptable language in various sources. Hanania's description might not be strictly false — maybe Achtenberg was referring to some earlier example where somebody cited those phrases as exclusionary — but it is definitely misleading.
EDIT: It looks like I goofed on this. There is a correct citation in the book. See Hanania's response below.
Oliver Traldi's review (https://quillette.com/2023/09/23/civil-rights-and-wrongs/) points some more misrepresented anecdotes . For example:
"But every now and then a claim goes by rather quickly that I wasn’t sure about. For instance, the book cites a statistic that Yale now has as many administrators as it does students; but this is because many employees at Yale’s hospital count as administrators for bookkeeping purposes."
I remember spot-checking a few other claims and finding them all to be exaggerated or distorted.
> "But every now and then a claim goes by rather quickly that I wasn’t sure about. For instance, the book cites a statistic that Yale now has as many administrators as it does students; but this is because many employees at Yale’s hospital count as administrators for bookkeeping purposes."
This could be true, but at the same time it's kind of telling. There are over 15,000 students at Yale. If a few hundred hospital employees (staff of a typical hospital) is what tips it over from "not quite more administrators than students" to "technically more administrators than students," that's still a massive number of school-staff administrators, and far more than the school should need for any legitimate administrative purposes!
I looked into this briefly. The actual claim is "more administrators than undergrads", and there are only 6600 undergrads. Yale New Haven hospital has 14000 employees. I don't know how many are admins, but it could be a pretty sizeable fraction.
> Yale New Haven hospital has 14000 employees.
What the heck?!? How in the world does a hospital, even a big one, need that many employees? I just looked it up, and YNH has about 1500 beds. Do they *really* need 10 people for every patient, particularly given that most hospitals don't run at full capacity most of the time anyway?
Probably we're somehow comparing apples to oranges - maybe the "hospital" is a medical system including lots of outpatient clinics?
Sounds like Yale is a hospital with a minor attached education department.
The largest employer in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite what the name may suggest, UPMC is a massive healthcare network that controls some 40 hospitals and 800 or so medical offices throughout the US and provides research and consultation services worldwide.
Point being that yes, don't put too much stock in a name for something like this.
> Do they *really* need 10 people for every patient, particularly given that most hospitals don't run at full capacity most of the time anyway?
Remember that hospitals also have outpatient clinics and emergency rooms and the like, they're not just treating the people who are admitted to hospital at any given time.
I looked up a few other hospitals I know and 10-1 is a pretty normal staff-to-bed ratio for a big prestigious hospital.
The citation is right there. It's from David Bernstein, "You Can't Say That." I even cited the chapter, which is in the introduction. Here's his quote:
"There are a number of other phrases that did not make the Oregon list, but that some realtors avoid nonetheless for fear of liability, including the following: master bedroom (either sexist or purportedly evocative of slavery and therefore insulting to African Americans), great view (allegedly expresses preference for the nonblind), and walk-up (supposedly discourages the disabled)."
I didn't say that they violated the law. My exact quote was "even terms like 'great view' and 'walk-up' have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs." I didn't say that these terms were ever found to violate the law. It's in keeping with one of the main arguments from the book, which is that stuff that is technically legal might still be thought to be problematic, creating a chilling effect. So what realtors think you're allowed to say or not say is relevant to the discussion. And the fact that government has to cite them as ok tells you far the restrictions on speech go. If these are your border cases, the civil rights regime is a massive infringement on liberty.
As for the Yale claim, Traldi doesn't provide a link, so I don't know how much the hospital staff affects things. But this article says that there's a 45% increase in administrators in less than two decades, and it doesn't appear to count hospital staff. It pegs number of administrators as about 80% of the number of students without counting the hospital.
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-part-of-its-leadership-to-lead-yales-administration-increases-by-nearly-50-percent/
So the statement ends up technically true, and also not very misleading unless you think that hospital administrators shouldn't count (which is arguable) and you think there's some massive difference between a huge increase in administrators that leads to them being 80% as large as the student body or 101%. Hospital staff are also doing a lot of DEI stuff too, so I don't know why you should exclude them if they're part of a larger story of bureaucratic bloat.
Do you know if these laws have ever been upheld against a First Amendment challenge by the SCOTUS? They don't fall into any well-known exceptions. If not, somebody should try to challenge them.
Thanks for clarifying: I think I had looked at the US News article in the same footnote, but you are correct. My apologies, I shouldn't have commented without checking again.
For the Yale issue, it looks like the article you cite does count hospital staff: See the quote from President Salovey ("He reiterated that the growth in the Yale School of Medicine’s clinical practice has been a significant and worthwhile cause of the administration’s increased size"). Since there's nowhere that they break it out by hospital vs. non-hospital, it's hard to say.
Meanwhile, on the civil service hiring side, here's a good example of the non-meritocracy: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-actually-implement-a-policy
>Many hiring managers have told me— I’m not making this up — that people cut and paste from the job description into the resume and don't even reformat it. They don't change a single word, and they go to the top of the hiring list, even if it's completely obvious that it's a cut and paste.
>Jack Cable won the Hack the Pentagon contest several years ago, genius programmer. By definition, he’s one of the most qualified people possible to work on the Pentagon’s cybersecurity. He then submitted a resume for a job at the Defense Digital Service, but instead of cutting and pasting from the generic job description, he included a list of the programming languages he knows.
>And he was rejected something like five times. They told him, “If you want to get a job here, you could go work at Best Buy selling computers for a year and then reapply, and then you'll qualify.” So there's this insane down-select: whose resume most closely matches the job description?
>The second down-select is a self assessment where they send those candidates a form to fill out that says, “Here are the characteristics we're looking for. How would you rate yourself?” The way to get through that down-select is to rate yourself as “master” on every single one.
>So you’ve down-selected twice. Let's say we now have 100 resumes. Then you can apply “veterans preference” to that candidate pool. And that's your slate. Technically you have done everything right, but you have not given the hiring manager anybody competent in anything but cutting and pasting – and lying.
>The second down-select is a self assessment where they send those candidates a form to fill out that says, “Here are the characteristics we're looking for. How would you rate yourself?” The way to get through that down-select is to rate yourself as “master” on every single one.
When people think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, they typically think "incompetent people tend to think they're more competent than they are." But there's a second, complimentary half to Dunning and Kruger's research on the subject: because of their high degree of expertise, *actual* masters are painfully aware of their own flaws and imperfections — they know just how much they do not know! — and so are more likely to not consider themselves masters. So this "down-select" is basically a perfectly-calibrated mechanism for hiring arrogant twits and driving away the best of the best.
One clear example of the second variety that I've seen is fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. He's "kind of a big deal" in the world of epic fantasy, and has been for over a decade now, but the guy is ridiculously humble about it. If the subject ever comes up, he commonly downplays his massive success, saying that the true "big names" in contemporary fantasy are George R. R. Martin and Pat Rothfuss. (Before certain recent controversies, he would typically add J. K. Rowling to the list.) This despite the simple fact that none of these authors have produced anything in years, and they *certainly* don't draw in fandoms so massive that the only reasonable way to do a release event for the new books they aren't producing is to literally hold a convention, the way Sanderson does.
But somehow he seems to consistently underestimate just how big and influential he is. (Tongue-in-cheek "B-Money" antics notwithstanding.) I think this might be the second half of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. His writing is far from perfect, but he's still a top-tier elite author and he consistently seems to fail to realize this.
On Dunning-Kruger: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/all-are-unawarehtml
How is Rothfuss bigger? My understanding is he's only written two books, and only the first of those was especially well-received.
I don't know. This is Sanderson's claim, not my own.
If I had to guess, based on several years of context following these remarks and his career in general, I think he's measuring "bigness" or "success" by Hollywood. Rowling got a series of movies based on her books. Martin got a massive cultural phenomenon of a TV show. Rothfuss was going to get a Game Of Thrones-style show of his own, though I haven't heard much about that recently. (Is it still happening?)
Meanwhile, for all the significant effort that he's put into it over many years now, Sanderson has never *quite* managed to get anything greenlit.
While I do enjoy Brandon's own writing a lot, I was never a huge fan of his takes on what *other* authors were good. I distinctly remember an interview he had in which he was asked if he had anyone in mind to continue Cosmere series were he to unexpectedly die, and and he said he considered Brent Weeks. Yeah.
You don't like Brent Weeks? I have some minor quibbles with his writing but I thought the Lightbringer series was great. Genuinely curious why you don't think he is a good author.
Look, I think it is *possible* to write a good plot where the main plot device is memory erasure, but it can in fact get to the point where it is too chaotic. Also the entire thing with atemporal fallen immortals Abaddon/Belial plot point that never got anywhere was quite out of place. I just feel like Brent Weeks has a tendency to add flashy stuff that's unnecessary.
And that's with Lightbringer being his best series; I'd say that much. There's even more of that in Night Angel.
I had personal experience with when I was a college student trying to get a summer job at a National Park. It was entry level stuff, just taking people's money when they came in. My brother managed to get a job there previously, and he warned me: "you have to apply on this one website, they'll ask you how much experience you have in a lot of different categories, just pick the most experienced option for all of them. If you don't then you won't even end up on the list of possible candidates to interview."
So I did that, but I felt bad about it. Still feel bad about it. Lying just to get a low level summer job. It's terrible that honest people are filtered out.
The discussion about federal civil service hiring (not clear from context whether this is Richard or Scott) is pretty accurate to my experience, though I would characterize it as a focus on minimizing risk vs maximizing the correct selection. The primary affirmative action is for veterans, which arguably has had a greater impact on shaping the composition of the federal workforce than anything else (7% of US pop are vets; federal workforce is 30% vet).
A brief sketch of the federal hiring process:
1. HR evaluates all candidates to see if they meet the minimum qualifications of the job. To minimize discrimination, this evaluation is generally limited to seeing if the candidate meets or exceeds the years of experience required.
2. If too many candidates remain after step 1, HR defines a "Best Qualified" pool. While many means of doing this are available, typically only years of experience and education are evaluated (sometimes occupational certificates/licenses). Veterans' preference (veterans affirmative action) is applied here.
3. Best Qualified candidates resumes' are forwarded to the HM. Resume reviews are required to follow a standardized rubric that must be approved by HR/Legal.
4. Interviews are done by a three-member panel. Interviews are done via a structured format; all candidates are asked the same questions, with no follow-up questions allowed. Interview questions must be approved by HR/Legal. Panel members rate the quality of each response on a numerical scale.
5. Top candidate is selected based on a combination of resume and interview scores. If a non-veteran is selected over a veteran in the BQ pool, HM must fill out additional paperwork justifying why.
And the hiring preference for veterans isn't some "HR gone crazy" thing, it's the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998 being applied as it was written.
Agreed. (I'm taking no position on whether vet preference is a good or a bad thing - just pointing out that this is another category of legal, widely practiced affirmative action that isn't talked about much.)
Because when it benefits us or people we like, it's normal good, pro-social and improves the world. When it benefits people we don't like, then it's abnormal, bad, anti-social and makes the world worse.
>How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots? The George Floyd protests?
Admittedly, I didn't read the book (to taste the sea one need only a gulp) but I could imagine the reason behind each of these being largely due to a sense of inviolability created in no small part by civil rights law, such that if a private individual or entity merely looks askance at a minority person, (even if they're acting very badly) they're begging to get roto-rootered by lawyers. You could even be railroaded by a corrupt prosecutor and 12 terrified jurors if you're a cop because a junkie career criminal you've been trying to restrain for half an hour dies of a heart attack while in your custody.
Hence, even law enforcement agencies and elected officials are afraid to challenge obvious wrongdoing for fear of what's coming next:
>Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice (and his black female vice president)? Drag queen story hours? Gay pride parades? If it doesn’t explain any of those things, what’s left of it explaining “wokeness”?
People and institutions respond to incentives. Civil Rights law largely gives allegedly aggrieved minorities the whip hand over the majority in these sorts of frictive encounters and thus it empowers more adventurous norm-violators to claim that their particular status requires protection/normalization and that if somebody dares to say "hey, its kind of disgusting for nearly nude men to ride a purple, phallic-shaped float down the street for a gay pride parade" it's a basically a crime.
This bleeds into other aspects of life as well - imagine the outcry if Biden had promised to nominate a white, Irish-Catholic man instead of a Ketanji Brown-Jackson, as he did. Only conservatives cried foul over his obviously racist hiring criteria, but the incentive structures that have been created around how we treat minorities (and essentially codified) practically guarantee this ludicrous double standard.
It is striking that the Jim Crow south wasn't the part of the country with lots of riots during the Great Sixties Freakout. Another piece of evidence against what Fabio Rojas calls "deprivation theory".
https://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/most-important-social-movement-research-findings/
> You could even be railroaded by a corrupt prosecutor and 12 terrified jurors if you're a cop because a junkie career criminal you've been trying to restrain for half an hour dies of a heart attack while in your custody.
See also: Michael Dunn, the police officer who shot a man with a long criminal record, who was in the act of trying to run Dunn down in a truck he had stolen. About as clear-cut a case of self-defense as you can possibly find... and Dunn got charged with murder over it.
The name "Michael Dunn" must be cursed because the first results I saw were of a guy in Florida who was convicted of a 2012 killing of a teenager at a gas station, in what seemed like a reasonably just conviction.
The Police Officer Dunn however was not convicted, despite being run through the wringer for 4 years:
https://apnews.com/article/texas-judge-police-officer-murder-shooting-7b489071b8af0024918ea3e031cef2de
> The Police Officer Dunn however was not convicted, despite being run through the wringer for 4 years
The process is the punishment. Running him through the wringer, as you put it, makes an example out of him, puts immense emotional and financial stress on him and his family, and makes other officers less-inclined to shoot violent criminals who are badly in need of being shot. Whether he wins or loses his case is far less important to the people who charged him with murder; they already got what they wanted.
I completely agree, obviously - the incentives are aligned against police being proactive in all but the most obvious and life threatening situations. Still rather judged by 12 than carried by 6 however.
The shooting of Juan Moreno was captured by two surveillance cameras; you can see the footage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff3Qmz6nn5E
What the video shows is that Juan Moreno pulled out of a parking spot and drove around the officer Michael Dunn. Dunn shot Moreno through the driver side window as the vehicle was going by. As far as I can tell, Dunn was never in danger of being run over.
You claim that Moreno was trying to run Dunn down. Do you have any evidence to support that claim?
Office Dunn didn’t have the luxury of viewing the video multiple times before deciding whether he was in danger, so I don’t question the judge’s decision to acquit him. However, if no one was attempting to harm Dunn and Dunn was not actually in danger, I don’t think you can call this a “clear-cut case of self-defense.”
> You could even be railroaded by a corrupt prosecutor and 12 terrified jurors if you're a cop because a junkie career criminal you've been trying to restrain for half an hour dies of a heart attack while in your custody.
It would be pretty crazy if that had happened. Even crazier, though, would be if you slowly applied pressure to a prone, restrained individual's back, causing positional asphyxia, in defiance of your own department's standards (which make it very clear you shouldn't keep people on their bellies for long, precisely because of this risk), were recorded doing this, those recordings horrified pretty much everyone who watched them - right and left - and then somehow people on the right rewrote history to defend you.
Yes, there was absolutely no controversy over whether or not Chauvin followed procedures, and a fascinating lack of evidence of actual trauma caused by the aforementioned technique but a wealth of evidence that lethal levels of fentanyl were present in the subject in addition to a host of other illegal substances.
This would form the core of what constitutes "reasonable doubt" but clearly the jurors disagreed. Having watched the entire arrest video, allow me to express my opinion that there is sufficient reason to believe that Floyd's death was at least as attributable to his own resistance to arrest as it was to anything Chauvin did.
> allow me to express my opinion that there is sufficient reason to believe that Floyd's death was at least as attributable to his own resistance to arrest as it was to anything Chauvin did.
Your opinion is simply, objectively wrong. Chauvin applied pressure to George Floyd's back and neck AFTER the man was handcuffed. There is no reason to do that, and, in fact, guidelines say specifically that once a person is restrained, you should not only NOT be kneeling on their neck, but you should MAKE SURE THEY ARE NO LONGER IN THE PRONE POSITION (https://lawofselfdefense.com/statute/minneapolis-pd-use-of-force-policies/):
> 1. As soon as reasonably possible, any person restrained using the MRT who is in the prone position shall be placed in the following positions based on the type of restraint used:
> a. If the hobble restraint device is used, the person shall be placed in the side recovery position.
Derek Chauvin violated explicit department policy on how to restrain people, policy that was written to prevent position asphyxia ("Burking"), and his lawyers could not point to any part of his training where he was taught to kneel on suspects' necks, because no such part existed.
(The levels of fentanyl in George Floyd's body at the time of death were not lethal to a regular user. That is why he was alive and energetic prior to Derek Chauvin murdering him.)
What about the Chinese robber logic? If you need to, say, hire 100 chemistry teachers, and there are 1000 qualified applicants, 300 of whom are black and 700 of whom are white (because whites are more likely to study chemistry than blacks) — then surely affirmative action demanding that 50 of the chemistry teachers be black, and 50 be white, should be at worst neutral on net. Even if blacks perform more poorly on average, the 90th percentile of blacks will still be as good as the 90th percentiles of whites. Is it really the case that for qualified positions like airplane pilots etc., there are so *few* good minority candidates that this is inapplicable?
I think the difference between you and people who disagree with you is that you think of "qualified" as a pass-fail bar, and they think of a rank order of candidates, such that a non-affirmative-action company would hire the 100 best, and an affirmative-action company might hire the 100 best blacks (who are randomly distributed across the 1000).
...although I also know of people who complain that affirmative action causes the hiring of literally unqualified employees, but the book didn't touch on this and I don't know how common it is.
That last thing is what seems mystifying to me, yes. And I still get the sense that Hanania, and people who are mad about the airplane story, think the national crisis is "we're hiring a bunch of incompetents on specious grounds", not "we're hiring the merely competent and passing over the *best*". The former is a civilization-killer, the latter seems like the kind of dumb thing which governments do all the time already and which aren't in danger of causing the end of the West as we know it.
The former does appear to be have been the case with WMATA preferentially hiring people right out of prison, but those are subways rather than air travel. I do however think that preferentially hiring people whose worst subject was science is aiming for less competence (on the other hand, some people were told to give that answer and could just be lying).
> The former is a civilization-killer, the latter seems like the kind of dumb thing which governments do all the time already and which aren't in danger of causing the end of the West as we know it.
Perhaps, but when we're facing serious rivalries with civilizations such as China who *do* care about strict meritocracy, and have a larger applicant pool to chose from, it may well prove to be a civilization-killer too, just over a slightly longer time period.
Fair, though no more or less so than the broader problem of bureaucratically-enforced mediocrity, I would imagine.
More competence is almost always better, few jobs are so repetitive or well-defined that they can't be done more smoothly, the cracks don't need to be papered over, etc. You casually assume that government always does dumb things as if it was a given, but it's actually not. The US government is uniquely incompetent.
However, it's possible that's actually the greatest comparative advantage of the US. The incompetence of our government since the destruction of meritocratic hiring has prevented it from being expanded by popular demand. Seems likely that this is what prevented us from becoming "expert regulators" like Europe.
I wasn't saying government incompetence was an inevitability or not worth trying to fix, the point is more that singling out AA as some particular, pressing crisis might be missing the forest for the trees if we reframe it as just being a special case of the general "the system guarantees an ungainly basic-competence across the board, at the cost of actively hindering the unusually clever/talented" thing (whether we're talking about hiring people or selecting policies). Or at least that Hanania and other vocal opponents singling it out might give an overblown sense of its specialness/importance.
It's both. Because whatever test or determination the company is doing to determine whose competent in the hiring process does not correlate 100% to competency.
So maybe without affirmative action the company would only hire people who score above 90 on some test (or on some other metric) and with affirmative action they would hire people who score 80.
And maybe people who score 90 are competent 90% of the time and people who score 80 are only competent 80% of the time, so with affirmative action you get more incompetent people, even though you are still only hiring people you expect to be competent.
I think it is more likely that AA cases cause the _removal of qualification tests_ or the redefinition of 'qualified' or 'merit' or so on. (See all the people in the comments here insisting that federal hiring is on 'merit', which--sure, it's merit_2024 and that's different from merit_1954.) And then this loops back in to dishonesty and spiritual decay.
(Whenever the SAT-IQ comparisons come up, I bring up the renorming in 1994 that clipped the upper end of the bell curve. Why do that, except to make it impossible to talk about high levels of qualification using the test?)
Oh for sure there has been a huge dumbing down in *some* hiring of the "qualified" to just the barest on paper qualifications. So do you have the right degree and right years of experience and then in the interview are you personable (and/or meet right identity characteristics). Versus actually trying to identify the best candidate.
Sadly it's not possible to rank order candidates and hire only the best 100 and lots of unqualified people are hired for reasons that don't include affirmative action (lots of cases without malice)/
For a lot of jobs, there aren't really qualifications, beyond what a hiring manager (who can be easily influenced by HR, law, societal vibes, whatever) decides. Many of these jobs are wordcels (versus shape rotators) for those familiar with the terminology.
Example - person who writes a communication piece for our daily newsletter. Can someone be more qualified? Sorta. But a masters doesn't make someone a better writer than a bachelors, necessarily. Is two years of experience important for hiring a new newsletter writer? Or five? You can ask for writing samples, but whatever "better" means is going to be very subjective. So basically, the organization can hire anyone they want and say they're qualified.
How many jobs are like this? I'd say it's a spectrum, between hiring a rocket scientist like Werner von Braun (who was skilled enough he got hired despite the rightful US bias against literal nazis), and my real example of our newsletter writer.
A big organization can have a lot of people without real qualifications (who might be really good at their jobs!). But if they're not good at their jobs, they can also be moved or sidelined to something less important.
We would also call this newsletter qualified, in that before hiring him, we would draw up a list of qualifications and then assess him against them. So yes, he's qualified, but we set the qualifications to whatever we want. And often we include the qualification of "good judgement" or "reliable".
I'm in Canada, and here we also expressly include race as a qualification in the federal government. "Member of an employment equity group - visible minority." If a hiring manager decides to list this qualification, by definition no white person can be qualified.
Sure, but even if the qualifications are hard to pin down, I think we can all agree that some newletter writers are better than others. Yes, your readership might disagree on what constitutes the best newsletter writer, but they disagree about who's qualified as well.
One thing that separates the great newsletters from the adequate is that the former have great writers, and the latter have qualified writers.
Oh yes, not all newsletter writers are the same. But to pose a question like, "is that newsletter writer qualified?" leads to some pretty nonsense responses. Yes, he's qualified because he can write? Yes he's qualified because he has a bachelors of English? In some sense everyone is qualified, and instead you have to either pick the "best" rather, or you set some arbitrary qualifications and you say, "two years of experience newsletter writing is the bar to be considered 'qualified'"
Two points:
1. Why do you assume the 90th percentile of Blacks would be as good as the 90th percentile of Whites? If you admit that the Black group here has a lower average performance, then its 90th percentile would likely also have a lower average performance than the 90th percentile of Whites. I am also one of those whom Scott mentioned that think the firm should simply hire the best applicants regardless of race.
2. This hypothetical looks only at the situation at a single firm/school. But when expanded to the whole economy, affirmative action means that a few firms get all the most qualified AA-applicants while other less prestigious firms/schools, who also feel the social and legal pressures to engage in AA, must draw from ever less-qualified AA-applicants.
Regarding 1., that was meant as a different statement from my broader point; I agree the two propositions are independent.
But I think it's at best nontrivial that the top-achieving blacks would be lower on average than the top-achieving whites. Whether we think of black under-performance in terms of social setbacks (cultural/economic/etc.), or even in terms of differences in genetic distribution, you should still expect a percentage of blacks at the top who through luck of the draw lack any of these setbacks, and thus reach the same heights as their white counterparts -- shouldn't you? To my knowledge, even people who are much more bullish on HBD than Scott or even Hanania don't hold that black IQ is *capped* lower than white IQ -- that the smartest black man is always going to be dumber than the smartest white man. That's just nuts. And short of asserting that, I don't see why you *shouldn't* expect the top-achievers clustered at the top to be about equal in each population, with blacks' lower overall average being caused by an overabundance of under-achievers at the bottom?
2. is a fair point, but while I can see why it would apply to something like the American civil service, I'm just surprised it would become a problem with comparatively nicher jobs like airline pilots. I would have expected that there were *many* more "sufficiently competent" applicants than positions, so that you should still be able to fill them satisfactorily even if you added a selection handicap like AA quotas. I suppose "how many people of [minority y] are theoretically smart enough to be airline pilots" is a different question than "how many of those theoretically-passable people are actually applying to be pilots", but then doesn't that mean that AA-defenders saying we need to 'change the culture' so that qualified POCs apply to these kinds of job kind of have a point, of sorts?
I should clarify that none of this is me saying AA/hiring quotas/etc. are good. It just seems mysterious to me that it is seen (claimed?) to cash out in "companies are sometimes forced to pass over competent applicants and hire *incompetent* applicants" rather than "companies are sometimes forced to pass over *the best* applicants in favor of competent applicants who are just okay".
The standard view is that there are overlapping distributions. So there will be some blacks at most percentiles of the white distribution, but in different numbers. So, going back to Maximilian, the 90th percentile of whites might be the 99th percentile for blacks (these are just made up numbers to serve as an example). And an issue often brought up with selective college admissions is that the supply of blacks at the upper end is limited and they tend to get hoovered up by the most elite universities, resulting in the lowest black percentage at the moderately selective ones.
And this is where the steelman for "race and IQ should not be discussed in public" lies. Most people, including most journalists, lots of judges, and nearly all voters, absolutely do not think in terms of overlapping bell curves, don't know the difference between a distribution, the mean of the distribution, and an individual drawn from that distribution, and will round the correct statement about average IQ differences by race to "blacks are dumb, whites are average, Asians are smart."
I don't find this convincing (you can't discuss anything important if you're afraid to use facts or ideas that dumb people will not understand), but it's not a crazy issue to be worried about. Most people have zero understanding of statistics, and will usually do a poor job reasoning about them.
> "blacks are dumb, whites are average, Asians are smart."
And some will assume that means "every single black is stupider than every single white is stupider than ever single Asian"
This is exactly the issue.
Meanwhile, not discussing it results in people assuming discrimination between all outcome disparities, and applying opposite discrimination in an attempt to remedy it. Or rather, not discussing the possibility of outcome disparities not resulting from discrimination results in that—but tabooing discussion of any other specific possible cause of outcome disparities puts a thumb on the scale in favor of those automatically inferring discrimination, who are already way too common, much more these days than people assuming all whites are smarter than all blacks.
The problem is people perpetually worried about the specter of discrimination against black people, but not at all about discrimination against white people and Asians resulting from attempts to correct for mistakenly assumed discrimination against blacks.
Well to be fair, part of the fear is that giving anti-black sentiment an inch would rekindle the fire of *historical* levels of discrimination against black people, i.e. enslavement, lynching, etc., which isn't a concern with whites. That is, some people might think discrimination against blacks wouldn't be that big of a deal in itself, but needs to be nipped in the bud lest it lead to much worse things. I'm not saying this is a very rational fear to have in the 21st century (at least to the extent of worrying about a return to slavery -- in some places a backslide into mid-20th-century-South levels of oppression doesn't feel far off), but if you accept the premise, then worrying that some whites will get worse job opportunities, *end of story*, feels paltry in comparison.
If, say, the abilities of two populations are distributed along normal distributions (bell curves) with the same standard deviation and different means, then the ratio of the number of people from the population with the higher mean who are above some cutoff point to the number of the population with the lower mean above the cutoff point increases with the cutoff point, exponentially. (The ratio of the probability density functions of two such distributions is an exponential function.) At the same time, neither distribution has a hard upper limit.
Regarding point one: your intuitions about normal distribution are off. If the “chemistry ability” is normally distributed (which it most likely is) then *small difference in average ability will be massively amplified at the extremes - eg if you have two populations, A, B, of equal size, with A 0.5 standard deviation above B in expectation, then the fraction of A among total population 2 SD above the average of B is ~88% (and it tends to 100% very very quickly).
Taking your numbers as given for the sake of argument: There are not ten times as many qualified chemistry teachers as chemistry-teacher jobs. So the only way you get there is if every wannabe chemistry teacher applies to ten jobs. What happens next is, you send out your job offers to fifty white and fifty black guys, and forty-five of the black guys say, "sorry, I got a better offer". But you need fifty black guys to insulate yourself from lawsuits and bad PR. So you send out offers to all 300 qualified black applicants, and all but thirty of them say "sorry, I got a better offer". You still need fifty.
If your organization is above average in terms of cash available to incentivize potential employers, you can *be* everybody's better offer. But then your qualified black employees will be getting paid more than your qualified white employees, which is unfair and will cause morale problems when they figure it out. And, more importantly, not everybody can be above average. The local market needs 500 black chemistry teachers, and there are only 300 qualified applicants to go around.
So you're going to be hiring twenty unqualified black chemistry teachers. And two hundred fully qualified white chemistry teachers won't be able to find work anywhere, This, also, is unfair and will cause morale problems in society at large. Plus the bit where 40% of your chemistry *students* have unqualified teachers.
> There are not ten times as many qualified chemistry teachers as chemistry-teacher jobs.
I guess this is what I find difficult to believe. Surely there *are* many more people intelligent/gifted enough to be chemistry teachers than there are available jobs! I don't mean high-level experts, just ordinary teachers. Surely there are many more such people *in any given major ethnic group* than you'd ever need. Most intelligent people could do hundreds of different necessary jobs in theory! They just aren't applying to them all. But that's an organization problem.
Don't mistake me, these people might not have the necessary training yet, and they might not have ever considered a career as a chemistry teacher -- but they could do it if desired. If it's a case where there are indeed 300 black guys who could do the job in theory, but they've not had the training/haven't thought to apply, then as I said elsewhere in this comment thread, doesn't that support AA-proponents' narrative that we just need more training programs and awareness campaigns to lure minorities into these fields, and then the system will work perfectly fine?
(Of course, if we don't care about the vaunted benefits of AA, then it's obvious that having the campaigns but not the quotas, and then hiring on ability alone once the work's been done, would cut to the chase and be fairer with equally good results. But the point is that in this light, AA shouldn't be *dysfunctonial*.)
There are such intelligent people, but most of them could make more money doing something else.
If we stipulate that there's demand for fifty competent black chemistry teachers, then in an otherwise-free market their salaries should rise until the jobs *are* attractive to the cheapest acceptable candidate, no? So it's just a matter of making sure good quality screening is being done at the hiring stage on *top* of the stipulated diversity quota.
Or do you really think there's such a lack of qualified minorities at the scale of the overall economy that you could *never* fill 50% of needed positions with qualified minority applicants, even with optimal allocation?
(I say "stipulate" because, just to keep that in mind, this is a discussion about whether an AA system can stabilize into one where necessary jobs get done by qualified people; not about whether AA is a *beneficial* constraint to impose upon the system.)
"Never" is a long time, and if whites continue shrinking as a fraction then every racial group will be a "minority". Under the status quo, there are preferences for hiring CERTAIN minorities and thus it's difficult to find qualified minority hires even if you want them. This is less of a problem for a smaller number of needed hires, like VP or SCOTUS spots, as Yglesias discusses a way down in this post https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-progressive-organizations-have
> Or do you really think there's such a lack of qualified minorities at the scale of the overall economy that you could *never* fill 50% of needed positions with qualified minority applicants, even with optimal allocation?
That conclusion immediately follows from the difference in average IQs by race (equal IQ broadly representing equal qualification for any sort of job that is not physical labor), the demographic proportions, and the normal distribution. The best writer on this remains La Griffe du Lion [http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com].
I'll look into this, but prima facie I find it hard to grasp how you could jump to that conclusion without also having a solid number on *how many people above a certain IQ you absolutely need overall* for all the jobs to get done? Otherwise how does anything follow?
And in our society they'd need special chemistry and teaching credentials which aren't worth the bother of obtaining if you don't expect to get a chemistry-teacher job. Or, from the other side, not worth the bother of setting up a school to give out more credentials if there's already enough chemistry teachers to fill all the jobs.
So the number of credentialed candidates is unlikely to much exceed the number of jobs, and the really qualified candidates are a subset of that.
If you're taking people "with the potential to someday become qualified," from the group you want more of, and giving them free or heavily-subsidized training, while the group you want less of is expected to already be fully trained coming in the door, that still amounts to a mix of hiring unqualified people and paying them lots more.
I would think the 90th percentile of black chemists would be working at e.g. Exxon or Monsanto or a pharma company? Not teaching school.
In fact, I think a lack of minority schoolteachers is a problem for those would prefer for minority children to be taught by members of their own group, which idea to be clear I have heard from the left. I am not sure how serious they are about it or if it is meant primarily as a means of criticizing the teachers that exist.
the issue in that example, I would think is the assumption that the applicant pool is so much larger (10times larger) than what they are hiring.
I know that in theory it's true that say companies can post a job opening and get tons of applicants but realistically
1 Not everyone who applies would accept the offer
2. Not everyone who applies is actually component.
I mean, sanity check: people who have the skills to be a chemistry teacher don't have a 90% unemployment rate. So clearly there aren't just an endless supply of available applicants such that you can guarantee always finding some in whatever race you are looking for.
The conclusion comparing it to a missile manual was perfect. One additional consideration is, if those laws go away, would it really change anything? Given the existence of social media, pervasive canceling of companies and people, and broad social sympathies for perceived victimized groups, I would imagine “that company doesn’t hire minorities” to be much more damaging from a customer and relationship perspective in 2024 than the 60s and 70s when those laws were passed. If that’s true (which I’m unsure of), in a sense the civil rights advocates have already won.
One thing I forgot to mention was that Hanania correctly points out that nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?) etc. He thinks the reason racial discrimination has become so much more talked about than these other superficially-equally-interesting questions is that the government makes all companies keep racial statistics and talk about things in those terms. If there were no AA, companies wouldn't keep the statistics and people might forget about it the same way they've forgotten about religious discrimination.
We could look at France to test his hypothesis. The government is forbidden to collect racial statistics.
I now recall he wrote about this: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/french-anti-wokeness-as-a-second
The classic "religious discrimination" test case for most of the Western world has always been Jews, though not so much in America. While some degree of antisemitism has always been a thing in the USA, it was never a particularly powerful cultural phenomenon until the past six months or so.
I'd be interested in seeing some statistics on how and if hiring discrimination in America today affects the two groups that *have* historically seen severe discrimination: Catholics and Mormons.
Last six months or so? Leo Frank is from well before then.
Who's that? (Whoever he is, no relation to me, I assure you...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frank
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/law_facpub/28/
Interesting look at the discrimination Jewish lawyers encountered in the 50s and 60s from law schools and law firms, and the surprising result.
s/inter-race/intra-race/
Absolutely. He deserves a pat on the back just for that. It is amazing all the ink spilled on the subject without anyone's ever mooting the obvious (and only) solution - just stop talking about it, all of it, IQ included.
I think it would, that the laws are the only things holding wokeness together right now. Look at all the stuff that's going on around us today. Everywhere you look, even in hard-left areas like California and Chicago, we see wokeness in retreat. They overplayed their hands pretty badly in the last few years, and people are starting to wake up (no pun intended) to the serious damage their ideas cause when put into practice, and saying "screw that!"
There's a pendulum swing of politics in which there was a big wave of enthusiasm that couldn't persist at 2020 levels indefinitely. But it's institutionalized enough that I don't think it's actually going to be rolled back that easily.
Perhaps, but aren't the laws in question the underpinnings of that institutionalism?
Some people claim that "the law is downstream from culture," others that "culture is downstream from the law." I figure they're both right; the two both influence and feed into each other. Start fixing one, and it will begin to fix the other over time.
I expect it wouldn't disappear immediately, but there would be more variation among companies; and perhaps the non-woke companies would start to outcompete the woke ones, leading to the expansion of the share of non-woke ones, until the distribution of company policies matches the distribution of employee preferences.
The woke are found more in government, academia, non-profits etc than for-profit companies.
But there is plenty of effects of wokeness at for-profits too. Having that reduced would be a major benefit.
I don't expect there would immediately be more variation in academia because likely the employees and students, not law, are the main drivers of the wokeness there.
But eventually if society as a whole turns against wokeness, if arguments against wokeness that currently only discussed among politically engaged right-wingers become commonly known because many for-profit employees are free to discuss them, I expect that would slightly reduce wokeness in academia too.
But also, ultimately it's the laws that I personally care about the most anyway. The main reason I mind wokeness is that it hinders getting the laws repealed or curtailed, and instead drives even more expansive interpretations of them. If private companies were free from anti-discrimination and hostile workplace environment laws, or only subjected to narrow anti-discrimination laws that required plaintiffs to actually prove discriminatory intent, I would care little about wokeness in academia or wherever.
A rollback is the only alternative to catastrophic failure. If you are right, the latter will occur.
Elon buying Twitter might make all the difference once Hanania's plan is implemented. The media field is now (arguably) more balanced and we might reach a much better equilibrium.
Well, that's why the GOP needs to take power, right? So they can put all the communists, rapists, groomers, and terrorists where they belong.
I’m genuinely concerned that my point was misconstrued based on the responses I’m getting. I share the concerns of the original civil rights advocates because discrimination based on race sucks. I don’t pretend what we have now is fair either but rather I’m hoping that socially we have ingrained more of our principles than the US of the 60s and 70s such that the law would be immaterial. The forces I cited would be useful social tools in shaping opinions of bigots that violate tolerant norms. Generally, I think I’d prefer a society where the government has fewer restrictions on behavior and societal norms informed by shared values has a greater influence.
And what happens when those "shared values" change, as they are doing right now? Not that the distinction really matters, of course; laws can easily be rewritten or even ignored if there's an actual will for that.
> And what happens when those "shared values" change, as they are doing right now?
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
― C.S. Lewis
While I would very much like wokeness to disappear (I favor color-blind meritocracy), Lewis is phrasing his advice in a literally one-dimensional way. Even individual _cells_ are not well described by a _single_ parameter, going forward or back, let alone people, let alone societies.
> Lewis is phrasing his advice in a literally one-dimensional way.
Yes he is. Sometimes, though, that's all you need, especially if you're trying to convey a broad point without getting bogged down in too many confounding details. Broadly speaking, "we must go back; going back is the quickest way on" is valid.
You sort of got there yourself: if you go fully cynical about people and government, it's hard to believe in anything. That's the beauty of the Constitution at least, to hold a set of shared values that uphold individual rights. It's why the civil rights laws were able to be passed in the first place, and (if you accept the book's premise) why they were able to have such an outsized impact. To your specific question, if things go sideways, pass a law. This course correction is roughly what happened with prohibition and what I expect to happen with abortion (eventually).
I'm going to differ on the Constitution, it consists of laws rather than values. There was no political principle behind the 3/5 clause or the 20 year limit before the slave trade could be restricted, they were just political compromises.
Yeah I’m sure there are other similar interpretations. Values are always upstream of laws. The point, though, is that you have to have some fundamental things you agree on that can only change when most of society agrees or else you just get tyranny of the majority (or chaos that leads to bad stuff).
I'm not at all sure that "that company hires fewer minorities than their proportion in the population" is going to be damaging from a customer relationship perspective. As other commenters have noted, affirmative action does _not_ have broad public support. More generally, woke people, while loud, are a minority (on the order of 33% https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/563415-poll-one-third-of-voters-identify-as-woke/) of the population.
The thing about Title IX in sports is that the basic problem is football.
The general requirement of Title IX is that sports should be separate but equal (obviously, I'm quoting Plessy v Ferguson maliciously here). That generally means that the number of scholarships given to male student-athletes and the number given to female student-athletes should be the same.
If it weren't for football, this would be easy - for instance, each (top-level) college can have 13 basketball scholarships per team, so that's 13 men and 13 women. Compliance with Title IX is absolutely trivial. Even with baseball, they just have 12 men playing baseball and 12 women playing softball.
But football is 85 scholarships and they are all men. This creates a problem where a college has to have 85 additional scholarships that are all women. But all (or virtually all) the other sports are played by both sexes. So they end up with every other sport having more scholarships for women than for men, and men's sports getting dropped, so that the women's version of that sport can be used to balance out the many men's scholarships in football. So many colleges now have women-only track and field, for instance.
It really would have been a far simpler solution to just require any college that has a men's football team to create a women's football team with equal numbers of scholarships. Most of the other distortions would drop out of the system if the requirement was equal numbers on a sport-by-sport basis, rather than a college-by-college basis with the single largest sport being the only major single-sex sport.
Why don't colleges create women's football teams?
If I had to guess, (no actual facts to back this up, just personal observations,) probably because there's no demand for them. How many girls did you know, back when you were in middle school and high school, who showed *any interest at all* in playing football?
Soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, etc., sure. But for some reason, football seems to be rather uniquely "not a girls' sport."
There are a fair number of girls who are interested in playing football. I think even more than boys, though I'm not sure about that. But, you know, the *other* football, the one that actually involves a lot of contact between foot and ball. So we could imagine a school where the men's poncified rugby, er, "football", team is counterbalanced by the women's actual football team.
Except that, as Ryan notes, the fancy rugby teams give out a *lot* more scholarships.
🙄
You know exactly what we're talking about. Here, have a pedant pendant: 📿.
I think John's impish suggestion was that you could fulfill the *letter* of the rule that says "there has to be a men's football team and a women's football team, only the one can balance out the other" by playing on the double meaning.
Or in less ambiguous terms, a men's handegg team and women's soccer team.
It doesn’t work because men and women both play football..er…soccer. You would have to cancel soccer scholarships for men. Right?
Right. Would anybody notice if we cancelled soccer scholarships for men?
Someone might…
An exceedingly good question to which I don't think I have a complete answer.
I think that part of the answer is just that football is a very violent sport and colleges in the 1970s when Title IX was new did not regard creating a women's football team as a reasonable thing to do.
Another part is that there aren't high school women's football teams (Title IX doesn't apply to high school sport because there's no scholarships involved), which means that there isn't an adequate pool of players to recruit. It is dangerous to play football without a significant amount of time spent being coached and practising: if you hit people the wrong way you will hurt them. This will get penalised, but you have to practise until you have muscle memory of the right way to do it or you'll still mess it up at game speed with pressure on. Colleges can rely on high schools to have done this for boys, but not for girls.
There's no pool of players to recruit from, no professional ranks to graduate to, no Olympics to aspire to (which is what keeps sports like swimming and gymnastics going), and the sport is intrinsically more dangerous than others.
But that's more about why they don't do it now. Most of that was equally true for women's basketball or women's soccer in the 1970s. But that didn't stop colleges making women's teams in those sports, and high school and professional sport mostly built themselves up on the back of the college game.
Another thing to consider is that 85 scholarships is a lot. In football its necessary because even though each time only has 11 players on the field at any given time, positions are highly specialized. It's rare these days for anyone to play offense and defense, so 11 becomes 22. Then you have guys that are only on special teams (at minimum a kicker and punter, but increasingly a second kicker and a long snapper, and occasionally guys that specialize in kick/punt returns). So now you're around 25. Given injuries and the roster turnover that's inherent in college sports, you want to be 2-3 deep at every position at a bare minimum. So now you're in the 50-75 range. Then you have to factor in specialized packages. For example, a standard defensive formation will have 4 defensive backs, but you also need nickel (5 DBs) and dime (6 DBs) packages in certain situations. Or, on offense, 1 tight end might be standard but 2 TEs has become really common. In practice, managing those 85 scholarships is difficult.
Finally, consider that almost every school wants a football team because they are the biggest revenue generators and, in nearly all cases, pay for nearly every other sport (basketball is usually self-sustaining, but it's a rare exception to find any other sport that doesn't need to be subsidized). So multiply 85 by about 120 DI football teams, plus about 160 D2 teams (though they get fewer scholarships).
So everything you said above is true, but if you want to overcome all those physical and cultural hurdles and build up women's football from scratch, you have to create a much bigger pool of potential players than you would if you just needed ~12 scholarship players to field a team in a sport with a smaller roster. Plus, in that case, you have more flexibility in which sports you use to equalize the number of scholarships. For example, some schools have varsity women's ice hockey because the local culture makes sense, but other schools can do something different.
The natural comparison would be with the NFL, which - at first glance - has a roster limit of only 53. But that's not a proper comparison; plenty of players on a NCAA D1 FBS scholarship would be "inactive" in pro sports (injured players, redshirts, etc). The fairer comparison is to the number of players an NFL team is allowed to have under contract, which is 90. College teams don't have more football players than NFL teams, in spite of what some talking heads will say.
So yeah, building 100 full rosters would mean finding 8500 players, which realistically means 100,000 playing in high school. Basketball only needs 12 per team, much easier for a high school to put together.
If you look post-college, the only professional women's football was the LFL (originally "Lingerie Football League") which, uh, wasn't really selling itself on the quality of the sporting competition. There is a tiny bit of amateur 11 v 11 tackle football (well, unpaid: WFA teams are allowed to pay their players but none of them can actually afford to do so), and they just scrape enough money together to pay a game fee and flight and accomodation for the players who play for the USA in the IFAF World Championships, so that is technically the only professional 11 v 11 women's tackle football team in the world (for the three games they play every four years). Unsurprisingly, women's American football is even less important in every other country and the USA has won ever game they've ever played (they are 12-0 all-time).
There are 85 scholarship players on D1 football teams, but don't forget about walk-ons. Google tells me about 40 non-scholarship players is the norm. That doesn't contradict anything either of us has said; I'm just adding it for completeness. It makes sense to me that college would need a bigger roster given the 3-5ish year duration of a college career.
Man, I totally forgot about the LFL. Good times.
I knew nothing about amateur women's tackle football before reading this post. That's interesting. USA! USA!
I happened to be in Finland in 2013 when the women's world championship was on and saw a billboard at the airport. Honestly, I had to look it up in wikipedia to get any details, but it's a lot easier to find something if you're sure that it exists.
LFL was a casualty of the pandemic, apparently. They're now the "X-League", are wearing uniforms that cover slightly more of their bodies (cycle shorts and midriff-baring tops) and are supposedly coming back in 2025. I can't work out if they are owned by the XFL or not, which probably is intentional.
>Finally, consider that almost every school wants a football team because they are the biggest revenue generators and, in nearly all cases, pay for nearly every other sport
I'm reminded of something I read a while back, possibly from one of Milton Friedman's books, about colleges being in multiple businesses at once, producing education and certification for students, monuments for major donors, and football for alumni.
…I think the obvious thing to do here is to ban American football for boys as well. Just, like, in general. There. Balance restored, and fewer American young men will sustain grievous bodily injuries. Is there a downside?
I like the cut of your jib!
I agree, but about half the country would burn both of us at the stake as heretics.
Tempting, I have to say.
"Is there a downside?"
Other than preventing consenting adults from engaging in an activity they want to do?
Well, you're also preventing some people from making life-changing amounts of money. Granted, it's a very small number of people who earn that much, so in the aggregate the impact may be small. But for the individuals who do benefit...
I'm an individualist with libertarian philosophical leanings, so these things matter to me.
Oh, yes, of course. The post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I find the mindset of people who willingly subject themselves to American football baffling, but I wouldn't seriously propose banning it. It's just momentarily funny to fantasize for a few seconds about, just this once, allowing ourselves to tell the insane people who would like to keep hitting themselves with hammers ".......you know what, screw this, I'm going to be a traitor to my principles and take your hammers away". Just a bit of "yes, yes, principles, but between ourselves those jocks' preferences *are* completely bonkers, right?" elbowing between geeks, do forgive me.
Though I do, more seriously, think that there should be awareness campaigns of how physically dangerous it can be, as there is for other hazardous activities we don't want to outright ban, like smoking. If girls have successfully come to the rational position that it is a bad use of their time, without anyone needing to actually ban them from it -- then surely, even accounting for testosterone and objective greater physical resilience, boys could with the right cultural shift come to the same conclusion. I wonder.
I've lost the reference, but some flag football is taking off with women.
I'd much rather watch healthy young women play -- even if it's flag. Commentators could go on about their personal stories and make a great show of it if they had a pro women's flag football league. It would be more interesting than soccer.
Why would professional womwn's flag football be more interesting than (professional women's?) soccer? I don't consider women's soccer particularly interesting but have no idea about flag football. In male sports, I consider soccer much more interesting than american football.
Soccer is a bunch of people standing around. American football is a master class in ambition -- at least for American men. And it's a meritocracy. It takes strategy, physical agility, and brute strength. Flag football emphasizes agility and strategy over strength, which seems like a natural fit for women. And women are just better looking than men. I wouldn't mind watching them run and dodge and block, and revel in it all.
Of course I don't share your view on soccer but I guess if both of us did a deep dive into the other's favored sport, we'd learn to appreciate it.
Right now, I see american football as an anaerobic competition. Short encounters, less than a round of boxing, of high mental and physical intensity. Association footballs seems to me much more challenging endurance-wise. Some of the guys stand around but every one except the goalies runs quite a few miles per match with a lot of intermediate sprints. There's high sophistication about where to stand around and how long, where to run when and how to handle the ball and the opponent.
Does soccer inspire the same amount of talk radio talk and minute internet rehashing? I honestly don't know. Or is the appeal more in the moment?
Yes. If you want the sophisticated intellectual version, you can read Jonathan Wilson's columns in the Guardian. If you want the shouty talk radio version, then there's 606, which is available as a podcast.
Yep, and this leads to some really weird recruiting behavior. I went to a US university decidedly not known for it's football prowess. Despite that, we had a girls bowling team with members on full scholarship from all over the country. The girls tennis team was almost entirely Dutch women who were recruited specifically to play tennis at a school nobody has heard of.
You've caused me to look up something that puzzled me the other day, while grocery shopping. What seemed to be a delegation from Europe in matching tennis outfits, but which on closer inspection were those of a second-tier state college a couple hundred miles away.
I didn't think anymore about it, but just now looked up the rosters: mostly France, England, Ukraine, Luxembourg, Australia - just one American.
Yeah a second-tier state school campus I went to in the early 00s had a couple different girl's teams who recruited most of their players in Europe.
Well and you are assuming there is similar interest in playing sports among men and women, which I would love to introduce you to humans if that is your belief.
Fair. It's really title IX makes that assumption, but it would be a minor annoyance if there were women's football teams: if they existed, EEOC and courts would probably have eventually (at some point in the 1990s, probably) interpreted title IX to require colleges to have both men's and women's teams with equal numbers of scholarships in every sport that they have scholarships in. But that would mean a court requiring the creation of 10,000 women's football scholarships. There aren't 10,000 high school girls who know how to put pads on, and Title IX doesn't apply to high schools, so they'd never be able to get them to start building girls' football teams to supply players to the colleges.
The distortion of having a women's team matching every men's team would be real, but wouldn't be that big - sure, fewer women are interested in playing sports than men, but not by that much given the very small number of scholarships available. There are about 15 million students total; there are around half a million "student-athletes", though a majority of those are in the non-scholarship Division III. Division I scholarships are maybe half a percent of students. Guessing that perhaps half of men and a fourth of women are interested in playing sports, that means that they're the top 1% of men and the top 2% of women: that's more than a high enough standard for the sports to be interesting and competitive. Sure, the women's version will be a bit worse relative to what women are capable of, and the TV and in-person audience will be lower - but it's not catastrophic for the structure of college sports.
The distortions caused by men's football result in eight sports (Div I) being women-only (beach volleyball, bowling, equestrian, field hockey, rugby, triathlon, plus the two sports that cheerleading was split into: "acrobatics and tumbling" and "stunt") - note that five of these are Olympic sports, so US Olympic teams have men who never got scholarships competing alongside women who did [aside: women's rowing is governed by the NCAA, men's never joined and is governed by a separate body, the IRA, so it's not a "women-only sport" in spite of NCAA regulations apparently saying it is]. On top of that, the only sport with equal numbers of scholarships for men and women is ice hockey, though wrestling (9.9 men, 10.0 women) and baseball/softball (11.7 men, 12.0 women) are very close, and lacrosse has, uniquely, more men (12.6 to 12.0). But many other sports have vast gaps like 8-4.5 in tennis or 12-4.5 in indoor volleyball.
The combination of Title IX and men's college football (or the absence of women's college football) screws over almost every other men's sport. Even basketball is 13 men and 15 women. Why? To soak up 2 of the men's football scholarships in Title IX compliance.
Meh I think the differences in playing sports competitive are quite a bit large enough that there is some serious injustice in "equal" scholarship numbers. My college had a multiple national championship winning wrestling team disbanded to string together some barely functional girls volleyball/softball/swimming teams. All sports where the number of boys interested in scholarships and not getting them almost certainly exceed the number of women wanting scholarships.
You can start noticing the difference between boys and girls and their commitment to sports in soccer as early as like 8U. Stick 40 boys and 40 girls on a field and after a year 20 of the girls are checked out and 10 of the boys, and after two years maybe 25/12.
I would argue that title 9 has taken a situation where there were at say a normal 10,000 person mid-sized state school roughly 2,500/5,000 men interested in playing college sports and say 400 on scholarship and 500/5,000 women interested in playing college sports and 100/5,000 on scholarship.
And made the figures 250/5,000 and 250/500 and called that "progress", under the mistaken belief that the reason boys are 10X more interested in sports has something to do with "oppression" and "opportunity" instead of you know natural human behavior.
IDK I coach youth sports at a very fair handed coed even-minded level. And especially once you hit 10-11 you bleed girls like crazy. There are still plenty of girls interested in sports, but nothing like the boys. Go look at recess at any elementary school in the world. Like half the boys will be playing soccer/tag/whatever EVERY DAY. Meanwhile half the girls are sitting around talking.
It is just reality denialism.
As someone who actually works in civil rights law, this description of disparate impact discrimination is just completely wrong and made up. As long as the employer can demonstrate a legitimate reason for the requirement it wins. Before that a company that, say employed ditch diggers, could insist that employees pass a math test. Given our longstanding inequities in education, particularly of low-income workers, this had the intended effect of excluding black workers. So hiring on "merit" is completely fine as long as "merit" has some connection to the job. Courts are generally hostile to disparate impact claims, to the point that civil rights lawyers are very reluctant to bring them.
Also discussions like this tend to ignore the evidence of actual ongoing racism in employment: https://thehill.com/homenews/race-politics/4590888-black-sounding-names-less-likely-to-receive-job-call-backs-study/
Robin Hanson proposed that the best & brightest be given a big chunk of money to identify bubbles:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-to-pop-bubbleshtml
Similarly, we could endow a company with money to hire employees being discriminated against, and watch that company outcompete all the irrational companies.
> and watch that company outcompete all the irrational companies
In a situation where the discriminated-against party is outnumbered you would only expect choosing on dimensions other than quality to impact performance if labor is scarce. If there are enough qualified preferred-race (or whatever non-quality variable employers are being choosy over) candidates to fill available roles and the difference between hiring the nth and n-1th best candidate is negligible* the bottom line would be insulated against arbitrary choosiness.
*Actually this also holds in situations where actual performance is hard to predict from perceived quality--where outcomes are high variance and the difference is not negligible, but you can't reliably tell who is going to be most successful at the point of application
Also too, it only makes sense to describe discriminatory or arbitrarily choosy companies as irrational if they are aware they're leaving value on the table. If the discrimination is unconscious or is thought to serve as a proxy for value then, while someone could still come in and swoop up the extra value (assuming all competing companies share the choosy behavior and someone hasn't already done so) the companies in question wouldn't be making face-palmingly bad decisions.
Unemployment is at a low point now. https://www.slowboring.com/p/for-the-next-two-years-biden-needs
>In a situation where the discriminated-against party is outnumbered
Population of USA Blacks is 42 million. Slightly above of average country size and well above population, of, say, Taiwan.
The ratio matters, not the absolute number, as long as the number of needed hires does not approach the size of the preferred candidate applicant pool. In general, the higher the ratio of preferred (on an arbitrary dimension) to non-preferred candidates, the more often and the more steeply non-preferred candidates can be discriminated against without losing competitive advantage by allowing competitors to snap up the talent you left on the table.
Does this have the same problem that the last time this type of study was done, in that it's not black-sounding names that are discriminated against, but poor-sounding names, and stereotypically black-sounding names also sound poor, because black people are mostly poor?
e.g., are they comparing Lamar and Bubba, or Tyrone and David?
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1605237370055528451
IIRC there are similar studies comparing "name" with "no name" or "name and photo" with "name and no photo," which shouldn't be vulnerable to that effect.
Is that racism or people correctly matching up names with likely performance?
What is you are discriminating based on names though? Or shoes? Or politeness? Or ability to do basic math?
Deep dive into the topic: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/whats-in-a-black-name.
I hadn’t see that; thank you for posting it. The study data only shows discrimination against blacks. If “positive discrimination” (discrimination against whites) were as widespread as Hanania seems to think, I would expect it to show up in this study.
Thanks for this. Some more questions, if you have time:
Is it true, as Hanania claims, that they have to prove a test is nondiscriminatory for each race and site individually?
How easy is it to prove legitimate reason? If I say "I want my schoolteachers to do well on an IQ test, because schoolteachers should be smart" does that pass?
Why can't Sheetz say "We don't want people with histories of violent crime because we think they might be violent or criminal while working for us"?
Why was Duke Power Co decided the way it was, since they asked people to take a mechanical aptitude test for a mechanical job?
1) He may be right about that (I don't know actually) but even if he is right, so what? If a test is relevant to a job, that evidence will apply to each worksite. It's not like there's some affirmative requirement that employers prove the test works before they can implement it--they can do whatever they want and the only check is a lawsuit. A plaintiffs' attorney is not going to bring that case if it doesn't have some evidence the
2) Very easy. You just have to show there is a “manifest relationship to the employment in question" (a more lenient standard added by subsequent more conservative courts) then the burden shifts to the plaintiffs to prove its not legitimate or that the employer could achieve the same goal in a way that doesn't have a disparate impact. In Griggs, there was direct evidence from the employer's own experience that the test they were using was uncorrelated with job performance.
3) That is likely enough. But if, for example, their experience showed that people with a criminal history were no likelier to be violent and criminal than that argument would rightly fail. I think it is also unlikely the EEOC will win this case in the current legal environment.
4) As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.
Sorry, didn't finish 1) a plaintiffs' attorney isn't going to bring a case if they don't have some evidence of likelihood of success.
I recall Hanania saying such lawsuits are unusual in that court costs are still covered for losing plaintiffs, but not defendants.
If a plaintiff wins they can (though don't alwasy) get attorneys' fees, which is not true of defendants. But that's still a big risk for an attorney to take -- getting fees can take years, courts often quibble about the amount, and if you lose you are out years of work withiut compensation. Also plaintiffs do have to pay costs (filing fees, deposition transcripts, and some other things) for defendants if they lose and that can be tens of thousands of dollars in aditional losses.
Costs are not that expensive and usually run to hundreds or low thousands. Fees are where it's at. The major plaintiffs' shops run it as a factory business and can easily keep their costs to a minimum if the claim isn't shaping up to be lucrative. Since over 95% of cases settle, the chances of having to fight about a lodestar rate with the court are slim.
My larger point is that Hannania is a deeply (and admittedly!) dishonest person and engaging with his description of factual questions is unwise--as you found when you looked into the facts of the Tesla case, which were awful. He doesn't want anti discrimination laws not because they are counterproductive or over broad but because he thinks racial discrimination is a good thing as his past history of white supremacist posting shows. (Yes he has "apologized" for that but I don't see any reason to believe him).
If he was serious, he would engage with the actual emprical literature on the impact of discrimination cases instead of cherry-picking examples. See, e.g., https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1181&context=wlulr or igitalcommons.law.uidaho.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1405&context=faculty_scholarship. The literature is far from perfect but he has no evidence at all.
> Good afternoon. I'm Monique Lillard, from the University of Idaho. I am very pleased to inform you these proceedings will be published by the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal. I want to acknowledge that EEOC Commissioner Paul Miller is in the audience. [To Commissioner Miller] It's a pleasure to have you here again.
Indeed. That makes me very confident that the following research will be deeply honest and not at all biased in favor of EEOC and its mission statement.
Hanania clearly has no research bias.
Are there any reasons to oppose disparate impact policies or anti-discrimination laws or affirmative action other than a desire for racial discrimination, in your view?
There are critiques of affirmative action around the idea that it leads to stigma towards the groups who benefit that outweighs the benefits. Also that it causes employers to ignore socioeconomic diversity. I don't find those persuasive but they're coherent.
In terms of bans on disparate impact discrimination, you might just not believe that courts can figure out which hiring qualifications are relevant to predicting job success. But why you should believe employers can do so in that case I don't know.
I would turn the question around and ask what the social purpose is of allowing employers to hire using mechanisms that demonstrably do not relate to employees success and cause discrimination.
More generally, we don't have hypothesize about what employment would look like if we got rid of antidiscrimination law. We only passed those laws in the 1960s. It wasn't true then that the market eliminated discrimination!
> There are critiques of affirmative action around the idea that it leads to stigma towards the groups who benefit that outweighs the benefits.
Yup. First time I ever heard the concept criticized was in my late teens, from a latino friend whose argument was essentially, "if there's affirmative action in place and I get a job somewhere, everyone's going to look at me like I only got it because of the policy and not because I deserved it, and I don't ever want that to happen, therefore affirmative action needs to die." That conversation was quite the eye-opener for me!
I think your statement about disparate impact is slipping in a few assumptions that aren't obviously correct:
You said: "I would turn the question around and ask what the social purpose is of allowing employers to hire using mechanisms that demonstrably do not relate to employees success and cause discrimination."
a. There is a big and important difference between mechanisms that can't be shown in court to relate to employee success and mechanism that demonstrably do not relate to employee success. It's similar to the difference between "not guilty" and "proven innocent."
In fact, all else equal, we should expect employers to be a lot better at figuring out what makes a good employee than a court will be--the judge is an expert on the law, but not an expert on running an electric company or a convenience store chain or a software house or whatever. And the world is absolutely full of things that aren't legible or easy to prove, but are still important. In my field, I think I can look at a young researcher and have a pretty good intuition about whether he or she will be a star in 10 years, even compared to other people who look very similar on paper, and I don't think I am unique here. The court is only involved here because the employers may also be making these decisions for bad reasons that are forbidden by law, like not wanting black employees.
b. It seems like "and cause discrimination" is assuming your conclusion. Having a racial/gender proportion of employees that is not the same as the population is not the same thing as discrimination, at least not in the normal way the word is used. Indeed, the world is absolutely full of fields and workplaces where the race and gender ratio is not much like that of the population, even in places where it seems extremely unlikely to be due to any kind of discrimination. (For example, women are overrepresented among veterinarians and East Asians are overrepresented among academic computer scientists. It's hard to see how either of these would be due to anyone discriminating.)
Many thanks for your detailed and informative answers on all these questions!
One quibble:
>In terms of bans on disparate impact discrimination, you might just not believe that courts can figure out which hiring qualifications are relevant to predicting job success. But why you should believe employers can do so in that case I don't know.
Typically, one would expect employers to be domain experts in their area of business, while one would expect the courts to be domain experts in the law.
While I have never been a manager, I have been one of a team of department members evaluating job candidates, and I asked technical questions closely analogous to situations that arose in the code base we maintained and extended. (e.g. "What is the topology of a CMOS NAND gate? What does the transient waveform in a low-pass RC circuit fed a pulse look like? etc.)
"allowing employers to hire using mechanisms that demonstrably do not relate to employees success"
The idea that courts can figure out a company's business model, hiring criteria, and employment practices better than the employer itself is one of the foundational philosophical divides between the sides.
"In terms of bans on disparate impact discrimination, you might just not believe that courts can figure out which hiring qualifications are relevant to predicting job success. But why you should believe employers can do so in that case I don't know."
3 reasons:
1. Employers have a financial incentive to figure this out. Court's don't.
2. Employers have more experience with their industry than courts do
3. All Employers have to do is figure out which are LIKELY to predict job success. Courts deal with proof.
What does the word "likely" mean?
See this article: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-non-frequentist
The tldr is "likely" just means that the company believes it will predict job success. Because all a probability is, is a degree of belief. If I have a hunch that being smart will make someone a good teacher than the probability that being smart makes someone a good teacher is over 0.5 (at least my probability for this happening). Now I could be wrong, sure. Like maybe being smart is not correlated with being a good teacher. In a fair market companies will make reasonable, educated guesses and will be right more often than they are wrong.
But if being wrong comes with an expensive lawsuit then they will err on the side of assuming their tests doesn't work just in case someone can prove it doesn't work so that even tests that do work won't be used because maybe they dont.
> A plaintiffs' attorney is not going to bring that case if it doesn't have some evidence
Tell me you're completely unfamiliar with the concept of "the process is the punishment" without saying you're completely unfamiliar with the concept of "the process is the punishment"...
Sure there are nuisance settlements--I'm familiar with that concept. But my point was that the "you have to answer job site by job site" is irrelevant to that. Sure, there are some meritless cases, but there are lots of errors in the other direction too--meritorious cases that aren't proved because its too expensive and a lawyer won't take them. One-sided fee-shifting is meant as a means of addressing the imbalance in resources between employers and employees.
Re 3, I had a boss I was on good terms with a decade or so ago who definitely *thought* that he wasn't allowed to (explicitly) exclude people with a history of theft, and that the company would *also* risk being held liable for anything such a hypothetical thief did end up stealing. Sample size of one and all, upstate New York (so salt accordingly for different jurisdictions/local views on law/etc), but it's at least weak evidence of the chilling effect from the double-bind. (We didn't hire any thieves so far as I know, but I was never in a position to see background check results either.)
> 4) As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.
This does not mean the test isn't a good test in the sense that it doesn't measure job performance. See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left.
The test not predicting job performance could equivalently mean that Duke Power had a very well calibrated way to choose their employees where they were prefectly capturing the information from the apitutde test compared to all the other factors involved in hiring. Indeed the fact that this turns out to be very common suggests to me that this is going on here (and elsewhere).
Excellent. Call it Hartgood's law: a measure used for control purposes is worthless for observing statistical regularities in the phenomenon being measured in proportion to how optimal the control is.
First, I'm setting aside your assertions that "The way things are is correct", because that's precisely what is being debated, and simply asserting that doesn't demonstrate anything.
Second, this neglects the role of stochastic enforcement and extremely high punitive fines in creating a regime of fear, as well as neglecting the cost of fighting such claims in the event that they are brought.
Third, you're looking at the environment -after- everybody has already adjusted - it shouldn't surprise us if the median disparate impact lawsuit fails (which I note you don't actually claim, but am assuming for the purposes of steelmanning), that's the only equilibrium.
Does your work in civil rights law include advising corporations and other businesses?
This sounds fine in theory, except for the fact that the courts have determined that things like IQ tests have no relation to job performance in certain industries even when they demonstrably do predict performance. More generally, why should we accept that judges have a better sense of what tests are a good metric for finding a good employee than employers do?
" Before that a company that, say employed ditch diggers, could insist that employees pass a math test."
Given that all sorts of cognitive tests correlates highly with IQ, and IQ correlates with job performance *in general*, then they should be allowed by default if we want meritocratic hiring.
Your SAT math score or high school math grade may not have some obvious connection to your history grades, does that mean every college should have to prove such relationships for every single class it offers? Or can we just accept that cognitive performance on different tasks are related?
Everyone gets that cognitive performance on different tasks are generally related. But it's still not clear why you would use IQ tests for meritocratic hiring in a specialized role, any more than you use IQ tests to decide who wins a chess tournament.
Why opt for a criteria that is (let's say) 0.7 correlated with what you're actually trying to achieve, instead of one that is 0.99 correlated?
That's going to depend on how much it would take to make tests for every role and how big the benefit is.
I worked for a marketing research startup firm from 1982-2000. In 1982, our hiring exam was the final exam given by one of our founders, a college professor, in his Quantitative Methods in Marketing Research course. It was a great test, and we hired a lot of good people in the 1980s.
Our biggest client gave a similar exam and hired a lot of good people.
When the EEOC went after our biggest, most prestigious client over their hiring exam, the firm then spent a lot of money on consulting firms to have it validated as related to work performance to the necessary legal standard. And they continued to hire good people.
In contrast, when the EEOC finally noticed us in the 1990s, we found out how much it would cost to validate our exam and decided to save money by throwing it out. That turned out to penny wise and pound foolish.
> consulting firms to have it validated as related to work performance to the necessary legal standard
How does this work? What sort of guarantee does the consulting firm that did the validation provide? Are they on the hook legally to represent their client in case a suit is brought challenging that the hiring exam they validated passes the necessary legal standard? Or is it informal? I'd like to learn about this aspect of Anglo business culture.
"As someone who actually works in civil rights law, this description of disparate impact discrimination is just completely wrong and made up. As long as the employer can demonstrate a legitimate reason for the requirement it wins"
I'm not seeing a disagreement over facts here, you think it's a good thing these judges have a veto over private-sector employment practices and he doesn't.
"So hiring on "merit" is completely fine as long as "merit" has some connection to the job."
College degrees are famously irrelevant to jobs, but companies can still require them. IQ tests were rejected because judges decided they didn't like them.
In particular, I think IQ scores positively correlate with performance on nearly all jobs. The correlation is lower for a janitor than a programmer, but it's positive in both cases.
Now, anyone who wants to discriminate against blacks could certainly decide to demand an IQ test as a way to get away with discriminating. But since this will also help them determine who will perform better, how does it make sense to forbid it?
Similarly, blacks are more likely to have a criminal record than whites. I see that it's possible for an employer to be trying to use this as a stealth way to hire fewer blacks without getting in legal trouble. But a criminal record seems obviously relevant to a lot of things you care about as an employer. Making you spend a bunch of money proving that (once for each employer, I guess) doesn't seem like a very sensible policy.
I assume (but don't know) that in both cases, the EEOC and maybe the judges involved have a policy outcome they prefer (no IQ tests for employment, no excluding people for having a criminal record) and used existing antidiscrimination law as a crowbar to get their preferred policy imposed.
>College degrees are famously irrelevant to jobs, but companies can still require them. IQ tests were rejected because judges decided they didn't like them.
This point deserves emphasis because of its cost. A standardized test typically takes on the order of hours. An otherwise-unnecessary college degree takes _10% of a person's entire potential working life_. If credentialism is being driven by making hiring decisions more defensible to the EEOC, that is a _huge_ cost.
Can you explain the Sheetz case? Because saying employers are not allowed to use criminal history to decide whom to hire due to disparate impact seems really crazy to me.
Probably because it is. Hello, I see you've met the modern-day American Left.
A little history about social justice-- there were at least hints of it in Howard Fast's memoir *Being Red*-- I think long about the 1950s in the American Communist Party.
One of my friends says it was strongly in play in a gay/lesbian group at his university in the 80s.
You should watch Mad Men.
The missing option among the four answers to black underrepresentation is: Whatever the reason, law is not the answer. We do not expect laws to balance out every single social asymmetry, particularly ones we cannot even agree on the origins of. We do not demand politicians fix this any more than we demand they solve cancer.
That's a weird analogy, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_cancer .
Bad wording on my side. The government wages its "war" on cancer with tax money, but it does not enlist every single corporation in actively "doing its part". Same for the war on terrorism.
Is this true? The government has forced every corporation to ban smoking, stop using asbestos in their buildings, and put little "this product is known to cause cancer to the state of California" notices on everything. I'm not sure affirmative action is really an outlier in terms of government use of regulation to achieve social change.
Good counterpoints! Except for the California one, as I categorically reject generalizing from California to the US. (This particular piece of Californian lawhackery -- Prop 65 -- has had almost 30 years to escape California, and never succeeded at that, so I feel safe claiming that it won't end up federal.)
I'd still argue that these are far less intrusive than the penumbra of civil rights law. Smoking bans and asbestos bans do not determine who gets hired and fired.
EDIT: And the situations are not quite comparable. A company using asbestos can be claimed to concretely harm its workers, whereas a company not putting its thumb on the scale in hiring can be claimed to... do less than someone in DC wants to set some ancient inequities straight in the wider society?
The war on terrorism did result in every corporation enlisted via "know your customer" laws.
If by "every corporation" you mean a relatively few number of companies, almost exclusively in the financial sector, then sure.
I've never had to deal with KYC in my interactions with any company other than banks and brokerages. Have you?
I don't deal with customers.
Banks and occasionally dual-purpose suppliers, if I am not mistaken. A better example in this direction would be companies forced to use E-Verify to prevent illegals from getting hired. Still less intrusive than civil rights caselaw.
https://twitter.com/LizaGoitein/status/1779885131873800582
> If the bill becomes law, any company or individual that provides ANY service whatsoever may be forced to assist in NSA surveillance, as long as they have access to equipment on which communications are transmitted or stored—such as routers, servers, cell towers, etc. 6/25
They are certainly trying to make everyone (including the lady that cleans around some office computers) work on their "war of terror".
A better example would be lookism. Nobody cares about Hollywood refusing to hire me for being too ugly!
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/unequal_inequalhtml
This review offers a good account of the common answers people give to the question "why do racial disparities exist?":
1. Contemporary racism.
2. The historical legacy of racism.
3. Bad culture.
4. Not smart enough.
But that list is missing a very important reason that doesn't get enough attention (because it isn't toxoplasmic enough?): preferential clustering. Demographic minorities often cluster in specific industries and institutions, for mostly obvious reasons:
- To exploit social networks.
- As an outgrowth of cultural norms.
- Due to accidents of geography related to initial immigration patterns.
Therefore it should not be surprising that Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University all have lower percentages of black students than Atlanta (~47%), Georgia (~31%), or the USA (~14%), given that Georgia (and Atlanta specifically) has eight popular historically black colleges and universities (more, depending on how you count them).
Clearly these preferences can be a consequence of past discrimination, but they also have a life of their own and deserve separate consideration. Absent discrimination, we'd still see significant demographic clustering, though it would likely be less negatively biased.
Any time someone blames a specific feature of America's culture or law for something, your *very first* instinct should be to ask if the same thing has also happened in other countries. In this case, if wokeness is caused by American civil rights law, then why did so many other countries start caring about minority and LGBT rights at the same time?
I recall Mencius Moldbug's explanation was that the US conquered Europe in WW2 so they are really just colonies of the US.
Did the US impose the Civil Rights Act on its newly "conquered" territories?
Mencius Moldbug is a man who advocates that black people should be sealed up in pods where they play virtual reality games until they die, so I don't think he is an especially good person to listen to on this subject.
Yes, but this is kind of a wash - other countries are sort of woke, but often less so than the US, and often explicitly view wokeness as an American phenomenon which they are trying to resist. They also usually have a different landscape since they might not have black people, and probably have a different and more tradition-influenced relationship with whatever minorities they do have.
As an Australian, we are definitely net importers of US culture and movements that start in the US tend to have an echo here. For example during BLM. Less protests and certainly less property damage (we have a negligible population of African origin, and only 3% Indigenous Australian) but for awhile everyone was talking about police violence against Aboriginal people, and the case of an Aboriginal man who died in police custody back in 2015 was briefly revived
Yeah the biggest proof that it's imported from US and not organic is when it's exactly like US even when it doesn't make sense, and the activist protest posters are in English.
Wokeness in other countries seems to be somewhat correlated with the use of the English language; Anglosphere countries are the most woke (in the sense used in this discussion), followed by northern European countries in which English is widely spoken. This suggests that it comes from the US and that its vector of spread is English, accelerated by the speed of communication made possible by the internet.
So, wokeness was caused by specific laws, but in countries without those laws it still spreads just by cultural pressure? So what explanatory power do the laws add?
They are the root cause. Without the laws, the cultural factors providing said cultural pressure would not have established themselves, or at the very least would never have established themselves so firmly!
But wasn’t it cultural pressure that led to those laws in the first place? Is it turtles all the way down?
Well, wokeness being caused by specific laws is Hanania's thesis, which I don't completely agree with (although the specific laws clearly matter). I agree with Scott that Hanania is overly dismissive of the importance of ideas and truth (at least in the long term; in the short term, vibes and fashion can win the day).
I would say that wokeness comes from belief in empirical equality in the context of multicultural societies. Laws follow from that, and then there are self-reinforcing feedback loops between the laws and the beliefs. Social media accelerates the process.
Europe, Canada, and Australia lagged far behind the United States in implementing affirmative action. The U.S. really is the world's cultural leader when it comes to issues relating to blacks.
It’s starting in Aussie universities now, but hasn’t spread much to the federal bureaucracy and broader workforce
Which makes sense given the history of the US. doesn’t it? If we want to drag in Australia, and Canada, then it would be better to talk about affirmative action towards indigenous populations.
Almost all developed countries, and many others, have anti-discrimination and hostile workplace environment laws. How broadly they are interpreted varies, as does the general level of wokeness.
But I wouldn't consider legalizing homosexuality and later gay marriage, or caring about some basic minority rights, to be wokeness, nor attribute those to anti-discrimination law.
SCOTUS rulings in favor of gay marriage explicitly build off earlier anti-discrimination rulings.
I haven’t read the decision in a while but I believe equality under the law was closer to the core of it. The IRS refusing to allow inheritance unless there was a legal marriage kind of forced the issue.
The cheeky answer is "gay propaganda". A less cheeky one is America puts a lot of cultural and legislative pressure on the rest of the world. Do you want to get on America's bad side by appearing not to care about issues America cares deeply about? This makes checking if "same thing has also happened in other countries" very hard in such cases.
I think the UK had its own reasons for coming to terms with its attitude towards homosexuality irrespective of what was happening in the USA.
> I read him as saying that race realism is most likely true, but you shouldn’t talk about it, because it scares people.
In fact, Hanania openly expresses his race realist views in his article "Diversity Really is Our Strength" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/diversity-really-is-our-strength).
Specifically, he says "Let’s peg white IQ at 100, Hispanics at 92, blacks at 85, and Asians at 105. We still have 3% for other, and let’s just give them an IQ of 95."
I don't think of that as race realist, everyone agrees those are the numbers. Race realism is when you say genetics are the cause of those numbers.
Well, how would you test for that? The first thing that comes to mind for me is, give IQ tests to people of different races in other countries, and see if 1) the racial IQ distribution is any different and 2) if so, if there is any correlation between different numbers and societal discrimination.
Has anyone done a test like that? (Would anyone dare to, in this day and age?)
> if there is any correlation between different numbers and societal discrimination
That's not going to work because societal discrimination against dumb and/or violent subgroups evolves very quickly. This is seen even within the same race and ethnicity ("townies" vs new ex-peasants).
> how would you test for that?
One idea is admixture testing. If (as seems virtually certain) the genetic component of intelligence is massively polygenic, and groups A and B differ in the average number of intelligence alleles, an admixed population aA+bB should average at aIQA+bIQB. Such studies have been done, e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34 and https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.14.444173v2.full The professor who performed these studies was fired by his university acting upon forceful suggestion by the resident woke contingent headed in this specific case by Kevin Bird (case number 1:23-cv-00546).
One thing that people have done in the past is look at the children of American GIs in other countries after WWII. The most famous one is the Eyferth study in Germany, and I know I saw a similar article just a few years ago based in Japan, and they found that there is no difference in IQ between the children of black GIs and white GIs in Germany or Japan.
Eyferth study looks at kids somewhat too young (heritability of IQ fully sets at 16-20 years, Wilson effect). So if a researcher wants to prove than IQs are not genetically determined, they test children at 7-10 years and never test them at 18 years.
Even if you accept results of Eyferth study, it looks ridiculuous that just a few years later of defeat of Third Reich German society had less racism than USA 2024 which attemped to do a lot more.
It's like someone claiming to have fully working, industrial-ready fusion and not using it.
Never heard of Japanese study, same later point applies.
You have a point about ridiculousness, but the Third Reich was mostly racist against other Europeans, since there were so few non-Europeans around to be racist against. I recall Scott pointed out that the Japanese they allied with were much more racially alien than the Ashkenazi they killed https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ but that's politics for you.
> I recall Scott pointed out that the Japanese they allied with were much more racially alien than the Ashkenazi they killed
Ethnically, yes. Ideologically... read up on State Shinto sometime. Imperial Japan really were natural allies of the Third Reich.
The US Army runs IQ tests on all inductees. This introduces a bias into the result of studies such as Eyferth. During WWII, the test was the AGCT, and inductees scoring too low were put into semi-skilled or labor positions. The result was that "the majority of Black soldiers [were shunted] into non-combat service units, which seemed appropriate for soldiers who they deemed unskilled (Lee, 1965)" [10.7709/jnegroeducation.81.3.0200] Later AGCT was replaced with ASVAB/AFQT, and except for McNamara's 100,000 episode the army has consistently rejected recruits with IQs below 90-95.
One other shortcoming of the Eyferth study is that the racial ancestry of the fathers was actually unknown: about 20% to 25% of the “Black” fathers were not African Americans but French North Africans, who may have been caucasian. I don't think that this study is ultimately informative.
Not everyone actually agrees. True, there is no argument against it. But lots of people get angry for acknowledging those are the stats even if you don't state what the cause is. One possible response is to dismiss IQ as a concept and assert that the tests just measure socioeconomic status (not true, but it serves as squid-ink).
I'm morbidly curious as to how much is differences in lead paint and dust exposure...
Apparently not much: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead.
Many Thanks!
On the positive side, the decreasing BLLs over 2000-2020 sound like this is a solved problem.
On the negative side, the 100X disagreement in effect sizes and large recent publication biases are infuriating in trying to see what is really going on. Presumably, at _huge_ BLLs, one would get into the flat-out acute poisoning regime, but that is a long way away from the doses relevant to the IQ studies...
> I read him as saying that race realism is most likely true, but you shouldn’t talk about it, because it scares people.
Sam Harris also takes this position on infamous pod with Charles Murray
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/73-forbidden-knowledge
Not having expected to learn anything novel and mockable from this piece, can I just say how much I love, love that it's the "I don't feel safe" age that has yielded Violent People as a new protected class?
...You don't 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 to use dog whistles here.
For whom am I whistling? Or if you explained, would you be the whistler? Is this passive whistling? Was SA whistling when he told us about the woman who got a paycheck because somebody didn’t want to hire an attempted murderer? How far back do you have to go to get to the source of the whistle?
Remember: the distinguishing characteristic of a dog whistle is that *only a dog can hear it.* If someone tells you that their opponent's ideas are X-ist or whateverphobic dog whistles, but neither the opponent nor his audience perceives it as such, who's the X-ist or whateverphobic dog here?
We're against dog-whistlism 'round these parts https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/
Can you elaborate on who you mean by "Violent People?"
I'm usually the one who doesn't bother to read the whole thing ;-).
No need to elaborate, it was in the piece:
"A disparate impact case made the news recently. The Biden EEOC sued convenience store chain Sheetz for running criminal background checks on their employees. They didn’t allege any intentional discrimination. They just said that more minorities fail criminal background checks than whites, therefore it’s disparate impact, therefore Sheetz has to drop the criminal background check.
"(the article links to another case where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application)
"Is Sheetz the only company that does criminal background checks on its employees? Do they do the background checks differently than any other company? My understanding is that the technical answer is that to do background checks without being sued, you have to prove in some very formal way that the specific crimes you’re looking for would be bad for your specific industry, and maybe Sheetz didn’t prove that a general history of violence was bad for convenience stores. But if this sounds kind of fake to you, and you’re wondering whether the real rule is “the government has wide discretion to prosecute whoever it feels like”, Hanania’s answer is “definitely yes”.
Somebody asked SA for the specific instance to which he was referring. He supplied this link:
https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/local/2015/12/25/texas-fires-back-feds-criminal-hiring-efforts/14940357007/
Gotcha - so (at the risk of overexplaining the joke) "Violent People" means "people who fail criminal background checks."
Assuming that's your meaning, I'd expect most criminal background checks fail for non-violent crimes like drug possession, but I'm not an expert there and you were having fun with snark, not teeing up a thesis for a debate. Still, there is a jump between the two so I don't blame anomie entirely for not immediately connecting the dots, uncharitable though his assumption of your meaning was. Thank you for readily clarifying.
No, I don't think that's the joke (?) particularly. The government seems rather determined to go to bat not simply for those convicted of drug possession, but instead to jump to the cases that the general public would willingly have left alone (if they knew about this, which they surely don't). See Scott's accompanying link. Moreover, the idea is that it will decide pre-emptively what comfort level people are allowed to have - if there's any joke, it's that contrast with "whatever you say you are feeling, we are obliged to say it is valid, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, and to accommodate you accordingly".
This is of a pattern with the left's desire to - exalt what is low, despise what is good (or merely "bourgeouis"). That's ideology, not policy. It might be your ideology too, but one should have the honesty to recognize it as such.
I think if the question turned on drug possession*, being a disqualifier, it would be a massive problem for employers - but I haven't heard that's the case, or else, it is the case but bringing workers over the border camouflages it.
It's interesting to me to learn about this because at the same time it is pursuing these peculiar enforcement actions, the government is occasionally issuing a ban on certain people being commercial drivers. I didn't know that the feds got into the commercial driving business with that level of granularity until the other day when a guy driving a cement mixer, who was either high or sleepy from doing drugs most of the night instead of sleeping, slammed into a schoolbus returning from a zoo trip and injured a number of pre-K kids, killing one as well as the driver of another vehicle.
It turned out, surprisingly to me since I'd lay odds the driver wasn't in the country legally, that he'd failed so many tests or had other interactions with law enforcement in the drug way, that he was on some sort of federal list of "guys not allowed to drive". I was really surprised they were paying such close attention, or that this guy would have even been "legible" to them.
Of course, of that there was no enforcement.
*How many people have a conviction *only* for drug possession, is not something I know; and I'm not sure it is knowable.
I think it’s important to remember that having a criminal record does not automatically equal violent behavior. You can have a criminal record record for drug possession, for instance. And up until not too long ago that would include having some marijuana.
As for the attempted murder charge;
“a "Hispanic female who was convicted of attempted murder for shooting at her husband in a college football stadium where he was working as a cameraman,"
I will agree it’s not exactly good behavior, but it’s not like somebody running around robbing people at gunpoint. I don’t know all the details but it certainly sounds like a crime of passion to me. And one unlikely to be repeated.
>This satisfied the not-really-paying attention white electorate, because politicians could tell them that “quotas are illegal, we’re sure not doing anything like that”. And it satisfied civil rights activists, because inevitably businesses/departments came up with secret ways to favor minorities until representation reached the level where they wouldn’t get sued.
This hints at a deeper, more systematic problem, one formulation of which is "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy".
The reason that activists devote so much effort to changing the cultural and political trajectory of the US is that the US is a rich and powerful country. Those who control it therefore have enormous leverage to change it, and to change other parts of the world influenced by it.
But the wealth and power of the US are NOT created by political activists, who take those things for granted and seek to direct them to their own ends. Rather, they're derived from the productive activity of people who design, build, and maintain the technology and systems that make up the modern world. Think: engineers who design electrical substations, electrical linemen who build high voltage transmission lines, auto mechanics who repair cars, 10x programmers developing operating systems, roofers installing roofs, contractors repairing roads, etc.
The problem is that every hour you devote to the productive activities listed above is one hour less that you can devote to political activism. Thus, people who spend any time actually contributing to the creation and maintenance of a prosperous society will be outcompeted in the battle for control of the society by activists who do nothing but political activism.
Great review. I didn't read the book, therefore just based on your text.
What Hanania doesn't seem to address is that 13% is still too low of a number for this stuff create substantial harm. I don't know how much time General Motors' Mary Barra spends thinking about this stuff. Maybe if you had 50% black population, this could be non-linearly more harmful.
Here in Brazil we do have 50% black population (not black in the same sense as Americans). We didn't fight a civil war to end slavery and we didn't have segregation after ending slavery. We are cordial men (see: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pt&tl=en&hl=pt-BR&u=https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homem_cordial&client=webapp ). We had our first black president in 1909, but neither he nor the people made much of it.
I am saying this because Brazil offers a nice comparison. We do have quotas. Quotas for public universities and quotas for public service. The federal law for public service quotas is 20% (much lower than the general population). There was some pushback when Congress approved these laws, but people mostly accepted it. Not even Bolsonaro pushes back on them. And I think quotas for university aren't the worst idea (you're educating people instead of putting them as traffic controllers) and the 20% number for public service isn't doing the same harm that the African National Congress quotas did on their country. Corporate life isn't harmed beyond that.
It seems that "just accept quotas" is the much better status quo.
The current status quo is how the Chinese communist state regulates corporate China. "Common prosperity" says the party leader and companies need to scramble to be seen as doing good. At least more than the next guy.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem that these suits against companies are that widespread at 13%. I'd expect Richard to quote statistics like: last year there was 1040 suits like these or whatever. As said, it doesn't seem to me that it is that impactful as Richard paints.
On yet another hand, just by following companies and their communication with investors, Europeans seem to worry about this thing way more than Americans. It's super common even in 2024 to find companies that don't report ESG policies and DEI goals. But every single European company does have this "common prosperity". I'd like to understand better how this compares with the European experiment. (I guess there it's even less than 13%, idk)
I suspect that if you offered the US business community, and non-woke non-black community in general, replacing the current morass of civil rights laws with, "look, we need at least 5% of your employees to be black; you're allowed to do the quota think to meet that", there would be very broad support for that. In a country that's 12+% black, finding 5% blacks in any field is much easier than the current alternative, and you can find safe places to put them even if they are only marginally qualified.
The problem is, it's a complete non-starter because the black community and the social justice community will scream bloody murder. I'm not sure how you all got the quota set at only 40% of the actual representation in the population; good for you on that. But it's not going to work here.
Also, I think racial quotas of this kind survive mainly by being kind-of opaque. Voters generally seem to vote these down when given the opportunity. So not only do you end up with various activists on the left screaming bloody murder about "only 5%," you also end up with a program that will not survive if it is ever put to a vote.
Scott is really putting in a lot of effort lately to talk about the thoughts of people who don't really warrant the attention.
I think Scott rebuts your judgement pretty handily in the body of the post:
> But my impression of Hanania’s place in the ecosystem is that he’s not writing this for you or me. He’s writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He’s reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it’s against conservative principles, and that it’s pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest of the book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people.
It's difficult to tell exactly what you're advocating, but it sounds like it could be in the neighborhood of fideism, which Scott has addressed head-on in the past (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism).
Fideism? What are you even talking about? Is this an AI?
...are you one? One would expect that a human being could click the explanatory link which Mr. Trogoldytes helpfully provided and discover exactly what fideism is and how it applies to the question at hand. And yet you apparently did not do so.
Absolutely does not apply in this context, to the point of it being a non-sequitur and a failed attempt at a cheap "gotcha!"
If it were a cheap gotcha, I wouldn't have hedged as much and I would have stated it more decisively. At any rate, it's quite hard to tell what your objections is, and I'm still curious.
Scott is far from alone in reviewing this book.
It's below Scott. It might not be below the others. What's your point?
I'm saying the book is a topic of conversation among people who discuss the same issues as Scott. And Scott doesn't strike me as "above" them, he's just another blogger on the internet.
It sure seems like Scott gets to decide what books to review on his own, and we have the option of reading or not reading the reviews as we see fit. That's kinda the point of Scott having a Substack instead of being a writer for some magazine that assigns or contracts with him to write a review for a specific book they want reviewed.
Scott is really putting in a lot of effort lately to take down his friends/fans - who all do warrant attention. Bray Caplan /Szaszsz/, Tyler Cowen /AI/, just last week he did it to Robin Hanson (who goes to those EA/rationalist venues) - and by willfully misunderstanding Hanson, I'd say - and Hanson answered kinda surprised (twice). Now it is Richard Hanania, who had just delivered a fine adulation of Scott. Who is next? TheZvi? Putanumonit? Yudkowsky? XKCD?
(That said: I liked all the posts, esp. this review - only the versus-Hanson seemed wrong, but was a nice overview about medical progress and the limitations of big studies to show it. I just worry if all things are fine in Scott's life - with baby-twins, they can't be)
"who all do warrant attention"
They'll warrant attention when they put forth something thoughtful. Some of those -- Cowen for example -- had something thoughtful to chew on, even if he was lazy about it. The latest posts about Hanania and Hanson are covering such bottom-feeding inane garbage that it's a waste of Scott's talent to be writing about them.
I dunno, but: do better. - also: there is a book review contest coming. Or at least, make some suggestion of such angel-feeding divine manna Scott should be writing about.
Szasz has been dead for quite some time, so not a friend/fan.
I stuck up for Hanson, but I'm not going to say Scott was "willfully misunderstanding". Haven't we learned about inferential distance from Less Wrong? Misunderstandings are common, and Hanson was pushed to clarify himself so Scott (and others) would understand better.
Sorry for my unclear interpunction. Scott argued against Caplan on the basis of Bryan's interpretation of Szasz. Versus Tyler about AI. In both cases (+Hanson) not in a friendly way, I'd say. Though/cuz all 4 are in the same tribe? Which Hanania is not really, so he gets a friendlier treatment.
If Scott's understanding of Robin's views was genuine -which it was- and he gives a platform to Robin's response -as he has- then I bet Robin himself is happy about it. I think he likes it when his work is challenged even more than when it's ignored, as long as it's done in earnest. And, as it became clear, Robin hadn't been as clear as he thought he had been about his ideas, which ends up helping everyone.
I would hope next time Scott reaches out privately to him before the post, even if he still puts out his post to show his remaining qualms and clarify Robin's position further to those that had understood it like he had at first. From Robin's first response, this didn't happen here and I don't see an excuse for that other than that Scott was overconfident he had nailed Robin's position. Merits an update
Neither Caplan nor Cowen seemed very happy. I hope Robin was. His answers did not show sth new in his view I was not aware of (being his position). I assume he was kinda disappointed/surprised Scott did not know his work better. I hope his books/posts will get a boost, but I am skeptical. Stil, I do agree with a Straussian view: a negative review is much more of a boost than no review.
My admittedly anedotical 0.05$ as a generic office drone. *Every* white collar job I've heard of uses patently IQ test-like screening. I'm not talking about Google or Jane Street, I'm talking about big4 consultancies, mid-sized accounting firms etc. Places where productivity is not nearly high enough to justify resisting the acrimonious persecution Hanania posits, and that yet are happy to ask their applicants to submit Raven matrices or quirky plane geometry problems (the joke is even that the only thing those working there got out of grad school/MBA was prepping for the GMAT/GRE, since once hired they'll end up filling excels anyway).
As for wokeness driving the soulness of workplace, I worked under a boomer boss who openly made (admittedly funny) "I hate my wife" and "women amiright" jokes in front of the HR lady, confident that suing for harassment was something you see in media much more than in real life. The place was as soulless (or, I'd rather say, soulful in the modest and self contained way you can expect an office to be) bc people just wanted to do their work and then go live their lives.
I honestly think Dr. Hanania's jump from academia to punditry might have obscured him some aspects of corporate America, which he describes in a way more redolent of 90s movies made by ennui-poisoned theater kids than how the vast majority of people involved describe it. He had an objectively brilliant idea of how the law could shape incentives and then culture, and went ahead cherry picking cases showing the final result *should* be what he describes rather than checking how offices actually look like from inside, or even from a neutral outside view. Yes, they are not Mad Men, bc *it was exaggerated fiction depicting the most ebullient, quirky and hedonistic sector of the whole economy*. They are a bit like Office Space, but so they have been since forever. We learn to live with it.
He has described himself as being unsuitable for a regular job. As "Richard Hoste" he said he was the worst employee at the McDonalds he worked at as a youngster.
Re: Applicant pool
It used to be that the government considered the applicant pool to be the people who applied for positions at your company. At a federal contractor I used to work for, we tracked every applicant's race on a chart for this purpose - we were required to produce this data on demand and compare it to our workforce.
I don't know the details, but sometime fairly recently it appears that the government became concerned that *where* companies do their recruiting can have a big effect on that applicant pool. If you only advertise in places likely to be seen by affluent people, for instance, you will get disparate impact. This is currently morphing into a general sense that different levels of racial representation necessarily means disparate impact which also means there must be some mechanism that produced it. This is something popping up in EEOC enforcement more than court rulings, but there are some court ruling pointing this direction. The legal system is in the process of fleshing this out, but the current trajectory is definitely to consider all of this disparate impact and therefore illegal.
Hanania is a fascinating subject himself - a Palestinian libertarian who admits hating conservatives and who, apparently, would love to live in a progressive multicultural state that didn't discriminate or do strange things with taxes. He's read largely by white conservatives. It's a wild ride.
Most of his arguments seem to be stronger arguments for an honest quota system which allows meritocracy within the groups than whatever it is he's advocating for.
There's a lot of weirdness with the definition of 'black'. What's really meant is 'descendants of slaves in the US' but people are so uncomfortable talking about that there isn't even a word for it. Instead 'black' gets conflated with it and people who are first generation dark skinned immigrants get included. Employers then get credit for hiring them even though they like other recent immigrant groups are already overrepresented in a lot of fields.
I’ve seen both “Foundational Black Americans” and “American Descendants of Slaves” used for that concept, sometimes as a specific attempt to exclude recent African-descent immigrants from soft quotas and affirmative action policies.
Those are both awkward mouthfuls
Precise language often is. It's still valuable, though.
The problem is that there isn't a shorthand for it like 'mestizo'. Maybe 'ebonic' or something like that. It's a weird semantic problem race relations might be very different if a proper word for it had been invented instead of a series of pointless euphemisms for 'black'.
They might indeed. But of course that all rides on the people doing the inventing *wanting* clear definitions and good race relations; history rather strongly suggests the opposite.
It would be weird to watch someone be deprotected by the EEOC for insufficient slave ancestry in their family tree (even if the other ancestors were free African immigrants)...
Why is "woke" a 2010s thing? I thought you hit on it earlier in the piece - why are Republicans no longer afraid of being called "racist"? The collapse of the traditional anti-Communist Reagan Republican ticket in the wake of Bush and the Iraq failure. Culture wars shifting from Christianity vs. secularism and American Nationalism Hell Yeah vs. Hippies, back to issues of race and gender (large components of Obama and Clinton politics and subsequently the new reactionary Republican rallying point in Trumpism). Dear Colleague, wage gap, Birtherism etc. are all nice examples.
Seems a bit simpler than that to me. Republicans are no longer afraid of being called racist because:
1) They're finally starting to grasp the dane-geld principle. Appeasing those who will try to call you racist does not make them stop calling you racist; it just incentivizes them to do so again the next time you do something they don't like. It was never about anyone actually being racist; it was about leverage all along, so the winning strategy is to deny them that leverage.
2) Their opponents have badly overplayed their hand. More and more people are seeing that they were cynically crying wolf on racism all along, so the accusation doesn't have nearly the same persuasive power to voters as it once did.
I bet that if the Republicans actually try to repeal the Civil Rights Act, people will actually listen when they are called racist. Frankly, I am very pro-Origins of Wokeness because every time a Republican says something like "we should repeal the Civil Rights Act," we get that infinitesimal bit further away from a Trump reelection.
I'll take that bet. The left has been crying wolf for so long over X-ism and Whateverphobia that they've forgotten the moral of the story and what ends up happening to people who cry wolf. Progressivism is in retreat across the board right now, because people have stopped listening to the constant stream of lies, to the point where even if they were to find an actual racist on the right, how many people not already deep in the extreme-left camp would believe it?
I don't know how to explain to you that "the left crying wolf doesn't actually matter to this," at least not without being somewhat impolitic, so I will go with this metaphor:
Say me and my buddies get together to call you a pedo. We smear you publicly. People at first maybe listen, maybe not, but there's no basis for the claims, so eventually they get used to our shouting and decide we're full of shit.
Then you're interviewed on TV and say "I love fucking kids." In context, it's not sarcasm or a joke. Do you think that all the BS we spouted earlier will change how people interpret that?
The same applies to "we should repeal the Civil Rights Act." Maybe you can sit down and have some elaborate long explanation of how it's good. Maybe even it would win eventually in the court of public opinion - but I'm not talking about years down the line, I'm talking right now. You have six months to get Trump in office, please spend every second trying to argue we should repeal the Civil Rights Act.
You're clutching at straws here. Let's be clear: *no one cares.*
Not with the economy in the toilet, crime running rampant and badly exacerbated by the border mess, and Leftist college campuses turning into hotbeds of antisemitism, calling openly for Jewish genocide after a barbaric attack on Israeli citizens.
That's what has everyone's attention right now, and it's not going away in the next six months no matter how loudly you howl that people *should be* paying attention to other things or that everyone's misinterpreting the evidence of their own eyes.
Let's review the conversation again:
1. I said that conservatives saying "We should repeal the Civil Rights Act" will hurt them.
2. You responded by saying that the left has cried wolf so much that it won't matter.
3. I changed the context of the scenario of a person crying wolf so as to make it more obvious how it doesn't matter how much somebody cried wolf: if you actually start howling at the moon and mauling folks' sheep, they're gonna believe you're a wolf.
You appear to have misread my last post as saying "Please list the last half-dozen things you saw in the news/on your social media feed that made you mad." I do not care to engage with that, since I very carefully avoided getting into some gargantuan debate about every element of Trump v. Biden, but instead contained myself to the topic of Scott's original post: Richard Hanania proposing Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act. If you would like to have that conversation, I am sure there are many people out there who would love to talk your ear off about Trump bad or whatever, but I am not one of them.
If you reply to this with some more complaints about the Biden administration, rather than the substance of both my previous posts, I will not reply to it. If you write two sentences complaining about the Biden administration and then follow up with a really cogent and clever explanation of how I'm wrong and "repeal the CRA" is a real vote getter, then I will never read the latter because I will have stopped by then.
(Uncharitably but lovingly joking:) Americans when discussing social phenomena: It seems pretty tricky to tell what the effect of our laws is on our culture. If only there were other places we could look at!
German here: We have laws prohibiting outright discrimination during hiring, but the (fairly high) onus is on applicants to prove that they have been discriminated, and certainly there are no government agencies going after companies publicly because of insufficient women or minorities. Yet almost nobody uses IQ tests during hiring, and work places are very very much some form old mad men style old boys club. Germany would, however, be a data point in favor of Hanania's theory since companies focus comparatively less on increasing representation of minorities and women during hiring (in case of women perhaps more in recent years, but I don't think this is downstream of new laws). A caveat is that this is from public perception, I have only ever worked at small no-name companies with very irrelevant HR departments.
I personally would need to see a stronger breadcrumb of large cases and settlements brought about by American government agencies to believe that they are a deciding factor. I can see companies being pretty risk averse, and lawyers being biased of advising their clients that they do need to implement complicated rules around hiring, and why yes, they of course need legal experts to do this correctly. On the other hand, it seems employees get shafted regularly in clearly illegal ways by large corporations (wage theft, ignoring mandatory protection laws, etc.), and I find it hard to imagine that "merit-based hiring is forbidden but so are quotas" would be the one rule government agencies care enough to enforce above others.
Oh, I just recalled: Our Eastern European branch office DID turn into a old boys club on Friday afternoons, to the degree that some of the women there just went home at 2pm because it became unbearable to work there.
My flaming hot ultimate foreign relations take: I sincerely hope USA destroys itself and ceases to exist, but not before helping all the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Finno-Ugric, Tibetan, Caucasian, Boer, Balochi and nameless other peoples free themselves from the Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Afghani, South African, Indian or Pakistani yoke by destroying those countries first.
I think you're commenting on the wrong post.
No, for example how FAA recruits employees sounds like a society that has to cease to exist. On the other hand, if USA ceases to exist today even worse societies will take over the world. So first those worse ones should be dismantled and the peoples long oppressed by them should be freed. Once such a world is achieved then USA can be safely delenda est.
no thank you, that sounds like it would result in the deaths of over a billion people
dismantling of USSR didn't take many deaths, and yugoslavia could've had even less but it was botched unfortunately. russia is one strong support to ukraine and a well staged coup away from that, iran only supporting azerbaijan and wooing turkey a bit so a side proxy war. afghanistan is already a failed state, south africa is halfway and pakistan is quarterway there. china is y'alls main enemy and that can be ugly but who knows in a decade how they will implode. india i added mainly for flavor but some balkanization is necessary so that nobody is bullying the world in a post usa scenario. i'd say in total no more than a million or so.
Don't forget the (rolls dice) Dravidians, we need to protect them from the nefarious influence of (rolls dice) Bavaria. Once that is done we can proceed to finally dismantle the (rolls dice) world chess federation.
nope, bavaria is not a sovereign nation and even if it did it wouldn't cause any threat to world order in a post USA scenario. also, there aren't a significant number of geographically clustered dravidians there. lastly, i'm for dismantling the nations holding other peoples hostage, not organizations. your dice are all wrong.
Something I've always wondered: when I'm applying for a job and I fill out that demographics survey where they say "we're required by law to collect this information," what does my response get used for (if anything)? Is it one of the factors the EEOC might use in determining the "applicant pool"?
I notice that there are lots of cases where you put in a 'fact check' note to say that Hanania was wrong in some way.
To avoid file-drawer problem, were there any cases where you checked a specific surprising claim, and it was correct?
Or was it a case of 'every time he wrote something surprising to me an I checked, it was wrong or there was important excluded nuance'?
Yes, I can't put the words "fact check" next to every single thing that's true in a book. This was less specific "fact checking" and more ambiently reading about the topics he was mentioning.
>But Hanania doesn’t just say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like Office Space.
Hanania obviously didn't work in an office environment in the 1950s, and a glance at his Wikipedia page suggests he's never worked in a real corporate office either.
Is he just talking about *media depictions* of office environments, which is what he'd be personally familiar with? I have no doubt that those *depictions* changed over that time frame.
In my review of law professor David Bernstein's book "Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America," I explained how we got here in terms of race classifications:
The main plotline of "Classified" that partly unifies all these disparate examples is the rapid switch during the 1960s from America being a land of white privilege to one of legal nonwhite privilege. Thus, in the 1970s, immigrants from India, seeing themselves losing out to their officially Oriental rivals on government goodies like contracting quotas and low-interest Small Business Administration loans because they were counted as white, got the government to switch their categorization from unprivileged white to eligible Asian.
(One farsighted Indian activist group objected to this change on the grounds that someday being lumped in with high-performing East Asians might hurt them due to quotas. And indeed, Indians would be better off these days applying to Harvard if they were still considered white.)
As Bernstein notes, Indians and Chinese don’t have much in common, genetically or culturally. But government categories can more or less socially construct groups. These days, white people tend to assume that if the government calls them “Asian,” then they must have solid reasons to group them, like, say, they both eat rice and are good at math. The sordid story of why South Asians stopped being white—because being white doesn’t pay anymore—is not at all well-known among whites. This makes it easier for naive whites to fall for today’s reigning conspiracy theories such as “white privilege.”
Not surprisingly, West Asian and North African activists have been trying to bail out of the now-disprivileged white race ever since South Asians made their escape. The outgoing Obama administration granted “Middle Easterners and North Africans” their wish for the 2020 Census, but then the Trump administration reversed the plan. [The Biden Administration recently revived the MENA racial classification, although nobody seems to have wondered whether or not Jews qualify, which strikes me as an important question.]
Back in the days of actual white privilege, the League of United Latin American Citizens successfully pushed for Mexican-Americans to be counted as white on the 1950 and 1960 Censuses. But with the introduction of affirmative action in 1969, Latin pressure groups organized their jailbreak from whiteness.
Their problem, though, was that some Latins were white and many others liked to think of themselves as white—Latin American culture has truly been white supremacist since Cortez landed in Mexico 500 years ago.
How to qualify for racial affirmative action while still checking the box as white? Bernstein cites the witty Chicano essayist Richard Rodriguez’s allusion to Richard Nixon as “the Dark Father of Hispanicity.” The Nixon administration came up with the cunning notion of creating a new category orthogonal to race: ethnicity. People of Spanish cultural origin would be gifted with valuable “Hispanic ethnicity,” while everybody else got stuck with the booby prize of “non-Hispanic” ethnicity.
This Nixonian distinction between race and ethnicity is actually insightful. If you define a racial group as a partly inbred biological extended family, and an ethnic group as a collection of people united by traits, such as language, accent, cuisine, surnames, and so forth, that are usually (but not necessarily) passed down within biological families, then the subtle difference between race and ethnicity makes sense.
But like a lot of Nixon’s stratagems, it was too brilliant. Almost nobody got it. Instead, they just started thinking of everybody from south of the border as being of the Latino race. Due to Nixon’s brainstorm, we’ve now managed to socially construct a population that has a hard time seeing with their own eyes that Fidel Castro was white.
As for the Asian American Pacific Islander grouping that you used to hear about in the later 20th Century and then didn't hear about again until the 2020s and now you hear about it a lot ... That started off with bureaucrats trying to come up with a limited set of races that would fit easily on 8.5 x 11 inch paperwork forms.
Should there be separate categories for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders? That would make it harder to fit standard race checkboxes on one side of a sheet of paper, so where can we condense? Well, a large fraction of America's Asians and Pacific Islanders, back then, lived in Hawaii, and the population of Hawaii is famously intermixed, so a lot of people in Hawaii have both East Asian and Pacific Islander ancestors, so lumping them together to save space made sense.
But then in the late 1990s, Pacific Islander groups complained, not unreasonably, that they didn't have much in common with Asians. They especially didn't like being lumped in with Asian math whizzes when applying to college. So the Clinton Administration broke out Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander for the 2000 Census.
So the term AAPI faded away ... except that Congress had passed a law in the early 1990s creating an AAPI Heritage Month (like Black History month), back when AAPI was the official term. Congress has never gotten around to updating the legislation to fit the current race categories.
With the growth in antiquarianism during the Great Awokening, AAPI Heritage Month suddenly became a big deal in recent years, so the AAPI term came back into prominence, even though it was last used on the Census in, IIRC, 1990.
I love it!
"Identity Politics" meets "People Respond to Incentives"
Do any traditionalists insist that the _key_ requirement for categories is -
fitting on an 80 column punch card? :-)
>Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground.
Which is why wives stayed at home for hundreds of years of fairly-modern capitalism, then suddenly started getting hired to work: there was a mutagen in the water in 1950 that made all women uniformly as capable and economically productive as men, whereas before they had been stupid and flighty, making it suddenly economically rational to hire them when it hadn't been before.
Whenever someone makes this argument, I just want to stare at them and say, 'Do you not know what a bias *is*?'
Acting not-perfectly-rationally-and-optimally-in-a-consistent-way is the *definition* of having a bias!
If there's a broad cultural or systematic bias against a group, then yes, the market will behave inefficiently in way that disadvantages that group! That's definitional!
> there was a mutagen in the water in 1950 that made all women uniformly as capable and economically productive as men
Yes, it's called The Pill.
"The Pill" was 1960, not 1950, but yeah kind of this. Reliable birth control was *huge*. Before 1950-1960, a woman who did not want to live a life of chastity, was not going to be as productive as a man in most jobs because they're going to spend a lot of time pregnant or nursing, during which they are not producing anything for their employer and their professional skills and networks will atrophy. And that would happen at completely random times, possibly just after you'd finished training her to be really productive.
Exceptions being jobs a women could do from home, and jobs where there's greatly diminishing returns to experience (but not manual labor because upper body strength) where you don't lose much by rotating in a new batch of girls to replace the cohort that just got married and quit. Extra bonus points if it's a job where the employer or the customers will prefer someone perky and energetic and attractive, and "...but how do we get rid of them when they're thirty?" stops being a problem if you hire young women and expose them to a steady stream of prosperous, eligible bachelors.
Women did become relatively more economically productive once, due to technological advances, most labor was no longer physical labor. Other technological changes made housework less time-consuming, and generally drove a bigger share of the economy towards the formal economy, each of which made a more traditional division of labor, where the wife isn't formally employed, have more disadvantages and less advantages.
Another argument against anti-discrimination law is that it's only made when no longer needed. A society where people are so uniformly biased against a group that no company tries to take advantage, hire them, and outcompete its peers, won't make a law protecting that group either. Conversely, a society that makes such a law—and even more so a society where racism/sexism are as taboo as in modern-day America and other Western countries—is one that's not systematically biased against that group.
First paragraph: See my replies to Edmund, who made the same points.
Second paragraph: I feel like the Civil War alone sufficiently refutes this claim, although there are many other possible examples.
Certainly it takes *some amount* of public opposition to a form of oppression before we can get the political will to pass a law against it.
But the idea that this opposition needs to be sufficiently universal that *the oppression already stopped existing* does not seem to have any historical support I can think of... passing these laws has always been contentious, at least once involving a major war.
And, given the way our two-party system works, we should really expect most things to get passed into law when they have at most something like 60% support, since that controversial middle is where one side tends to take it up as a cause and use it as a bludgeon against the other side.
It doesn't take universal opposition to discrimination for anti-discrimination laws to be made, but it doesn't take universal opposition to discrimination for anti-discrimination laws to be unneeded either. If, say, 13% of the population is black, they performed equally to whites on average, but 50% of the companies in each sector refused to hire blacks, then the companies that don't care about race and just follow their interests would hire all the black people, and they would be not much worse off than whites. And when these companies perform as well or better than the racist companies, it would make it clear to most people that the racism is unjustified, and many of the other half would also stop discriminating.
Slavery was a different situation, because even if slave states were a minority of the US, slaves weren't allowed to move to a free state, or to choose whom they worked for.
Under Jim Crow states tried to prevent blacks from leaving for better employment territory, but they weren't as successful.
Also, to the extent that was a thing, it would have been perfectly possible (and right) to make federal laws to fight it, as well as against discrimination by state governments, without making broader anti-discrimination laws that apply to private entities.
> they weren't as successful.
You'd kind of hope not, wouldn't you?
When you look at slavery, in a whole lot of ways, it's not that different from employment. (Some slaves even got paid for their labor!) But there is one big, significant, bright-line distinguishing factor. The sine qua non of slavery is: the slave is legally not free to leave.
Trying to implement such a blatant law, even under Jim Crow, seems like just asking to get smacked down by courts or Congress.
>If, say, 13% of the population is black, they performed equally to whites on average, but 50% of the companies in each sector refused to hire blacks, then the companies that don't care about race and just follow their interests would hire all the black people, and they would be not much worse off than whites.
If discrimination didn't cluster by location or industry or things like that, maybe.
This goes back to the gay cake thing. 'Just go to another cake store' makes sense if you live in a big city with 30 cake stores. If you live in a small town with one cake store 20 miles over in the next larger town, not so much.
If it's clustered by location, you can move. I'd consider it preferable to have private discrimination against black people in some parts of a country and little discrimination in other parts, to having the government meddle with it, resulting in legally incentivized discrimination against whites everywhere a few decades later.
Would you say that was true of antidiscrimination law as applied to blacks in, say, 1960-1970? Because it sure looks to my uninformed eye like there was quite a lot of explicit and implicit discrimination going on before it was banned, including restrictive covenants that forbad selling houses in some neighborhoods to blacks, employers who would not hire blacks for some jobs regardless of their qualifications, etc.
I think you can make a plausible argument that these laws aren't worth the costs they impose in 2024, but I think that is a *way* harder argument to make about, say, 1970.
>Because it sure looks to my uninformed eye like there was quite a lot of explicit and implicit discrimination going on before it was banned, including restrictive covenants that forbad selling houses in some neighborhoods to blacks, employers who would not hire blacks for some jobs regardless of their qualifications, etc.
Were these sufficiently visible and unambiguous that the discrimination could have been banned _without_ weakening the standard of proof to "disparate impact" and imposing quotas (with attendant dishonesty about the quotas). From your examples, the racist covenants sound like they should have been an open and shut case. Were the other 1970s era discrimination actions similarly clear?
_Most_ of the damage from the EEOC looks like it came from extensions (such as "disparate impact") effectively turning into anti white_and_asian racism.
My impression is that discrimination was already declining fast in at least parts of the US by the 1960s, and would have continued to do so even in the absence of civil rights law. One reason to think so is widespread support for the civil rights act itself (59% to 31% according to one 1964 poll I found); there wouldn't have been wide support for it if most people wanted discrimination to continue. Another is that, AFAIK, the relative wage gap between whites and blacks decreased much more in the decades preceding 1964 than it did since then, suggesting that the cultural changes that precipitated the civil rights act were more important than the act itself.
I don't say there wasn't any discrimination anywhere in the country in the 1960s. I say within a decade or two, black people could have found more-or-less equally good jobs and housing as similar whites in at least parts of the country, and they could have moved to those parts. Making that process faster by a few years, and forcing the same norms on all parts of a supposedly federal country, weren't necessities that justified infringing upon the freedom of association, and all the costs described in this book review.
(Restrictive covenants had been unenforceable since 1948, Shelley v. Kraemer, though I disapprove of that decision too.)
This is a good point to bring up. Potential counterarguments (as opposed to the "mutagen in the water") would be that:
1) Women's preferences shifted due to changes in culture/education (such that most women honestly didn't have a preference for full-time paid employment in the 1920s, but did have that preference by the 1970s).
2) The jobs available changed dramatically (less physical danger? More demand for verbal skills and less demand for upper-body strength?) such that it made sense for a woman to refuse the job options available in the 1920s, but embrace those available in the 1970s.
3) Women's time was more needed in the 1920s to keep the home functional: cooking, mending, and cleaning (without modern tech) take a long time. Once technology made those burdens lighter, women had more ability to pursue other employment.
I am not sure if either of those explanations is true, and the real answer probably involves a combination of several factors.
>1) Women's preferences shifted due to changes in culture/education
Sure, but those are some of the likely causal for the racial gap according to the non-HDB side of this argument. But the HBD side still doesn't want affirmative action in admissions or minority scholarships to reduce the education gap, for example.
>2) The jobs available changed dramatically
To some extent, but I don't believe that women were equally represented in safe office jobs in the 1940s and 2010s. This could be an argument for why absolute female employment went up, but not why it went up in specific industries where women were always capable, and I believe it *did* go up hugely in those industries.
Also, you know, competitive advantage. If it were the case that there were lots of jobs suitable for only men and some jobs suitable for men or women, market logic would demand that the men all get hired into the former, meaning that the latter would be overwhelmingly dominated by women. And that the number of women in the latter type of job would *decrease* when the former type of job went away, freeing up more men. That's the opposite of the actual observed pattern.
>3) Women's time was more needed in the 1920s to keep the home functional: cooking, mending, and cleaning
*Someone's* time might have been more needed, but men can cook, sew, and clean.
To use your second answer in response to your third answer, relative to *most* jobs available in the 1920s, women had the comparative advantage on the tasks listed (and men had the comparative advantage on factory work, farm labor, construction, etc.)
You raise good points.
A long time ago it was risky hiring a woman for many jobs because you could expect she would quit after she got married.
2) "To some extent, but I don't believe that women were equally represented in safe office jobs in the 1940s and 2010s. This could be an argument for why absolute female employment went up, but not why it went up in specific industries where women were always capable, and I believe it *did* go up hugely in those industries."
The labor necessary to run a household in 1940 was still considerable. "Only 55 percent of homes with plumbing had what the government considers a 'complete system' -- hot and cold running water, a flush toilet and a tub or shower." Someone had to be at home making the place function.
3) "*Someone's* time might have been more needed, but men can cook, sew, and clean."
They cannot nurse. It makes sense to train the person with the milk ducts to do the tasks compatible with infant and child care. Comparative advantage. Formula did not become popular until the 1920s, and it costs money, while lactation is free. Hormonal birth control was not released until 1960.
One major thing that shifted in the 70s was stagflation.
"Women's lib" was sold to women in the 60s on the premise that "if you want to go into the workforce and not just be a traditional housewife, you should have that option." And they got it. And then, no sooner did they get it than the cost of living skyrocketed and it was, in many cases, no longer tenable for it to just be an *option* anymore, because you just couldn't afford to raise a family on Daddy's salary alone. So we went in a few short years from opening the door to the workplace to women who wanted it to forcing the ones who didn't want it into the workplace anyway, just to keep their heads above water.
But the experience of women & blacks in the US workforce is very different. There is no female equivalent of Jackie Robinson famously breaking a bright-line barrier and thus changing things:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/who-are-the-brooklyn-dodgers-of-feminism/
Rather female employment just increased over time as they shifted out of full-time housework (and with labor-saving devices & birth control technology being behind much of that). The decade with the largest increase in female participation in the workforce was the 1980s, because Reagan focused on cutting marginal tax rates and women were marginal workers.
Bryan Caplan's take* on the history of women in the workforce seems to be that the norm of household production was once efficient, and that leaving the household for workplaces is the result of material conditions changing. Which is I suppose a quasi-Marxist viewpoint.
*It might be in the titular essay of "Don't Be a Feminist", which isn't available online for free, but he responds to a feminist critique of it here https://www.betonit.ai/p/feminism-do-i-really-fail-my-ideological
"wives stayed at home for hundreds of years of fairly-modern capitalism, then suddenly started getting hired to work"
Is this an accurate description of what happened? Wouldn't it be more like:
With the exception of a few leisured elites, both men and women have always worked. In agricultural societies, almost everyone "stayed at home," because the workplace was the home. Significant labor was required to run a household. Industrialization brought work out of the home to the mine, factory, slaughterhouse, etc. Men, women, and children all worked in these settings in some capacity. Married women, who could expect to quickly become pregnant in the absence of reliable birth control, often labored in the home for obvious practical reasons. Most would not have traded places with their husbands, because eg hacking apart cows by muscle power alone is both unpleasant and dangerous. Many families could not afford a single member forgoing paid work to keep house; those wives sat at sweatshop sewing machines or kept house for others.
Continued technological progress 1) made industrial work less reliant on muscle-power 2) brought a ton of work into the even safer and more pleasant office 3) drastically lowered the labor required to run a household and 4) made it possible to prevent pregnancy.
Within a couple decades of this completely unprecedented situation obtaining, women were all up in paid employment.
1. I don't trust Hanania. He's not a reliable historian. And he's much more heat than light. I have concerns that in participating in this I am adding to attention drawn to him; I'm out of the thread after this. I did not read the book.
2. I have some expertise in harassment cases in California. The idea that one joke creates liability is untrue. See: California Civil Jury Instruction (abbreviated CACI for reasons not immediately clear to the casual observer) 2521A. Further different workplaces can have different standards; (see the Friends case - Lyle v. Warner Brothers (38 Cal.4th 264)). "FEHA is not a civility code."
For clarity, I am not talking about what the law should be. I am discussing what the law is. And isn't.
> The idea that one joke creates liability is untrue.
That's not the idea, though. One joke creates *grounds for a suit,* and then, even if the defendants win because the suit was obviously without merit, the disgruntled employee who filed the suit is now a member of a protected class and you can't do anything to them for fear of having it called "retaliation."
Reading the CACI jury instructions, it looks like anything that a California jury thinks is both “severe” and “offensive” is grounds for liability. It is well-established in 1st amendment cases that relying on “reasonable person” standards for speech is a recipe for disaster.
What if Bob makes one offensive joke, Alice reports him to HR, HR does nothing, then Bob makes several more of those jokes, then Alice goes straight to the court? If the court would hold the company liable for condoning harassment by not having disciplined Bob the first time, then the company is forced to discipline employees even for one joke.
Also, companies don't have a lot of resources to investigate complaints, so they err on the side of presuming guilt. And the laws are vague, and the awards excessive; and courts adjudicate civil cases on a mere preponderance of evidence basis; and employees avoid actions that carry even a moderate risk of getting them fired.
All of these point in the direction that hostile environment law has a chilling effect on a far, far broader range of speech than what's actually likely to lose a lawsuit.
>Also, companies don't have a lot of resources to investigate complaints, so they err on the side of presuming guilt. And the laws are vague, and the awards excessive; and courts adjudicate civil cases on a mere preponderance of evidence basis; and employees avoid actions that carry even a moderate risk of getting them fired.
Many Thanks! Great articulation of the whole _chain_ of amplifiers for the chilling effects!
Why is it the origin of woke (power)? Surely incentivizing companies to suppress criticism of an ideology makes it much easier for it to spread.
Part of the origin, of course, is that activists come up with the ideas. But it, especially its sillier parts, wouldn't have anywhere the clout if most people were as free to argue against it, without risking their jobs, as for it. In particular, it's risky to hire an outspokenly anti-woke manager, so managers are either true believers, or shut up. The true believers push the stuff well beyond what the law technically requires, and no one stands up to them.
Civil rights law (as interpreted by courts and the bureaucracy) is necessary to explain at least the sheer uniformity with which companies and organizations subscribe to woke advocacy and curtailment of its criticism. In its absence, there could be more variation, and I expect many companies would end up less woke in the absence of the legal pressure.
And perhaps the more extreme excesses of wokeness wouldn't have occurred to anyone if civil rights law hadn't helped them thoroughly win all the previous battles. They would have more important things to worry about. Then and if you define wokeness as the more recent excesses, rather than as racial/gender progressivism in general, then it may be correct to say that civil rights law was part of the cause of even the conception of those ideas.
EDIT: an analogy: For a liquid cooled below its freezing point to freeze over, it needs a nucleus around which further crystals can form. But in most circumstances there will be one, so it's reasonable to identify cooling below the freezing point as the cause of the freezing, rather than try to search for the nucleus.
----
As for the original origin of racial/gender progressivism: I think it results, roughly, from these beliefs, common among educated people/liberals, some of which were close to the truth back in the 1960s:
(1) racism/sexism are among the most evil ideologies
(2) in a debate between a more anti-racist (etc.) and a less anti-racist position, the former is right, and the latter is racist
(3) if a phenomenon may be explained by racism (etc.), it definitely is; people who deny that racism is a big problem, and is the cause of all sorts of inequalities, are themselves racist.
The problem is that this creates a ratchet where people justify less-and-less reasonable (ostensibly) anti-racist ideas, because pushing back against them would be considered racist. And society can't course-correct, because arguing that these beliefs are no longer reasonable is itself seen as evidence of racism.
Does someone know if the SCOTUS has ever upheld laws against verbal harassment against a First Amendment complaint?
It doesn't fall into any of the established exceptions to the First Amendment. It's not a content-neutral time, place or manner restriction. There have been cases where particular applications of hostile workplace environment (i.e. harassment) law have been struck down as unconstitutional. The only problem is that only the employer has standing to make a constitutional challenge, not the employee fired for his speech, because the company would have the right to fire him even if the government didn't compel it to do so. So perhaps just no company has tried to get it struck down completely, perhaps because it would seen as incongruous with claiming that the company sincerely condemns harassment and does everything to prevent it, which is the claim companies try to use as their main defense?
The best thing a libertarian/conservative organization with a few million dollars could do is to offer to pay the legal costs of a company that makes a First Amendment challenge against hostile workplace environment law, and fights it all the way to the SCOTUS. Perhaps, if it can afford it, also offer to pay the damages in the case of a loss, lest companies are wary about taking up the offer because they expect to lose and be forced to pay more than if they settle early.
(The main place I've read about harassment law is https://www2.law.ucla.edu/Volokh/harass/, written around 2000; IIRC, according to him, harassment law had been upheld against First Amendment challenges by some lower courts, but not by the SCOTUS.)
Has anyone written a thesis on what is the driver of wokeness, then? If it is not the civil rights laws, is there a compelling competing hypothesis?
My thesis is that people get upset about how our society treats some minority groups worse than the majority group. It seems like people think it is unfair.
https://ncofnas.com/p/why-we-need-to-talk-about-the-rights
thanks
https://scholars-stage.org/honor-dignity-and-victimhood-a-tour-through-three-centuries-of-american-political-culture/
Johnathan Haidt blames tumblr (etc) for wokism's explosion in popularity in the past decade. Haidt has a substack where he discusses this more at length.
Personally, I thought his observations added an interesting dimension, though I think there's more to the story.
> But since 1964, when Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were the three equally-sized and equally-interesting groups, the Hispanic community has become dominated by Mexican (and Central American) immigrants, who do form a pretty natural grouping.
The conspiracy-brain take is that this was an attempt to diminish the impact of Cuban Americans specifically, who were overwhelmingly anti-communist and very pro-Reagan, at least back in the 80s, for unsurprising reasons (most of the ones who had made it to America had deliberately fled communist Cuba). This fact alone should highlight that I think this grouping is very *un*-natural... each of these places differs drastically, just as you point out for Korea and Tonga... what makes this grouping natural, in your opinion? It includes people of almost exclusively European ancestry and mostly Native, plus everything in between. They might natively speak Spanish, Portuguese, or English (or probably lots of other languages, variants, Creole languages, etc). Is it just that the ones that are in the US immigrated here? That's not a racial or ethnic group, that's just "immigrants."
You know, we could have avoided all of this bullshit if we'd just agreed to reparations instead.
There was a point where I think most of the culture agreed with the sentiment 'Black people are largely descended from slaves who were pulled for their homes and treated as chattel, even after emancipation they faced constant discrimination across all areas of public life an the economy, this has left modern black people in a state where they are massively and unfairly poorer than everyone else.'
And the obvious answer to that seems to be 'that is true and unfair, lets give them money until they are on par with everyone else.' Equity achieved, thank you and good night.
But no one wants to give people money. And not enough people were willing it ignore the injustice entirely.
So instead we invented these notions of racial justice with the intent of achieving the same outcome by manipulating the system until it produces the outcome we want. Instead of just creating it directly with cash transfers.
Suppose we did the reparations and there’s still inequality - do you want more reparations or does that end the issue for you?
Inequality in what sense? I specified that the amount of reparations is whatever it takes to reach economic equity.
If we found that equity slipped very slightly in the next generation or something, I might want to re-up once or twice, give generational trauma effects some time to wash away.
"slipped very slightly in the next generation"
Check out how long it takes for black athlete millionaires to go broke after they retire.
And white ones too, for that matter. Just about anyone who doesn't understand basic money-management skills, who then ends up with a lot of money, rapidly proves unfit in their handling of it.
I wrote about this last year: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/you-can-never-earn-more-than-you
A general finding on the subsidy of history:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/the-lottery/
Statistically longer than white athletes who started life in the same SES? Or you're referring to a few anecdotes you know about?
Whites are irrelevant to the point I'm making, which is this:
if black athletes lose their hard-earned money to a newsworthy degree, then why assume that blacks who are just handed money will only experience a slight dip into the next generation?
Feel free to share the source for your claim though.
"Newsworthy" doesn't necessarily mean much, it requires us to accept the news as representing reality.
I can't help but find the idea that just giving black people enough money to get up to the median wealth would eliminate inequality to be incredibly naïve. The Chinese Communists during the Cultural Revolution tried a far more radical levelling intervention: they confiscated all the wealth and murdered millions of their upper-class. But that class still economically dominates modern China: https://www.economist.com/china/2020/09/17/the-families-of-chinas-pre-communist-elite-remain-privileged
The problem is that, for all the good that it might theoretically do, the idea of reparations remains strongly in conflict with the idea of justice.
There are no black Americans today who were slaves. I'm pretty sure there aren't even any alive today whose *grandparents* were slaves. And the same can be said about white American slaveowners. We did not do this. The idea of reparations is profoundly unjust because it involves punishing people who did not commit the crime in question, and rewarding people who were not the victims of it. Justice is individual and always has been; like "American," it's one of those words whose meaning is diminished, if not outright negated, when you stick adjectives on the front of it.
It's important to remember that, even in times when slavery was a thing, very few people participated in it. Not very many white people, even Southern whites, were slaveowners; to use the modern vernacular, they were "the 1%." In fact, there were plenty of white people — several of my own ancestors among them — who were persecuted and even killed for their abolitionist views. So trying to impute to them, or their descendants, some degree of guilt and liability for the actions of the Southern elites whose injustices they suffered greatly to fight against is unjust and offensive in the extreme.
Reparations might have made sense during Lincoln's day, and there were some plans being made along those lines. Unfortunately, John Wilkes Booth cut short the implementation of any such plans, and we'll never know how they would have turned out. But today, we're a century and a half too late for there to be any reason to take the idea seriously.
Only if you believe in the capitalist formulation of justice, where the accident of your birth is always cosmically just since it is the result of your parent's hard work.
Some people being born in poverty and squalor while others are born into wealth and abundance is an injustice. Some people being starved for nurturing and opportunity while others are swaddled in support networks and mentorship is an injustice. Privilege is an injustice.
Now, the typical response to this is something along the lines of 'Oh, but you don't care about poor white people who face disprivilege and squalor, you just care about black people and want to help them! Racist hypocrite much?'
To which I say: I *absolutely* care about poor and disprivileged white people too. If you are ready and willing to redistribute all the wealth and power, raze the current power structure until we have a fully level playing field, and roll out the guilottines for anyone who opposes teh glorious revolution, I'm all for it. Most of the beneficiaries of that redistribution would be poor white people, and that's just fine with me.
But if you're *not* willing to do that, then I'll take whatever half-measures I can get. Racial justice is a half-measure that has a lot more political support than total global economic redistribution, because we all acknowledge that slavery and segregation were pretty bad and we feel a little guilty about it. Capitalists can even embrace it by saying that those past injustices took away opportunities and training needed to develop human capital, making it anti-meritocratic and thus in need of market corrections.
I don't think poor people, regardless of race, would benefit from such a revolution. Poor people are far better off in capitalist countries, where they are rich compared to the rest of the world and only poor relative to the much richer people they share a country with.
So redistruibute everyting one time (or once every 100 years or w/e) but keep the economy capitalist. Fine with me.
Honestly though, I think that *free market economies* are very good for everyone, and capitalists have spent unimageinable amounts of money and influence over centuries to make 'Capitalism' (ie, the means of production are owned by a separate ruling class of obscenely wealthy people) synonymous with 'free markets'.
I think free markets are great, I don't think they actually require billionaires to work.
A one-time redistribution is genuinely much better than ongoing redistribution (no deadweight loss if it happens by surprise), but realistically no one would actually expect it to be limited to one time.
Thus, land value tax and UBI. No deadweight loss even over the long term because land can't be manufactured or concealed. More competition since everyone can afford to try entry-level entrepreneurial stuff, and fewer billionaires because collecting rent stops being a reliable way to compound wealth faster than inflation.
At least, fewer until we get toward a point where there are news stories like "humanitarian crisis in the Alpha Centauri system! After a long history of high-level corruption and mismanagement, one survey reports almost half the populace would be insolvent if their household were faced with an unexpected billion-dollar expense, and many are in such extreme poverty that they can't even afford personal aircraft."
> Some people being born in poverty and squalor while others are born into wealth and abundance is an injustice. Some people being starved for nurturing and opportunity while others are swaddled in support networks and mentorship is an injustice. Privilege is an injustice.
I don't buy that for a second. I know better, from personal experience.
Name any "privilege" you can think of, I didn't have it. I was born into poverty and raised in hellish abuse and deprivation all throughout my early years. The only advantage I ever had was a mother who loved me very much and did the best she could, under such conditions, to raise me right and teach me good principles.
Under the "privilege" theory, I should be a junkie and a career criminal today. And I very easily could have ended up that way, but I didn't. Instead, I'm a successful software developer with a high salary, a wonderful, loving wife, and a comfortable life I'm very content with. Why? Because I rejected the trajectory that my circumstances had laid out for me and chose to be better, to live by the things that Mom taught me were right, and to make something of myself.
Wait, which angle are you coming at me from? That I'm insufficiently rational and overly "emotionalized," or that I'm insufficiently "empathetic" and therefore "despicable"?
Or are you just throwing insults at the wall to see what sticks? It's the oldest dirty trick in the book: when you can't attack an opponent's reasoning, hurl insults and personal attacks to distract the audience (and hopefully the opponent) from this fact. Problem is, that trick only works on people who aren't aware of it, so you may as well abandon it now.
Well done. I see you have assimilated much of what Mister Trump has modeled regarding deflection. The more egregious the spin, the better. And keep it coming as a torrent, so nobody remembers what was said a minute earlier. Good day to you, Mister Frank.
His life is indeed an anecdote, but you haven't given any reason to think it's unrepresentative in any relevant way. He didn't tell a Horatio Alger story of Nimble Dick being given a boon by one of the very limited number of Uncle Pennybags. He basically said he followed the "success sequence", which many others could have done but chose not do.
> He basically said he followed the "success sequence", which many others could have done but chose not do.
Pretty much, yeah.
Hell, my uncle smoked all his life and lived to be 95. Hell, I heard about a guy who was killed by his seatbelt. Hell, I was in the same battle with this guy who now claims to have PTSD. It seems he just gave up on his man-trajectory, eh? Am I right?
If you don't understand why BF's "success sequence" argument is pure BS you're further off the rationality train than I imagined. Meanwhile Clarence Thomas is still a corrupt, sociopathic fool.
Banned for this comment.
Do you think that a larger percentage of people born into your circumstances become junkies or career criminals than the percentage built into my circumstances of wealthy white parents with great educations and lots of connections?
Because from where I'm standing, there are plenty of outliers from both populations, but the trend lines are pretty clear.
I shouldn't have to explain to anyone here how Bayesian reasoning and stochastic processes work. Yes, every distribution has outliers, but those don't disprove the population-level trend, nor the systemic factors behind it.
Bayesian reasoning telll us that in society that at least partly meritocratic there will correlation of genetic ability with observed trait.
Correlations can go from 1 to .00001.
Sure, there's a correlation between those things. And between lots of other things.
> The only advantage I ever had was a mother who loved me very much and did the best she could, under such conditions, to raise me right and teach me good principles.
That's a pretty substantial advantage, which many people not only don't start with, but don't even realize is possible, at least not soon enough to usefully seek out.
You are so right.
I think it is a very dangerous thing to use one’s subjective sense of one’s self to judge others’ outcomes. I as well can describe my upbringing as objectively hellish by any excepted methods of measurement. I have been told by therapists that statistically I should be either dead or in jail. My outcome has been pretty good. There is nothing there to generalize from.
...And why do we care about injustice, again?
Probably an evolutionary response to fair division of trade when cooperating to hunt or build things in our evolutionary tribal history.
Or it might be earlier than that, related to sibling rivalry and trying to get a fair share of resources from parents.
Anyway, yeah, we definitely *do* care about it, so...
Side notice: xenophobia and sexual jealousy are also evolutionary responses.
Here, you're not applying justice to your tribe but to those who are 50-100k years apart. You should think why, or else it's like eating sugar well, because we definitely do like sugar.
Yeah, the proximal reason is that it's in our utility function. That's the proximal reason for doing anything.
Sugar is great. Too much sugar is bad for *specific health reasons*.
If you have *specific reasons* a certain type of justice is bad, we can discuss them directly. But that's what literally this entire conversation has already been about, until someone asked 'why do we care about justice'.
We do care about it, but I think over the eons the notion of what “unjust” is has changed quite a bit. I think there are many things that we consider unjust today that at one time we’re just looked upon as one’s normal place in a given society.
“ God bless the Squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations.“
-Old English couplet
I could argue that historically human beings have understood the genetic distribution of ability much better than we do. I think it’s pretty clear from this comment section that we are no longer willing to accept this, but don’t really have a clue what to do about it.
> Only if you believe in the capitalist formulation of justice, where the accident of your birth is always cosmically just since it is the result of your parent's hard work.
Not sure how I missed this gibberish the first time around, but... seriously? Do you honestly expect anyone in a rationalist community to accept that this is what capitalists actually believe?
On the contrary, far too many capitalists have seen seen the age-old tale of "Grandpa built the company, Dad took it over and managed it, and then Son ran it into the ground" play out in cases they're personally familiar with to ever believe in such nonsense. I'm not sure which ideology believes the things you describe, but it's certainly not capitalism!
Of course they wouldn't say that when being asked about meritocracy and equality of opportunity.
They say it when being asked about inheritance tax.
But the real world is a single piece, not separate magisteriums. If you believe it when asked about inheritance tax, then you believe it when asked about meritocracy and justice. Even if you don't *say* it in the latter case.
> They say it when being asked about inheritance tax.
Meh. To be frank (no pun intended,) that's a libertarian thing, not a capitalist thing. For as much effort as they've spent trying to conflate the two and redefine capitalism as libertarianism, they are very different things and are directly opposed to one another on many important points.
James Buchanan is generally thought of as a libertarian, and he was very much in favor of inheritance taxes. Other libertarians (most economists among them I'm aware of) oppose it as collecting little revenue for lots of deadweight loss.
Parents being able to pass on much the benefits of their hard and productive work to their children specifically, rather than all children equally, is necessary for anyone who wants there to exist a society as prosperous as our own. A consequence of this is that the children of diligent and talented parents will have advantages that other children do not.
If this strikes you as unfair, your choices are to suck it up and live with it, or settle for a much less prosperous society. And if your plan is to make the society you presently inhabit into a much less prosperous one, you'll probably want to run that past your neighbors before they decide to lynch you.
You might be able to wait until our current society suffers some great catastrophe that greatly reduces (and rearranges) prosperity, and try to convince people that they should aim for fairness rather than prosperity in the reconstruction. But I'll still be on Team Prosperity.
>Parents being able to pass on much the benefits of their hard and productive work to their children specifically, rather than all children equally, is necessary for anyone who wants there to exist a society as prosperous as our own. A
Possibly, though child-free people have a higher income than people with children. 'People won't work hard unless they can give that money to their kids' is an appealing intuition if you're trying to justify the current system, but people seem pretty willing to work hard just to give themselves a nice life and retirement.
But, granting the premise:
>If this strikes you as unfair, your choices are to suck it up and live with it, or settle for a much less prosperous society.
Or fix it on the other end, which is what I'm proposing here. Give the under-advantaged kids what they need to compete.
You can make it less comfortable and less prestigious if you want, so rich parents still give their kids *nicer* lives, just not ones with more opportunity. If you think that level of child suffering is needed to motivate people to work for some reason (I don't) then we can test that and implement it at the needed level.
*At the needed level* being the most important point, here.
Even if we think that inheritance is an important motivating factor, it must be true that there's some distribution where allowing more inheritance creates more motivation, and taxing inheritance more produces less motivation.
Conversely, I've provided an example of how inheritance hurts the economy by taking away opportunities from kids (thus burning available human capital by not developing and exploiting it fully). There's also a sliding scale there, where more or less inheritance creates less or more inefficiency of this kind.
If we actually cared about these factors, we could find the equilibrium point between these and other concerns, which produces the highest overall utility/prosperity, and try to set society to that point.
But if you're saying 'don't do anything, don't change anything,' then you're implicitly assuming we're already *at* that point.
And since the current point was arrived at randomly with no intentional design or direction, the only reason to think we're already *at* the optimal point is the Just World Fallacy.
"Or fix it on the other end, which is what I'm proposing here. Give the under-advantaged kids what they need to compete."
If the under-advantaged kids are given what they need to match the "advantaged" kids, then the parents of the advantaged kids aren't actually helping their kids with their hard and productive work. Giving them some luxuries, maybe, but not giving them real advantage. The smart move is to slack off, make just what you need to satisfy your own desires, and let the State or the AI Gods or whatever give their kids for free all the stuff they'd have to work themselves ragged to provide.
All the productive work that is presently motivated by the desire to help one's children succeed in life, becomes a chump move and goes away. Your society will be much poorer as a result.
I don't think teddy bears make kids measurably more competitive in the job market when they're 30, but parents seem very motivated to buy them anyway.
Sorry, but this really feels like a just-so-story. Like I said, childless people already have higher incomes, that should disprove the importance of that motivation on productivity on its own.
Not to match, just to compete. Hand over a pile of cash as citizen's dividend, ensure stable access to goods and services everyone agrees are essential (water, electricity, nutrition, libraries, lifesaving medical care, etc.), let individual families chase the je ne sais quoi of parenting the rest of the way into diminishing returns. Sorta like how sports have standardized equipment and playing fields, but each team gets to work out the details of their own training program between games.
Yeah, at the extreme end, you need to make parents stop helping their kids learn stuff they're stuck on (also a great way to review that calculus you learned 30 years ago!), reading to their kids, teaching their kids values and behaviors that will help them have a middle-class life, etc.
>But if you're *not* willing to do that, then I'll take whatever half-measures I can get. >Racial justice is a half-measure that has a lot more political support than total global >economic redistribution, because we all acknowledge that slavery and segregation >were pretty bad and we feel a little guilty about it.
Is this really true? You will find people who pay lip-service to racial reparations, because they know it is unlikely that they will ever happen. But are massive racial reparations more likely to happen than strong social democratic measures (no need for a guillotine hopefully)?
Where would immigrants and their descendants fit in the picture? Unless I am very mistaken, most of the ancestors of today's US "whites" weren't around at the time of the Civil War. As for the period during which the South enforced segregation and full-on institutional racism, and the rest of the country tolerated it - would the large (mostly non-white and/or Latino) chunk of the US population whose grandparents weren't around for that have to pay reparations?
I agree that it is an enormous shame that agrarian reform with reparations wasn't undertaken right after the Civil War. Forty acres and a mule would have made a world of difference - the socioeconomics of the US would have changed massively, for the benefit of everybody (save the slaveowners who would have had their lands expropriated, obviously). I hope that there is or will soon be a long-overdue consensus on *that*, at the very least, and I don't mean just in the progressive corner. When I arrived in the US in my mid-teens, I was bemused to see how high-school textbooks (and teachers) painted Radical Republicans as having been an unforgiving, destructive lot. Thaddeus Stevens ought to be a major American hero.
As for money that comes from Southern plantations and is still in the hands of those whose great merit was to descend from slavers: from my perspective, the more of that you confiscate, the better. Now, as for a way to do it...
>>Where would immigrants and their descendants fit in the picture? Unless I am very mistaken, most of the ancestors of today's US "whites" weren't around at the time of the Civil War. As for the period during which the South enforced segregation and full-on institutional racism, and the rest of the country tolerated it - would the large (mostly non-white and/or Latino) chunk of the US population whose grandparents weren't around for that have to pay reparations?
The American people and the Federal government are not a unified single identity, so the culpability or non-culpability of the average taxpayer shouldn't really factor into our analysis here. Bigger writeup on this below in my convo with Bob, but the short version:
Most of us are not involved when the FDA approves thalidomide, if the Bureau of Prisons allows corrections staff to abuse inmates, if the intelligence services violate the 4th amendment, or if a government agency poisons the water at Camp Lejeune. But we don’t accept the argument that the Federal government shouldn’t pay out damages in those kinds of situations “because paying the victims so would only punish taxpayers who had nothing to do with it.” The Federal government is an independent entity which can be held responsible for its past actions, regardless of turnover in the population of voters, the same way a corporation can be held liable for its actions regardless of turnover in its shareholders.
There's a difference in degree that becomes a difference in kind, though. Even in the case of reparations for interned Japanese-Americans, we are talking about a much smaller group of people, and presumably also smaller amounts of money; $20000 a head per surviving Japanese-American held in camps (not descendants, unless I am mistaken) works out to a pittance per taxpayer. Here we are presumably taking about taking large amounts of money from people who do not descend from slaves (or who descend from, say, Black people who were slaves elsewhere) to descendants of enslaved people (even those wealthier than the mean).
I would agree that, say, paying reparations to victims of the Tulsa riot would have been much more like paying reparations to Japanese Americans (though the riot wasn't perpetrated by the Federal government; rather, local authorities were complicit in it). Reparations weren't paid (except in an extremely limited sense), which is an enormous shame.
A couple thoughts (with the caveat that I'm undecided about reparations, just have had a pet peeve about this government=people thing since post 9/11 when I kept seeing people try to scuttle attempts to ask whether blowback for US foreign policy was part of the causes with "so you're saying the victims deserved it?", as if somehow the state department and intelligence apparatus were one in being with civilians in the tower, and you couldn't hold the former accountable without 'blaming 9/11 on the American people').
(1) The size of a claim against government doesn't eliminate the distinction between the government and the people. The culpable entity is still the government, and we shouldn't let it off the hook because of the 'innocent taxpayers' who aren't the ones under discussion in the first place. Impacts on the people writ large are secondary, and we don't permit a corporate entities to hide behind secondary impacts to avoid being held liable for obligations when they do harm. BP can have arguments about whether it should be liable for Deepwater Horizon, and for how much, but "liability should be zero because otherwise you'd just be punishing my innocent shareholders and employees" isn't a good one. For example, as of 2015, the Federal government owned $1.8 trillion dollars worth of land (probably worth more now). https://www.bea.gov/research/papers/2015/new-estimates-value-land-united-states. A decision by the Federal government to pay reparations by passing costs on to taxpayers rather than, say, selling a third of that land, would be a decision to pass harm along from one party to others, consistent with my point that we are talking about separate entities, even when we talk in large dollar figures.
(2) Also, there is a range of dollar amounts between "such a large number that a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind" and zero. When a corporation screws up so massively that it can't afford to pay a legal claim against it, the answer isn't "well we have no choice but to reduce the obligation to zero," the answer is it pays what its assets will bear. If someone's reply to that is "but if reparations aren't full, then people won't stop complaining about racism, even if we pay them" then my answer is that person is thinking about reparations the wrong way. They're not supposed to be a "fee so that black people shut up about inequality" in which case if you can't get the shutting up then you might as well pay nothing. They're supposed to be compensation for harm done, which means that if the Fed can't cover all the harm, then it pays what it can bear without collapse, and we all live with the fact that the whole harm won't be paid. Same principle as when a poor person hits me with a car and can't cover all my medical bills.
Since you've posted this twice: the FDA pretty notoriously did NOT approve thalidomide, at least back during the era people are thinking of. It has been approved since then for those who aren't pregnant. Somehow the "FDA sucks" position has come to produce this retro-memory.
Thanks for the correction. I think the principle holds for the other examples- will stick to historically accurate ones going forward.
This approach strikes me as improperly letting the Federal Government off the hook for its own actions by permitting it to hide behind the American people. The Federal government and the American people are not the same entity.
Most of us are not involved when the FDA approves thalidomide, if the Bureau of Prisons allows corrections staff to abuse inmates, if the intelligence services violate the 4th amendment, or if a government agency poisons the water at Camp Lejeune. But we don’t accept the argument that the Federal government shouldn’t pay out damages in those kinds of situations “because paying the victims so would only punish taxpayers who had nothing to do with it.”
Another example - the Japanese Internment happened from 1942 – 1946. Reparations of $1.6BB were paid in 1988. Median age of the workforce at that time was somewhere between 35 and 36 (https://www.gao.gov/assets/ggd-92-38.pdf pg 28), but I don’t think the argument that “this mostly just punishes taxpayers who weren’t involved in the internment” would (or ought) to have been considered as a serious reason not to pay them, and I’m certainly not aware of any counterproposals where the government considered only apportioning the tax costs of those reparations to people aged 42 and older.
The Federal government is an independent entity which has been in continuous existence since brought into being by the constitution in 1787. It can be held responsible for its past actions, regardless of turnover in the population of voters, the same way a corporation can be held liable regardless of turnover in its shareholders. Saying “I’ve never had slaves I shouldn’t have to pay,” to me, holds about as much water as “but I only bought my BP stock *after* the oil spill why should I be affected by the settlement?”
Fair enough. But this is not the case for reparations for slavery. Literally no one is advocating for paying the victims, because *there are no victims left alive* and haven't been for many generations now.
I think that's the better argument with respect to reparations for slavery, specifically, but there are plenty of racial harms for which the Federal government is responsible and for which victims are still alive. The military was segregated until 1948. Redlining of black neighborhoods by the FHA continued until the 1960s. The little girl who Brown v. Board of Education got into school only died 6 years ago.
Would you have a more favorable disposition, as an example, towards compensation for members of black families denied home loans due to FHA redlining? That would be a clearly defined class of currently living victims.
> I think that's the better argument with respect to reparations for slavery
Better than what? That is in fact the argument that I made: both the perpetrators and the victims are long dead, so there's no justice to be done here.
> Would you have a more favorable disposition, as an example, towards compensation for members of black families denied home loans due to FHA redlining? That would be a clearly defined class of currently living victims.
I would find such a thing acceptable, if it could be accomplished without harming innocent people. If the government, for example, decided to build some number of new housing developments created for this purpose and give currently-living victims preferential treatment on obtaining these homes, I'd be just fine with that.
>Better than what? That is in fact the argument that I made: both the perpetrators and the victims are long dead, so there's no justice to be done here.
Better than the argument that reparations would somehow be inappropriate because "it involves punishing people who did not commit the crime in question," "even in times when slavery was a thing, very few people participated in it," "[n]ot very many white people, even Southern whites, were slaveowners," "plenty of white people... were persecuted and even killed for their abolitionist views," etc. None of that has any bearing on the culpability of the Federal government for its own actions or inactions.
I think your argument about the direct victims being long dead is the better one. I don't think it's beyond dispute - I think serious people could still entertain the notion that indirect harms of slavery may still impact persons living today, and I think you're stretching the certainty of your argument to say authoritatively that "we're a century and a half too late for there to be any reason to take the idea seriously," but I certainly give more weight to your point that the direct victims are long dead than I do to your point about reparations "punishing" modern taxpayers by forcing their government to pay out on a liability.
>I would find such a thing acceptable, if it could be accomplished without harming innocent people. If the government, for example, decided to build some number of new housing developments created for this purpose and give currently-living victims preferential treatment on obtaining these homes, I'd be just fine with that.
What do you mean by "harming innocent people?" Does simply cutting a check to currently-living victims "harm innocent people" in ways that building a house for those same victims would not? Both would be paid out of government coffers, and if by "innocent people" you're referring to taxpayers it seems like the harms of building the housing (cost overruns for Federal construction projects, people displaced by any land seizures that needed to happen) would outstrip the costs of a simple cash payment.
"Members of black families..." is not all that clearly defined, and is likely to wind up pointing to currently-living people who are not victims as normally defined because they were not alive at the time of the victimization.
If you do limit it to people who were then direct victims and are now still alive, you could probably get a consensus for something like this. But it won't do all that much, and you'll still have all the usual suspects pointing to what they feel is a much bigger problem that remains unsolved.
Agreed. By "members of black families" I was thinking of both the discriminated-against buyers and their then-living children at the time of the discrimination (i.e. the people who are direct victims in the sense that but for the redlining they would have been permitted to live in the house in question), but I see how it could be read more expansively. Call for better clarity on my part - I'm really just trying to get down to how Bob thinks about currently-living direct victims if we consider them in isolation.
And 110% agreed on "it won't do all that much, and you'll still have all the usual suspects pointing to what they feel is a much bigger problem that remains unsolved." Reparations for just a single clearly-delineated racial harm for which the Federal government is responsible certainly make for more easily defended policy, but anyone expecting something like that to just settle the race issue forever, or for advocates to just disappear once the policy passes, would be naive. One would hardly expect Korea to just consider all WW2 matters satisfied if Japan made a single payment to still-living comfort women - no reason to expect anything different from a limited step like FHA compensation, even if its limited nature makes it an easier sale politically.
I've always been curious why the Japanese internment is now considered bad but the Draft wasn't.
Either way the government is forcing you to go live in a camp somewhere, but at least in a Japanese internment camp you're reasonably safe.
I tend to think of military conscription as somewhat similar to the internment camps, and somewhat similar to the slave trade. It takes someone formerly free and law-abiding, takes them from their home, forces them to perform tasks, - and also puts them in lethal danger. So call it an even mix of kidnapping, slavery, and murder?
For the fighting-age males, sure. But even there, one of the side effects was that while the internment was going on, their property was stolen, seized, and/or extorted, leaving them with very little once they got out.
I'm not sure about better or worse. I'm not sure how I'd choose myself - I'm told that the death rate for US soldiers was about 1/40, so your options are would be a 1/40 chance of death but if you don't die you get the GI bill and hailed as a hero, or you spend 4 years in a prison and then when you get out your house and business have all been taken by others but at least are assured of life.
Either way though, I think it isn't so much that the internment was bad and the draft wasn't - it's that the draft, good or bad, was a necessity forced upon the US by a foreign attack, and the unavoidable harm was distributed as fairly as one could ask for it to be (randomly among men of fighting age), while the internment was unnecessary and visited on a specifically targeted minority. In that light, I think it's fair to view the two as morally distinct, and the internment the morally worse of the two.
John Tyler, 10th president of the US (1841-1845) and slave owner, still has a grandson alive today. Looking only at the maternal line, if someone was a slave born in 1850, had a daughter in 1890, and the daughter had a daughter in 1930, the granddaughter could certainly be alive today, albeit quite elderly.
Slavery has not been gone for all that long.
Looking only at the maternal line, though, how many women have kids at 40? Pretty sure the tech to enable that is a little more recent than 1930.
> how many women have kids at 40?
Me and my wife were both 42 when our second child was born. No tech was involved. It probably requires some genetic privilege and good health on mother's side, but it is possible.
Generations are spaced about 20 years apart, not 40 years apart. So most likely there's 5 or 6 generations removed, not 3.
Obviously that's the historical _average_, but women are often able to have children at 40 and did so historically. For a normal family it's 5 or 6 generations, but 3 generations is possible in some cases. I'm only responding to the claim that they don't exist, not saying that it's the median case.
I mean, that's still a 90+ year old person who almost certainly never met their grandfather who was the slaveowner; not a particularly close connection.
At least there is a historical case to compare. Germans as a nation really wouldn't have reason to complain much if they had been mostly massacred and partly enslaved for a few generations after WW2. Instead, they could prosper, even the eastern part, and pay some reparations. Compared to the Versailles peace treaty, it was a fine deal for us and we managed to be on good terms with Israel even, so far. And german jew-haters today are overwhelmingly muslims, not nazi traditionalists.
Better than Versailles? That seems like a stretch.
I'm well out of my area of competence here, but my picture was that imperial germany more or less stumbled into WW1, didn't do anything much morally worse than it's enemies and got heavily punished at Versailles, which later contributed to Hitler's sufficient electoral success. Teach me if I'm wrong.
Oh, Germany of WW2 was much worse than that of WW1. I was just comparing the end result rather than what led to it.
I don't know much about imperial germany on the eve of WWI. My impression was that it wasn't totalitarian, but was more on a par with its sibling european powers. Roughly how controlling was it of its citizens, say, compared with Brussels bureaucrats of today?
Off the cuff I'd say the regime was too dysfunctional to be totalitarian. There probably was a more or less common identification with martial competence (prussian tradition) and national identity (student stuff from 1848) but no grip on industrial ecomomy. The Kaiser was not competent and for the allied KuK Austria-Hungary monarchy, read Musil.
Many Thanks!
Well, Imperial Germany was certainly the aggressor, invading Belgium (which was neutral) and France (under the slimmest of pretenses). The war in the West was fought entirely in French and Belgian territory, and was unbelievably destructive - entire villages were wiped off the map, and part of the country remains uninhabitable *to this day* (Red Zones). Demanding Germany to pay for the cost of reconstruction was pretty reasonable.
Now, demanding that Germany pay for the cost of waging war is something else, at least to our sensibilities. (It was not really exceptional at the time: Germany imposed heavy reparations on France after the Franco-Prussian war for the crime of, well, defending itself and losing?) That demand was later scaled down, and my understanding is that the part of reparations that was actually paid was the entirely reasonable part, but some of the rhetoric in the UK and France was certainly damaging.
Of course that something is legal and justifiable (reparations) doesn't necessarily make it wise, but that's another matter. The allied powers could have avoided some of the political blowback in Germany simply by not rubbing it in.
So what's your take on Foch's disgust with the Treaty of Versailles? He had two points: that Germany wasn't being punished anywhere near harshly *enough,* and needed to be occupied and disarmed (essentially, what we did to Germany and Japan post-WWII), and that if the Allies went through with this treaty instead, they would find it was "not a peace, but a twenty-year armistice."
His second point was unquestionably true, eerily so; it was twenty years and two months later, fulfilling Foch's prediction *almost to the day,* when Hitler invaded Poland. But that doesn't necessarily imply that his first point was correct. What say you?
Harshly enough from the point of view of what? Justice?
Much more harshness across the board (resulting in even lower living standards, etc.) would in fact have been cruel; whatever people say about Versailles ("terrible reparations", etc.) would have been unquestionably true in that case. Yet I've heard a (very old, but obviously not WWI-old) German academic claim that Versailles didn't make it clear enough to Germany that it had been defeated.
One obvious alternative is "greater clarity about the outcome and the new order, less ability to rearm, and less harshness towards the people". Harsher on the Krupps, then, but an immediate lifting of the blockade (it remained in place for some time after the armistice, even though it was literally starving the population), some measure of direct emergency help (food that was not turnips, basically) as soon as the peace was signed, stricter rules on behavior in occupied zones (part of Germany *was* occupied, and civil servants would sometimes move in the nicest house they could find, with the owners relegated to the kitchen coop - not exceptional behavior, and much better than some of the things that the Reich did do in Belgium, but not exceptionally good either), etc.
> Black people are largely descended from slaves who were pulled for their homes and treated as chattel, even after emancipation they faced constant discrimination across all areas of public life an the economy, this has left modern black people in a state where they are massively and unfairly poorer than everyone else.
Compared to *which* everyone else? Certainly not poorer than the descendants of the West Africans who _weren't_ brought as slaves to the United States.
It seems to me that reparations were paid (and then some) in 1866 in the form of US Citizenship, a huge privilege that has led to US blacks being far, far better off than the non-slaves of West Africa.
> How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots? The George Floyd protests? Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice (and his black female vice president)? Drag queen story hours? Gay pride parades? If it doesn’t explain any of those things, what’s left of it explaining “wokeness”?
I wonder if the answer is in this very post, just a little bit higher up:
> Fine, then the undergrad programs are the racists. Or if they can prove they’re not, then the high schools are racist and we should do busing. The point is, somebody somewhere along the line has to be racist, right?
The idea that any difference at all necessarily proves some sort of discrimination is, as you note, basically unfalsifiable. And it very naturally leads to a spiraling feedback loop. You do some anti-discrimination work, and that has some success, because the US really did have lots of racism in the 60s. And sexism too, so you improve on that front. But you quickly run into diminishing returns, or perhaps even 0 returns, because there are some differences that aren't really the result of discrimination. So you try to do more anti-discrimination work, but find that it has very weak results, maybe even indistinguishable from random noise. But of course, discrimination *has* to still be out there and causing the observed differences. It's simply an article of faith, unquestionable. So you conclude that you simply didn't do enough, or the efforts were sabotaged by secretly-racist organizations and people. And then you have to go on a purity campaign to expel the heretics and demand even more be done. And of course, this cycle has no end, because it cannot and will not actually solve the problems it identifies, plus there are an infinite number of outcomes you could claim are the result of discrimination. No different from how religious cults often operate.
So the answer to your question could be that you started with a few ideas that seeded modern wokeness, probably originating in academia, and with some laws with good intention (paving the proverbial road), and the back and forth between ideology and law gradually ratcheted up both of them.
Hanania goes on to outline his political strategy for rolling back the current legal/regulatory regime.
But perhaps what we need is to roll forward civil rights law to actively protect whites in this era of institutionalized racist antiwhite hate. For example, mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training should be seen as prima facie evidence of a hostile work environment for whites. I outlined some principles to guide legal reform:
(1) The key is not to try to abolish civil rights laws, which would be impossible in the current climate, but to articulate that civil rights are inclusive. No race is excluded. Everybody possesses equal civil rights. Same as everybody else, whites and men are protected classes.
(2) For instance, one crucial step is to declare in clear, ringing language that the 14th Amendment’s famous Equal Protection Clause applies not just to the currently more favored races but also to whites and Asians.
Bizarrely, the question of whether or not the phrase “equal protection of the laws” protects whites as well as blacks simply doesn’t come up much these days. I searched in Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for the text strings:
“Does the 14th Amendment [equal protection clause] apply to whites [white people]?”
…and found absolutely nothing on the entire internet.
My impression is that conservatives assume that of course the 14th Amendment pertains to whites as well as nonwhites: Just read it. On the other hand, liberals assume that of course the Equal Protection Clause does not apply to whites: That would be racist (which in practice they define as the law treating people equally).
The Supreme Court should clear up this muddle definitively.
(3) Similarly, the Court should announce that hostile environment law very much protects whites and men as well as its traditional beneficiaries. Therefore, mandatory training classes preaching the antiwhite doctrines of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity and/or Critical Race Theory represent prima facie evidence of a hostile work environment for white employees. Nobody would doubt this if the races were reversed and blacks were forced to endure organized harassment by professional white bigots, so why should it be legal for employers and schools to impose a hostile environment upon whites?
(4) Statements of support for DIE/CRT by holders of powerful positions in institutions are to be taken as prima facie evidence of intention to discriminate illegally against whites and/or Asians.
(5) In law, the word “equity” does not mean equality of outcome. “Equity” as recently redefined is no part of the Constitution.
(6) Affirmative action discrimination against whites and Asians cannot be justified on the grounds that they are the “majority.” Whites are already a minority in the two biggest states and headed for minority status in most places. Asians, of course, currently are a minority. Instead, racial quotas are racial discrimination.
Did you not pick up that a huge chunk of his argument is that the law will be implemented by bureaucrats who reject a colorblind agenda? The same thing will happen to new laws.
> But perhaps what we need is to roll forward civil rights law to actively protect whites in this era of institutionalized racist antiwhite hate.
That's just taking Kendi's infamous "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." and flipping the script on it. If it's wrong when Kendi does it, it's wrong when other people do too.
> The Supreme Court should clear up this muddle definitively.
We could start with Justice Roberts' principle that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Feels like this would turn the current double bind (don't hire based on race but still get the desired racial balance) with a triple bind (also don't discriminate against the group you must discriminate against to achieve that racial balance).
"Acquittal after acquittal after acquittal until the stench of it reaches so high and far into heaven that it chokes the whole fucking lot of them!"
This idea is too clever by half. Personnel is policy, and everyone in charge of civil rights law would instantly gut any attempts to put all the races on an equal basis. This is far more likely to galvanize further racial conflict and white identitarianism than alleviate wokeness.
Why did the Great Awokening not start until 2013 rather than in, say, 2009? My prediction in my 2008 book about Obama was that he would keep anti-white tendencies among his supporters in check during his first term to help his re-election bid, but during his lame duck second term, watch out.
That timeline seems pretty accurate from the perspective of 2024.
I think that matches up from some of what I saw in the federal bureaucracy.
Some astounding omissions signal way too much bias for a trustworthy book review. First, why no mention of the Voting Rights Act, and how the Roberts court systematically dismantled it, claiming without evidence -- just on gut feelings -- that problematic states no longer had enough racism to worry about. Which is why we've seen an explosion of unchecked voter-suppression efforts in the past decade, providing a rich dataset of how far we still are from a reason-based approach to race and diversity.
Most important to the broad topic is there's no mention of THE most important argument for the entire bucket that includes affirmative action: that EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution. I have never seen an anti-woke argument address this fact directly, because the bias is always too strong: egalitarianism is treated as a form of welfare instead of recognized for the very real widespread social benefits that come from diverse experiences, intelligences, strengths, etc. Critics prefer to argue anecdotally about air traffic controllers and IQ.
Yes, the laws address inclusion practices out of pragmatic necessity, but the big picture is that when we are nudged to live and work alongside others, we do learn to accept and appreciate difference, culturally, linguistically, physically, etc, as useful, welcome expansions of worldview. No, this is not essentially an argument for social engineering. In the end, the LEGAL goal is still to protect minority populations from unfair disadvantage due to biases, whether those biases are intentional, or relevant, or not. The most efficient way to gain ground on this Constitutional front is for culture to evolve -- a goal that gets set back with each intellectually reckless eruption such as anti-wokeness.
Please read more from, say, the New York Review of Books or The New Yorker to learn how reviews with the most integrity maintain a perspective while still performing a disciplined, honest, deep dive into another side's thought processes. It seems your typical process is to pick and choose your on-the-other-hand arguments mostly from your own (limited) common sense instead of diligently trying to understand the passion of the others, many who have been battling on the ground for more fulsome agency their entire lives. It's lazy if nothing else. I would probably assign a C to this review if it were submitted by a grad student -- with the option to expand your research for an up-grade.
The review doesn't discuss the VRA because the book isn't about that.
> I have never seen an anti-woke argument address this fact directly
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1774860462984663409
But, more theoretically, if it were actually beneficial we would expect a competitive market of for-profit companies to converge on that without the government needing to force them to do such things for their own good.
Scott has done a LOT of book reviews. I suggest you read more of his before telling him he needs to read NYRB or the New Yorker as if he hasn't already.
LOL, a year ago he didn't even know the difference between the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. A scrupulous review would require an analysis of the VRA precisely because the book left out this entirely relevant dataset (assuming it did, I haven't read it). Trustworthy reviews must engage what the writer strategically (or foolishly) leaves out.
> LOL, a year ago he didn't even know the difference between the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.
What is your basis for saying that? He did shut down his old blog because the NYT was about to reveal his real name, and that was more than a year ago. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/
The book is about the CRA (and later modifications of it, by all three branches of government), not the VRA. You might have wanted the book to be about the VRA, but books are about what the author chooses to write about.
Well, I'm not going to continue arguing about your parsing of how to responsibly review books in an ostensibly reason-based public forum, as your idea of criticism is apparently stuck in high-school English class. As for his ignorance of the storied history of The New Yorker, he admitted it himself here, as if it was just an amusing example of how supposedly liberal media all blends together in his brain. But, no, he did not realize The New Yorker was an independent magazine. I'm not going to do the search. If you want to bother I believe it was in a comment.
Do you have any arguments other than blind status-signalling?
A text search of the username through this comments page strongly suggests one particular answer to that question...
> Some astounding omissions signal way too much bias for a trustworthy book review.
This would be a lot easier to take seriously if the arguments you raised weren't so astoundingly full of intense (and long-debunked) biased talking points.
> Which is why we've seen an explosion of unchecked voter-suppression efforts in the past decade
No we haven't. Not even close. The election-integrity laws that extreme leftists slander as "voter suppression" have never had that effect, neither in theory nor in practice. Don't believe me? Check out what the Washington Post (which no one can reasonably accuse of harboring right-wing biases) had to say: the effect of the introduction of such laws in Georgia was to expand voting, rather than limit it, and the limits they imposed were in fact less restrictive than those on the books in deep-blue states that no activists are complaining about. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/30/biden-falsely-claims-new-georgia-law-ends-voting-hours-early/)
> Most important to the broad topic is there's no mention of THE most important argument for the entire bucket that includes affirmative action: that EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution.
Perhaps because that argument is well-debunked nonsense unworthy of mention, let alone serious consideration?
There is definitely some benefit to some degree of diversity in a lot of situations. But there's a yawning chasm between that obvious fact and the extraordinary claim that "EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution," a chasm for which no extraordinary evidence has ever been introduced to try to bridge it. Most researchers who have attempted to replicate the initial findings failed to do so; this is just another victim of the replication crisis in social sciences.
"Most important to the broad topic is there's no mention of THE most important argument for the entire bucket that includes affirmative action: that EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution. I have never seen an anti-woke argument address this fact directly, because the bias is always too strong: egalitarianism is treated as a form of welfare instead of recognized for the very real widespread social benefits that come from diverse experiences, intelligences, strengths, etc."
If this were true, you wouldn't need laws to force it on people.
Note what tech company workplaces look like. There is a *ton* of diversity there, just not the kind that's needed for political reasons in the US. If you have a workplace with four Chinese, two Israelis, a Russian, three white Americans, two Indians, and a Frenchman, that's pretty normal, and very diverse by any definition that would make sense for benefits from diversity. But it's not the right kind of diversity, because Chinese, Russians, Israelis and Indians aren't sufficiently important voting blocs in the US.
Agreed, though my department had South Koreans rather than the Frenchman :-)
"Critics prefer to argue anecdotally about air traffic controllers and IQ."
Sounds like you don't want to actually defend what the FAA did.
>that EVERYONE benefits tremendously from diversity in every institution.
What is the argument for this exactly? I don't see it at all, especially if we aren't talking about viewpoint diversity, which incidentally isn't something protected.
Hanania makes a strong case that the main reason for wokeness has been the past half century of government regulation of the workplace in the name of civil rights.
As Willie Sutton replied when asked why he robs banks, that’s where the money is. For the ever-growing numbers of people paid to micromanage diversity and shut down potentially offensive free speech at work, it’s a living. It may not seem like a lot of money to Silicon Valley titans, but to many soft-major college grads it’s more than they could make doing anything else. To update Upton Sinclair’s famous quote, “It is not difficult to get an HR woman to believe something when her salary depends upon it.”
In response to the proliferation of government regulations (and the lawsuits that accompany them) banning discrimination against some people and encouraging discrimination against others, corporations vastly increased their human resources staff to cajole and mollify the bureaucrats.
Of course, corporate HR staffers are less the adversaries of the government and plaintiff attorneys than their codependents in a symbiotic relationship featuring slightly different career paths in the same field. Just as many of the environmental consultants hired by corporations to placate the Environmental Protection Agency are former EPA staffers (and thus are definitely not going to call for repealing environmental laws), corporate HR, federal civil rights bureaucrats, discrimination lawyers, sexual harassment trainers, and so forth have perfectly understandable mutual economic incentives to bring ever larger parts of American life under their purview to generate more business for people like themselves.
From 1968 to 2021, despite immense improvements in automation, the number of Americans working in human relations grew from 140,000 to 1,500,000:
In 1968, only 1 in 558 American workers were employed in human resources. By 2021, that number had risen to 1 in 102, including 1 in 184 men and 1 in 68 women.
I wonder what fraction of black women with college degrees work in HR: 1 in 20? 1 in 10?
A third of a century ago, the founder of a couple of firms I worked at had a stated policy of only hiring black women as his head of human resources because that inclined the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to harass his companies less. As Hanania explains, the civil rights rules regarding employment are so vague and potentially far-reaching that in the inevitable federal investigations and discrimination lawsuits over firings, the best defense is often to look like you aren’t one of those bad racist companies that must be rooted out and punished. And what better proof that you are Good than making the face of your HR department a black woman? Employers, Hanania says,
"are encouraged to find ways to convince bureaucrats, and potentially judges and juries, that they are good people who take discrimination seriously…. “Woke capital,” which often refers to corporations taking left-wing stances on identity-related issues, is a natural response to a system that rewards this kind of virtue signaling."
For example, if a few deep-pocketed employers increase their budget for DEI staffers to new highs, the EEOC can extoll this to other employers as a “best practice” that might be looked upon favorably by the EEOC the next time they get sued for firing a protected class goldbricker (likely next week).
The diversity racket is a self-licking ice cream cone that ratchets upward much more easily than downward.
I'm a little surprised that you write "I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason, but Hanania is no doubt right about the strategic considerations" when you've also written https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/. What differences do you see between Hanania's not publicizing certain parts of his views as loudly for strategic reasons and scientists keeping quiet about lightning? With Hanania putting his real views on his blog where the intellectual curious can find them and his slightly sanitized versions out in a book meant for mass market appeal, it looks to me like he's following your recommendation to a T.
As for the accuracy of the title and how well the book described the origins of woke, I think Hanania is trying to describe the origins of woke the current, successful movement, not woke the strain of intellectual thought. Progressives have believed all sorts of things, especially in the 60s, and I don't imagine Hanania is interested in the particular intellectual traditions the judges in Griggs v Duke Power were drawing from, he's interested in why those thoughts are dominating the 21st century American labor market despite being economically inefficient and unsupported by the majority of Americans.
That said, I agree that his description of the origins of woke as a movement is still incomplete. The first part of your own post, describing how people are forced to use and internalize wokeness in order to survive in business, is how Hanania believes woke laws have turned into woke culture over time, but there was a dramatic shift in the 2010s that I don't believe he has an explanation for. I do know he's said in his blog that he doesn't believe repealing civil rights laws will undo wokeness overnight or even quickly, merely that it will allow the pendulum to swing back the other way eventually, but he may have left that out of the book rather than admit the limitations of his policy recommendation as he makes it.
Re: the causes of racial disparities:
Jews and East Asians far outperform (non-Jewsish) whites in many of the same statistics in which whites outperform blacks. Since it's implausible that this is caused by discrimination in favor of those groups, this is sufficient to prove that racial disparities *can* have causes other than discrimination, and so discrimination against blacks can't be inferred either just from outcome disparities between whites and blacks.
That way one can avoid discussing specific explanations, each of which may be more taboo than making the above argument.
And in a society where racism is as taboo as in present-day America, and there are as strong pressures on companies to have equal representation of races, it doesn't seem more plausible that managers still secretly hate black people, discriminate against them for no reason, and then go through all this effort to signal the opposite, than that there are genuine differences between demographic groups that cause these disparities, while managers try to favor the underrepresented minorities while trying to maintain some degree of merit-based hiring.
(In the case of East Asians, it can be argued that maybe they outperform because immigration policy selects for the best-performing ones. But this doesn't apply to American Jews, most of whose ancestors migrated to the US before selective and merit-based immigration policy, and even in the case of East Asians, it doesn't clearly explain why they outperform other immigrant groups.)
And the criminal justice system (which isn't disciplined by a competitive market, and thus more likely be biased) goes after men much more than women, but nobody thinks that's evidence of sexism. https://twitter.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1782410808342839430
>(In the case of East Asians, it can be argued that maybe they outperform because immigration >policy selects for the best-performing ones. But this doesn't apply to American Jews, most of >whose ancestors migrated to the US before selective and merit-based immigration policy, and >even in the case of East Asians, it doesn't clearly explain why they outperform other >immigrant groups.)
Immigrants self-select - and do so differently depending on the country they migrate to. The average Ashkenazic IQ in Israel isn't particularly high. Was the random person who stayed in Chelm all that clever?
One could expect immigration to select for smarter people—but then again, non-Jewish white Americans are *also* descendants of immigrants.
There may still be selection effects that applied differently to Jews and non-Jewish whites, but there may have also been different selection effects on white immigrants and African slaves forcibly taken to America, so we're once again talking about a kind of explanation that may also explain differences between whites and blacks.
Per Cremiuex, Israeli data are consistent with an Ashkenazi IQ identical with American Ashkenazim (see: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/pinpointing-jewish-iq), although he still suspects that Israel’s Ashkenazim are slightly less intelligent than their counterparts in the U.S. and U.K., due to selective migration.
A subsequent (paywalled) article of his discussing a new data set on the topic is foudn here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/updated-estimates-of-iqs-within-israel.
I just checked; he seems to work hard to tease out results that he doesn't have. You would think the necessary results are somewhere? Of course one should be about any quote that says 100, as that may be due to normalization.
I think Trump is a poor leader and I think that Jan 6th was moronic. But I'll forgive him for every bad thing he's ever done if he follows Hanania's advice to the letter: repeals every related EO on Jan 21st and starts up a bunch of lawsuits to cancel out prior judicial overreach on Civil Rights law. If he's lucky he'd also have full control of Congress and would be able to sneak in some legislative changes as well.
I *wish* it was Vivek or DeSantis or Haley or Suarez running instead but I'd settle for Trump if I have to.
I thought the _sic_ was not only about the surname _Di-az_, but also about the first name _Demetric_, instead of the more plausible _Demetrio_. It looks like, somewhere along the way, someone misread a dirty copy of the name, and then their mangled version became official.
Re: The origins of . . . Inequality, I think there may be a simpler explanation for the underrepresentation of black math PhDs that doesn't rely on assuming racism.
I accept the premise that increased diversity is valuable precisely because people of different races tend to have different life experiences, perspectives and preferences on average, so it seems plausible that career and educational preferences may also differ across racial lines to some degree. For example, perhaps a lower percentage of black students are innately drawn to the field of mathematics at the PhD level compared to other racial groups, for cultural or other reasons.
This would parallel how we see gender-based differences in preferences leading to unequal gender ratios in many fields, without necessarily implying sexism. There's no reason to assume that every racial group will be equally interested in every possible career path. Diversity of people will naturally lead to diversity of career choices.
A couple places I suspect racial and cultural diversity really matter a lot:
a. Medicine--I think a lot of people feel more comfortable dealing with "one of their kind" as doctors, especially when there are some cultural or genetic differences they share. Getting a slightly less stellar intellect as your family doctor might be worth getting someone who "speaks your language."
b. Politics--a lot of people prefer to be represented by someone "like them." It's nice if they can manage that.
c. Education--just as with medicine, I suspect having a teacher who gets your culture and "speaks your language" might be beneficial, though I'm not sure how big a deal this is.
Umm…
> “So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities.”
?????
This isn’t true, not even remotely.
I took plenty of tests (both written and hands on) for both my private sector apprenticeship, and then my civil service jobs.
Most civil service jobs also give points towards getting hired for being a military veteran, and the service’s administrator the ASVAB tests.
Right now at this very moment I’m sitting with a new hire who took a series of written tests to get hired (though his veteran status probably clinched it) in November 2023, so aptitude tests are still very much a part of the hiring process, and no one gets promoted in The City without also passing more tests.
While they’re a few entry level jobs (sidewalk repair, strew cleaning, and tree planting) that are “affirmative action”, those jobs are based on neighborhood and age, not race, because government hiring based on race is illegal (by voter decree) in The State of California.
Given how the chain of argument is represented here, blaming the original civil rights legislation for the current policy seems a bit like blaming the US constitution for Roe v. Wade.
--
> White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85
One whopping fucking standard deviation? Why the hell are we not talking about this all day long, identify causes and try to CRISPR the hell out of the next generation if the causes end up being genetic? (Yes, yes, massively polygenetic, yes, yes, eugenicism has a bad rep, I get it.)
--
I think the overall standard of non-racism should be color blindness, not equality of outcomes. If someone uses a correlated test with the goal to discriminate against a protected group, e.g. hires only tall people for an office job because they prefer men, that seems bad. But anything remotely related to job performance should be fair to test for.
In the South in 1950, I can imagine that finding good employment as a qualified black person. In an environment where customers prefer to deal with white employees, the rational business owner will prefer to hire white employees. This sort of thing is why the government stepped in.
This is not a problem these days any more because customers have changed. Sure, that Chinese restaurant might prefer to hire Chinese people and Swastika Auto Parts might only hire white people, but if customers care about the hiring policy of the shops they frequent at all then it will be to make sure that they are inclusive enough. (Of course, no legal framework, bureaucracy or movement ever declares the problem they were created to fight solved and is repealed or disbands.)
On the flip side, there are costs of all sorts associated with the current status quo. Having a government which has an official and completely arbitrary policy about which races there are (for the purposes of detecting discrimination) seems like a bad thing. Any departure for meritocracy imposes additional costs, which will be ultimately paid by the customers. Then there is the spiritual damage of having to engage in doublethink when you can't openly do affirmative action but also have to ensure equality of outcomes, so you do something illegible instead and hope that you are not caught. For the prospective employees that then results in epistemic damage, because an important practical part of their lives if purposefully made opaque.
The FAA thing can be summarized as "a federal agency conspired to discriminate against some races by systematically enabling black people to cheat in an exam". Dear Democrats, how do you think how a moderately right-leaning rural white would update their world view with regard to the impartiality, non-corruptedness, and ultimately legitimacy of the federal government, the fairness of written tests and outcomes of such tests? Dear media, given that you have decided to not report on this much, how much do you think that same person is going to take a lack of you reporting some fake news they read on telegram as evidence that it did not actually happen?
David Bernstein gave the best libertarian argument in favor of applying the 1964 CRA to the Jim Crow south: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/06/16/david-e-bernstein/context-matters-better-libertarian-approach-antidiscrimination-law/ But the context now is very different.
Jim Crow was a moral disgrace and an economic impediment. It disappeared in just a few years when the feds stepped in.
Segregated schools took a while after Brown v. Board.
> (Of course, no legal framework, bureaucracy or movement ever declares the problem they were created to fight solved and is repealed or disbands.)
You just hit the nail on the head. This is known as the Shirky Principle: bureaucratic institutions will actively work to perpetuate the problem that they were crated to solve. It's a big part of the reason why there was so much conservative opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, by people who had been big supporters of civil rights and of previous civil rights laws: they could see something like today's mess coming if you got bureaucracy involved.
"> White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85
One whopping fucking standard deviation? Why the hell are we not talking about this all day long, identify causes and try to CRISPR the hell out of the next generation if the causes end up being genetic? (Yes, yes, massively polygenetic, yes, yes, eugenicism has a bad rep, I get it.)"
This happened, and the causes turned out to be environmental. Google "The Bell Curve Debate" for more information.
I've heard of the debate, but hadn't heard that "the causes turned out to be environmental". Rather, my understanding of recent admixture studies https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/admixture-in-the-americas-introduction-partial-correlations-and-iq-predictions-based-on-ancestry is that they've shifted the evidence against the environment (Murray & Herrnstein themselves were agnostic about the proportion to assign to it vs genes). James Flynn was the main anti-hereditarian even willing to engage in debate with hereditarians, and he's dead now.
It's a very complex issue that I am happy to go into if you really want, but I warn you it's a real rabbit hole. There are controversies around how one operationally defines race or genetic influence (basically the IV), how one measures environmental influences (the other IV), how one defines intelligence (the DV), and how one uses correlational statistics to measure heritability. And what "heritability" actually means. The bottom line is that once you control for the many well documented environmental differences between blacks and whites in the US, there isn't much group variation left to explain.
As for the old Bell Curve debate, the following article, I find, summarizes the objections really well: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech
The money quotes:
"Adoption from a poor family into a better-off one is associated with IQ gains of 12 to 18 points. "
"The black-white IQ gap is decreasing, and is now closer to 10 points than the widely cited one standard deviation (15 points), which is the erroneous value Murray cites in the interview. Academic achievement of blacks has also improved by about one-third standard deviation in recent decades."
"The heritability of intelligence, although never zero, is markedly lower among American children raised in poverty. Several interpretations of this fact are possible. The one we find most persuasive is that children raised in those circumstances are unable to take full advantage of their genetic potential because they do not have access to the high-quality environments that could support it."
I read that Vox article when it came out. It does not show that "the causes turned out to be environmental". Blacks from high SES families still have lower average IQs than whites from low SES families. Lower heritability in poorer families is just evidence that the environmental contribution is non-zero, which doesn't contradict the actual position Murray took going back to The Bell Curve.
Actually, you're right--I overstated the case. What I should have said was: "The causes of the differences between races are not primarily biological" or even "the differences between races are not biologically fixed" which are much more nuanced statements. My apologies.
Yes, even if differences are biological, that's not the same as "fixed" https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
Some other reservations about the Vox piece. Has the IQ gap between blacks and white been shrinking? This is debatable, but there’s reasonable evidence that it has not been. Cremieux surveyed much of the evidence and finds that the gap is still about one standard deviation, virtually unmoved for decades:
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-state-of-the-gaps-2022-23
Adoption may improve IQ. However, this doesn’t necessarily tell us much about racial gaps in cognitive ability since the IQ gaps from adoption seem to be on specialized cognitive abilities, not general intelligence. However, the IQ gap between blacks and whites appears to be strongly related to general intelligence:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914005248
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/4/2/6
The heritability of intelligence & SES: this is also disputed, with different studies arriving at inconsistent findings. But, as someone else pointed out, this still wouldn’t explain the gaps since the gap is actually bigger at higher SES levels.
The cause of the black/white gap in IQ scores is an open research question, not some known thing. The Vox article and many other argument like it say that we should assume its cause is environmental until proven otherwise (for a variety of good and bad reasons), the cause is not known.
My sense is that the best available picture of the world now is that some of the gap is environmental, some is genetic, and we don't know how much of each yet.
> > White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85
> One whopping fucking standard deviation? Why the hell are we not talking about this all day long, identify causes and try to CRISPR the hell out of the next generation if the causes end up being genetic? (Yes, yes, massively polygenetic, yes, yes, eugenicism has a bad rep, I get it.)
Genetic engineering will so radically transform humanity that most ethnic groups known today will disappear. After all, genes will no longer be tied to parentage. (I also find the obsession with African-Americans in this context both bizarre and contemptible, but it is beyond my powers to explain this to people shaped by US culture.)
The obsession with both African-Americans and IQ is also bizarre to me.
One is a category that's transparently unconnected to genetic reality even by the rather absurd standards of 19th century race science: let's take a subset of West African populations, ship them overseas and then inject a large percentage of anglo/Irish ancestry via the master raping his slaves. Add in the most obvious confounders of having been enslaved and then actively discriminated against until a generation ago so that the environmental deck is stacked against them as hard as possible. This population is now the subject of endless screeds on the genetic differences between races, and is also projected back to the much more diverse parent population to somehow explain why melanin = poor performance.
The other is application of a fairly questionable tool (an intelligence test that can get order-of-magnitude differences in results with the same subject tested on different days) to a domain it was never supposed to be applied to (inter group scores, where the whole mechanism of testing relies on norming for a group), generally using the least useful version of that tool (Raven's matrices, which only correlate with IQ at like a 0.25 level).
The whole "black people are dumber than white people because African Americans IQ tests" thing is this incoherent tower of assumptions and poor tools that, funnily enough, seems to then vindicate the prejudices of the white Americans applying it. And, just by coincidence, provides a convenient justification for ignoring the unseemly effects historical discrimination by blaming the victims.
I agree with you that HBD certainly attracts the wrong kind of people -- everyone who inherited their world view from their racist grandparents will point to it and say "see, we were right all along".
I am also suspicious of new theories which have a lot in common with old theories which were soundly debunked: if someone tried to sell me on their Earth-centered world view I would go "this looks a lot like geocentrism to me".
On the other hand, I think that this is very much a culture war topic where open-ended research might not be appreciated, which is probably why people who argue for the existence of genetic group differences in intelligence point to the Ashkenazi (who probably did not have the kind of economic advantage over the gentiles that the US whites have over the US blacks) instead of running straight into the largest mass of barbed wire on that battlefield and marry Adolf Hitler.
I do not think that if Scott was 99.7% certain that there was no genetic influence on the observed group difference, he would have written that possible explanation as he did, but that is just my subjective opinion.
As best I can tell, none of the factual claims you make here are right, or even anywhere close to right. I think you're blowing smoke.
> an intelligence test that can get order-of-magnitude differences in results with the same subject tested on different days
This is pure bullshit. What would it even mean to get an order-of-magnitude difference in an IQ test? Do you honestly believe someone can test IQ 20 on one day and IQ 200 the other day? I am not even sure if such an IQ test exists that would provide either of these values.
I am going to assume that you actually meant something like "a standard deviation of difference in results". (Please correct me if you insist on the original version; in that case I am afraid this debate makes no sense.) Even this statement is kinda true, but only in a way that doesn't matter. Basically, the further away from IQ 100 you are, the greater the noise in the test. It is possible to score IQ 145 on one day and IQ 160 on the other day, because maybe that's just a difference of getting one or two most difficult questions correct by accident. (Or maybe the two tests just assign different maximum score for getting all the questions right.) But the chance of getting IQ 100 on one day and IQ 130 on the other day, or IQ 75 on one day and IQ 100 on the other day, is negligible -- and this is the part that people are talking about most.
Whatever source you got this information from, I suggest to treat it with more skepticism.
One funny piece of evidence that probably any local branch of Mensa could give you, is that there are people who are obsessed about becoming Mensa members, and they keep doing the IQ test as often as possible; which by the official rules of Mensa is at least 6 months after the previous attempt. So there are people who keep doing this for years, they already took the test about dozen times, and have failed every time. Which would be quite unlikely if the noise was as big as you assume. (In a hypothetical world where IQ tests are so random, soon the word would get out that if you want to join Mensa, you just need to try three or four times to get lucky.)
*
Now let's return to your question, why are some people so obsessed. Yes, some of them are obsessed, because they are racists, and they see it as a support for their prejudice. (Though I wonder what is their opinion on the fact that some black people score high in the tests, and some white people score low. Would an actual racist be okay with having a black neighbor, if that neighbor was e.g. a math professor?)
But I think that many people arrive at this topic defensively. They organize some activity for other people -- establish a school, or write a blog and organize offline meetups -- and suddenly someone points out that the majority of participants are white, and accuses the organizer of racism, and insists that the burden of proof is on the accused. So people feel like they need to come up with an explanation, and the hypothesis of different average IQ is one that seems to fix the observed facts. If we didn't have so many baseless accusations of racism, there wouldn't be so many people looking for an alternative explanation.
You are correct - I meant a standard deviation. That's on me for typing in haste.
My argument here is that this whole idea rests on a tower of assumptions, some of which are patently false (i.e. that more melanin is a useful way of categorizing human genetic diversity) and some of which are shakey and become useless once taken together (the noise in IQ testing + the tests being designed to be normed intra-group + Raven's matrices not being well correlated with the tests by themselves + applying tests across populations mainly via Raven's matrices = junk stats).
I don't quite understand your example of people becoming defensively racist - if someone accuses me of sexism in hiring female doctors, is it then okay if my first response is to build this tower of pseudo-science about how woman can't be doctors because their menses makes them too emotional and prone to fainting? Am I supposed to condone the people who build and disseminate pseudoscience because it helps soothe the hurts of others?
I'd prefer things to be true rather than be plausible ways to justify our preconceptions, especially when those preconceptions affect the lives of others.
Imagine that you want to hire some people, and 10 candidates apply for the position. 9 of them are men, 6 are qualified, 3 are not. 1 is a woman, and she is not qualified. Let's say you need 5 people, so you choose the best 5 out of the qualified men. So far, makes sense?
The next thing is that a journalist notices that 5 out of 5 employees you hired are men, and accuses you of sexism. The burden of proof is on you, because "everyone knows" that there are absolutely no differences between men and women, therefore the true reason why you didn't hire at least 2 qualified women must be that you did something wrong.
You know you didn't do anything wrong, so you say something like "who knows, maybe women are simply not interested in being doctors". But then someone points to that 1 unqualified woman you didn't hire, and uses her as evidence that women actually are interested in being doctors. You point out that she wasn't qualified. They say "but sure there are many *other* women who are qualified -- why didn't you hire any of them?" They may even provide a specific example of a great female doctor, living in a different state. You say "well, none of them came to my interview", and they say "of course they didn't -- you have a reputation of being sexist, they probably didn't feel safe; you must try harder".
So you hire a team of diversity consultants, send your 5 doctors to sensitivity training twice a year, put "feminism power" posters all over your hospital, make a huge advertising campaign about your hospital being a woman-friendly place, and announce the next round of job interviews, exclusively for women. This time, 3 women candidates come, but all 3 are unqualified. You hire the most qualified one of them, hoping that now the journalists keep you alone. Perhaps with more experience, she will improve and become as good as your other doctors. Sadly, she does not.
One day you say "I don't know, perhaps women are just less qualified to be doctors, in general". The next morning you find out that your accounts at Twitter and Google were banned for hate speech, and a mob of angry students is trying to burn down your hospital.
Perhaps I can propose a hypothetical to illustrate where I'm coming from:
It's now one of the world's worst-kept secrets that men are significantly underrepresented in university (both as incoming admissions and as new graduates). This appears to be world-wide phenomenon, and shows up everywhere where women aren't actively excluded from studying. The only places where this is not true are in maths, engineering and computer science, which are still predominantly male.
Being aware of this fact, choose from the following (alone or in combination) as useful ways of addressing the issue going forwards:
A) Demand that 50% of admissions in all faculties must be men.
B) Study the issue to determine the genetic causes of this problem - maybe the Y chromosome contains genes that make men better at maths but worse at literally everything else?
C) Look for sociological factors that explain the discrepancy - maybe boys are now socialized to not want to be biologists or lawyers when previously they did?
D) Conclude that men are intellectually inferior to women, and that tipping the scales in any way would lead to less-qualified people becoming doctors, scientists, lawyers, artists, sociologists etc.
E) Conclude that there's something fundamentally fucked with how high school and university education works, that whatever measures it uses to assess a student's ability to perform the jobs they're nominally being trained for is wrong, and that a fundamental rethink is necessary.
F) Enter conspiracy mode and decide that any differences are caused by US affirmative action policies driving men out of universities.
I am not even sure that this is a problem that needs to be solved. Perhaps men are more interested in math & similar subjects, and in things that do not require university education, and women are more interested in non-mathy things that do require university education. We should make sure this is not the case, before attempting to solve the problem.
A -- clearly wrong, because either there is no problem, or there is a problem but this does not address the underlying cause
B -- it's possible, and it is an empirical question to find out
C -- it's possible
D -- it's possible
E -- it's almost certain that the system is fucked up, and it is a good idea to fix it regardless of what impact it would have on gender balance; that said, it is possible that fixing the system will have no impact on the gender imbalance (or could even make it worse)
F -- it's possible
I am not really giving you a specific answer here (except for the point A), am I? Thinking about the answers, I would like to suggest an option that it could be a combination of these things in some non-linear way. For example, that today it is expected that a person working in a profession X would have some skill Y, and that men are objectively worse at the skill Y, but that there is no objective reason why we should require the person in the profession X to have the skill Y, it's just some historical accident. For example, maybe men are better at "hard skills" and women are better at "soft skills", and it is the balance between the hard skills and the soft skills that is changing recently. (To put it extremely bluntly, is it more important to do a technically good job, or to avoid a possible controversy? Perhaps men are better at the former, and women at the latter.)
I'm not being prescriptive about the solutions here, so whatever floats your boat.
The interesting thing, for me at least, is that this is more or less the same menu of options that get touted for a number of situations where there is a disparity, and that the preferred solutions advanced by different groups change wildly depending on whether it's men/women, black/white, gay/straight etc.
For instance, some conservative universities have introduced quotas (either overtly or covertly) so that the student body doesn't become too female. This is, safe to say, not their preferred approach to the problem of underrepresented minorities on campus. Similarly, there's very little US lefty concern (that I can see) with solving the issue, despite it being just as glaring as, say, female underrepresentation in IT degrees.
It's also interesting to see biological explanations being hauled out for things that have changed over time. Programming used to be seen as women's work, back in the day when a computer was a room full of women with slide rules. Which is why a lot of the first computer programmers were women. Then it became seen as men's work and suddenly women turned out not to be interested/able.
Similarly, where I'm from medicine has gone from being almost exclusively men's work to being heavily skewed towards women, while in other countries its still seen as a job for men because women are too squeamish/emotional/irrational.
The solutions and explanations are always downstream of other things, is what I'm trying to get at. A good heuristic is to beware biological essentialism, as it often serves as plausible cover for other reasons.
It is easy to understand the obsession. Speaking plainly, US has a large highly visible subpopulation that, without massive affirmative action, would be _overwhelmingly_ relegated to menial occupations with no hope for betterment in the lifetimes of their children and grandchildren. Human nature being what it is, it is a terrible prospect for both sides and I cannot fault Americans for obsessing over it.
I also think that knowing more details on the causal pathway which leads to worse economic outcomes could be genuinely helpful to figure out the best solution to ensure that economic outcomes are less unequal in the future. And IQ seems like it might be one stepping stone on a causal pathway. IQ can be lower for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps many of the teachers of the black kids were racist. Perhaps it is the lead. Perhaps black culture has less emphasis on academic success.
As Scott argued in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/ (IIRC, SSC does not load for me), racism as a root cause acts as a curiosity stopper. People are racist, end of story. I do not find that very satisfactory.
'Group X has worse outcomes by N, ergo society is racist, ergo we fix society by doing affirmative action on the order of N' does not seem remotely sufficient from an understanding the world point of view.
I agree with all you wrote above, but there is an important addition: plausible "causal pathways" which are left after half a century of hunting down preventable causes (lead etc.), which can be broadly grouped under the heading of culture, need blacks' active cooperation to work. And that can be tricky to get. asdf put it like this [https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-analogy-with-religion/#comment-493783] (I elided the harshest words to spare feelings):
---------------------
It’s true that people in Baltimore schools would benefit from better discipline. But they don’t want it bad enough. The social status hit of admitting they need [severe discipline] to even begin to act half human is just too much. [...] Back when making them [behave] meant cheap reliable factory workers, their betters in Baltimore bothered to do it, hard as it was, because there was something in it. There were Methodist churches all around my neighborhood taking in the working class and churning out punch clockers. Now, there isn’t. So the only people who bother aren’t people that need them to show up for their shift sober, but people who need them to show at the polling booth drunk.
I think it was literally the first time I heard that number, so I do not consider myself obsessed. If there is any group with who's genetic IQ component I am obsessed, it would probably be the Ashkenazi (based on SSC.)
Not that I feel very obsessed about them, either.
I wonder if the rise of wokeness has anything to do with occupy wall street. The timing lines up.
Hanania responded to some arguments along those lines here:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/a-psychological-theory-of-the-culture
Not sure why you react the way you do about dating in the workplace. Presumably you've seen the famous graph about where couples met, with "met at work" peaking in the early 1990s and then dropping off. Combine that with younger millennials and zoomers being much less likely to be married and have children than previous generations were at their age, and it's a pretty serious problem.
We made a society where people are encouraged to stay in school until their mid-20s and delay marriage to focus on their careers. But we also made it so the people who you would naturally meet and interact with after college, your coworkers, are off limits for romance. We replaced that with Tinder, Bumble, etc., which don't work very well for most people.
Having a family is one of the most important parts of life, and so laws that make family formation harder are important. And I think the fact that flirtation can constitute a hostile work environment that can cost your employer hundreds of millions of dollars is a significant factor.
Fuck the mess that is dating apps, but isn't breaking up (which is not a good thing and people should try not to overdo and be more serious towards their relationship mates, but necessary nonetheless) difficult and awkward in a workplace?
A workplace is one of the very few places in a modern secular-ish society where you're **forced**, on threat of not finding food, to interact with people. How much more difficult would that be if every 5th employee was once your ex who is not on good terms with you? How much more awkward would it all be if this ex eventually married/did-the-serious-whatever-it-is with another guy from work, and now there is a lowkey jealousy/awkward feelings whatever it is in either you or the husband or both?
I'm not opposed to the general abstract idea and I also think Scott unfairly jumped to satire too early here. But the above is a legitimate concern. To say nothing yet of the inevitable case when bosses start bullying/annoying lower-rank exes. Which is bound to happen.
>but isn't breaking up (which is not a good thing and people should try not to overdo and be more serious towards their relationship mates, but necessary nonetheless) difficult and awkward in a workplace?
Yes, and this is a good thing.
Not sure what you mean by that...
Classic "Bad things are good" Chestertonian thinking. Being able to interact fruitfully with people you don't like is good, dealing with awkward and difficult situations is good. Lack of exposure leads to an inability to cope, and an inability to cope leads, in the long term, to less happiness and productivity. This obviously leads to bad outcomes on the margins (the "bosses bullying exes" situations mentioned above), but is a good tradoff.
That being said, I think I'm an unusually non-resentful person, so maybe I'm underestimating the frequency of those bad outcomes.
I agree with you in principle, but I don't think this is a good application thereof. Situations like this aren't training to be able to cope; they're *the things you need to cope with.* If you don't already have the requisite skills by the time you enter the workforce, getting thrown in the deep end isn't going to benefit you much, and if you do, then you already have them and don't need a situation like this to learn them.
"People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law?"
I saw that change happen in real time at my last job. Out in the far reaches of the Mojave desert, in the Land that Woke Forgot, we had a workplace culture where pretty much everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs. With rather less sex than the TV version, because A: real life rather than Hollywood and B: nerds rather than Advertising Bros. But where there was mutual desire, it happened, and where there wasn't, nobody really pushed.
Until one woman filed a sexual harassment complaint(*), which everyone recognized was utterly baseless, and revenge for a social slight. But management decided they had to pretend to take it seriously, money quote, "I'm sorry, [redacted], I have to take her side - she's the girl". In a matter of months. Policies were changed, management became much more intrusive, and the job ceased being fun for anyone not long after that.
I should have quit immediately; by the time I eventually left, my colleagues were only half joking when they suggested I could offer my next employer an entire spacecraft-propulsion R&D team, cheap.
* Really, a series of escalating complaints of increasing bogosity when she wasn't satisfied with the social response to the earlier ones. By the end, management was officially 100% on her side, and she had no friends whatsoever of either gender.
I retired a couple years ago and there weren't that many women in the engineering departments where I worked so I must have missed a lot of this. The only time I ever saw a women raise an issue was a meeting where some guy answered her question about a data type with 'it's a fucking integer'. It was pretty lame. She had a foul mouth in her own way too., Issue raised - Issue dropped
I'd kind of like to see this phenomenon live and in person. I live within an easy bike ride of the University of Minnesota. Alum 65 and older can take courses for credit at $10 per or audit for free. I would expect a lot of justified resentment if I were to pop into a class there though. Hi, I'm old, my health care is subsidized and I'm only paying 50 bucks to take this course. How you doing today my young friend?
BTW you are probably too young to fully appreciate Mad Men. My youngest brother didn't understand what i saw in it. If you don't remember the Manson murders or at least their aftermath you won't flip out when the show reaches 1969 and Don Draper's love interest is in California and picks up her green phone. Oh gawd. Sharon Tate had a green phone!
I am happy to be reminded that bogosity is a word.
Also it seems odd to me that moving was an option for you. Spacecraft propulsion seems adequately expensive and government-entwined that I find it difficult to think that any company could preserve a healthy culture for long.
I feel it's worth mentioning (since nobody else seems to have made this point) that Mad Men is a cautionary tale -- Don Draper is not intended to be an aspirational character, he's an essentially broken person. Much of the subtext of the show is how this era produced powerful men who were philanderers, alcoholics, bullies, and egoists. The juxtaposition between that reality and the superficial trappings of the era ("when men could be men", great fitting suits, etc) is what makes the show so interesting.
Even though the government’s misuse of the “applicant pool” concept gets touched upon, it feels like this by far the most egregious part of the entire phenomenon. The problem that civil rights laws are trying to fix is discrimination, and the (real) problem being described in the book is when non-discriminatory companies have to jump through a lot of dumb hoops because they couldn’t naturally hire “enough” minority employees on their own. But if the real applicant pool does correspond to the % minorities in the company, then the company is being sufficiently non-discriminatory that it shouldn’t need to jump through those hoops.
I feel like whenever see statistics for a company’s representation, I never see it the statistics breakdown for “people who applied to the job who met the bare minimum qualifications” or “people with the desired college degree” presented alongside it.
It is worth noting that “job applicants” (no caveat for being qualified) alone is probably not a great metric. I know some tech companies that were able to hire more female employees without affirmative action simply by paring down the listed requirements to a more realistic level (which significantly increased the number of women who applied—stereotypically men apply to jobs where they meet 1/10 requirements while women wouldn’t apply to a job where they met 9/10 requirements). But even the flawed “job applicants” number would be a better metric than the general population.
So the counter-argument here is that hiring practices aren't just about treating everyone equally. It's about creating a counter-weight against the social discrimination minorities and other communities experience in the rest of society. It would be ideal to eliminate disparities in everything from education to housing to health care to employment in general, but no law could ever do that.
The question then becomes whether the cost of forcing employers to make due with a less productive workforce (because, granted, this means they are not hiring the very best applicants) is worth the benefit of giving members of discriminated communities a chance at upward mobility. That's more a matter of personal opinion.
It’s still the case that the real applicant pool (as opposed to the general population) is hugely important. Let’s say companies get 1000 qualified applicants during a year for 100 positions. Company 1 has 200 qualified applicants who are women, and Company 2 has 500. If Company 1 hires 40 women and Company 2 hires 50 women, it *looks* like Company 2 is better at promoting gender equality, even though Company 1 is providing a huge counterweight and Company 2 did nothing.
But it seems like we rarely get to see the full picture in practice.
I would argue that an employer's contribution to gender (or any other form of) equality isn't based on applicant ratios, but the total objective effect on the larger society. The fact remains that one company hired more women than the other, so their value-added to gender equality is higher. Again, the question still remains whether or not this is a desirable policy.
“The fact remains that one company hired more women than the other, so their value-added to gender equality is higher.”
… Just to clarify, are you saying this as someone who personally cares about gender equality at all, or is this a best guess at how e.g. feminists would view things? Because if it’s the former case, that is WILD and I am curious as to how you came by that belief.
Seems logical to me. Given that society has made a decision that employers should to contribute to social equality, then it seems more logical to me to measure their contribution to overall social equality, and not limit it to how they selected from the applicant pool.
To use a different example, if we decide we want, say, manufacturers to contribute to fighting global warming, then we should do that by measuring the total amount of carbon they contribute to the environment, and not simply by measuring how efficient they are at using energy, even if they are relatively better than the average manufacturer.
There are also costs to requiring many hiring/promotion decisions to be legible to protect against lawsuits, and a lot of other compliance costs. The laws still may be worth it overall, but you should include those in the costs.
The fear that people express about how their career can be terminated in an instant by an offhand joke or remark taken the wrong way... sometimes strikes me as just a bit pathological. It's like somebody who has a fear of snakes or spiders. Do snakes or spiders sometimes kill people? Undoubtedly. But are the odds of this happening to *you* high enough to the point where developing a chronic phobia over it is worth all the discomfort and paranoia and avoidance? Often not, methinks.
I know that people sometimes lose their jobs and reputations over mostly innocent politically incorrect remarks, and I know this is bad. But I struggle to see this as so prevalent that we should view it as an epidemic (particularly post-2022... I'll grant that in 2020-2021 we got carried away with this).
Across many years of being in the workforce (and being involved with myriad startups and midsized companies as an investor) I'm having a hard time thinking of a single individual male who was ostracized in a permanent way for some sort of lewd comment he carelessly made. In 99% of cases this seems to be handled appropriately either via informal feedback (pulling the person aside to let them know what they said isn't acceptable) or some sort of disciplinary hearing that - at least in my view - is typically handled professionally and fairly.
In fact I can much more easily find examples of *women* who became un-hireable because of a harassment claim that they made at a previous employer. If we lived in the "woke" world with its "victim culture" that Hanania imagines we do, that would not happen.
While I concur that the excesses of the "woke" are bad and should be pushed back against, these people who are completely fixated on the excesses of woke progressives (whether it's Hanania or Bill Maher or Tucker Carlson or whomever)... I dunno man. Seems like pearl clutching to me.
Edit 5/4/24: Fixed grammar in final paragraph.
Yglesias has made a similar critique using Jonathan Haidt's argument against many Haidt fans. Razib Khan also denounced people as cowards for being so afraid and not willing to use their real names online. Unlike him, I'm not a professional blogger/podcaster and founder of my own company and have a boss, so I keep my real name mostly off the internet and have thus avoided getting asked about online history in any hiring process.
My suspicion is that provocative writers who use their real name trust that their most outrageous articles will never be found. They would struggle more if their primary platform was YouTube or TikTok, and less if they only wrote books (which are notorious for how few of them are read).
Some of Razib Khan's writings from his days writing for the Unz Review caused the New York Times not to hire him, but I doubt that they knew about his passionate defense of James Watson's comments on the low intelligence of Africans, and the full extent of his advocacy of HBD. Afaik he also received funding from Ron Unz personally for his university education, so he did not succeed entirely on his own. Now it is easy to look back and say "I no longer hold these views", as Hanania has done, but of course Hanania would have never risen to fame in the first place if his previous writings had been public knowledge. I will also claim that both he and Scott Alexander have become noticeably more cautious in their writings after they got unmasked.
> The fear that people express about how their career can be terminated in an instant by an offhand joke or remark taken the wrong way... sometimes strikes me as just a bit pathological. It's like somebody who has a fear of snakes or spiders. Do snakes or spiders sometimes kill people? Undoubtedly. But are the odds of this happening to *you* high enough to the point where developing a chronic phobia over it is worth all the discomfort and paranoia and avoidance? Often not, methinks.
The difference is, we don't live in close proximity with venomous snakes and spiders. If we ever find such creatures intruding on our homes or places of business, we go to significant lengths to either exterminate them or drive them off. This is the principal reason why deaths to snakes and spiders is quite rare.
The same cannot be said of the woke.
> I struggle to see this as so prevalent that we should view it as an epidemic (particularly post-2022... I'll grant that in 2020-2021 we got carried away with this).
So it was a legitimate problem in 2020-2021, people took it seriously enough that it's now not a particularly big problem anymore... and therefore we should stop taking it seriously?
> So it was a legitimate problem in 2020-2021, people took it seriously enough that it's now not a particularly big problem anymore... and therefore we should stop taking it seriously?
Actually yes, that's about how I feel about it.
The problem is that Hanania's book came out 4 years too late. The battle is over and the woke side has lost. Examples: BLM is almost completely discredited. Nobody is hiring Chief Diversity Officers anymore. The median American voter hates racial hiring quotas and hates the Free Palestine protestors at Columbia even more. San Francisco threw out their DA and then voted for a bunch of referenda that are anti-crime and anti-social justice. Americans HATE Kamala Harris and are on the verge of bringing Donald Trump back into office. All of the most-read and most-watched voices on Facebook and Youtube are conservatives whose opposition to "woke" is their number one calling card. People are moving en masse to red and purple states. The things cited as problems in Scott's article are things that nearly everyone reading this hates just as much as he and Hanania do. Opposing "woke" is not a minority opinion, it's an overwhelming majority opinion!
People like Hanania like to perpetuate a vision of a world where none of this has happened because it gets disgruntled conservatives to keep buying their books that validate their view of themselves as an oppressed minority.
On the one hand, you do have a point about the things that have happened. I agree with you, wokeness is currently in retreat throughout our society, and I believe that's a good thing. But a retreat is often followed by regrouping. The bad guys are currently "down but not out," and it would be a bad idea to let down our guard until the ideas underlying wokeness are discredited in our society to the point of unthinkability, the same way that Nazism, slave-holding, and being subjects of the British Empire are. (Funny how we tend to face an existential, civilization-defining threat every 80 years or so. We've had a pretty good track record at defeating and discrediting them so far. I can only hope that trend continues in the present iteration!)
Remember, if a weed grows in your garden, you don't just cut it down and declare victory. You have to pull it out by the roots, otherwise it will always come back and continue to cause trouble for you.
The Soviet Union collapsed but isn't discredited in the same way. Bernie Sanders was rather pro-Soviet and is hardly cancelled.
Exactly. We let down our guard in the 90s, and now look what resulted!
I appreciate this response, thanks Bob.
Though I agree with your overall point (that an essentially Black Swan phenomena shouldn't determine policy), I need some verification of some of your claims. Can you connect me to an online resource documenting the rate of people being fired for frivolous reasons across 2020-2021? Was it a real problem even then? Or were there just a handful of well-publicized cases? (I grant that even one unjust outcome shouldn't happen, I'm wondering how significant this really ever was).
"BLM is almost completely discredited. Nobody is hiring Chief Diversity Officers anymore. The median American voter hates racial hiring quotas and hates the Free Palestine protestors at Columbia even more."
Really, you sure? I would be interested in any opinion polling you have seen. Has BLM been discredited or have the number of protests declines simply because the number of well-publicized police shootings seems to have declined? Racial quotas may be unpopular, but the Gaza thing may very well cost Biden the next election.
> the Gaza thing may very well cost Biden the next election.
If the open borders, botching Afghanistan, blatant, out-in-the-open politically-motivated prosecution of his opponent, inflation like we haven't seen since the 70s, and manifest senility didn't already...
And weaponizing the IRS https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/new-report-details-alarming-irs-civil-liberties-abuses
>The report reveals how the IRS committed alarming civil liberties abuses, including an unannounced, unprompted field visit to the home of journalist Matt Taibbi on the very day he testified before Congress about government censorship.
Your example of "loss" are either:
* replacement of things by similar things (BLM specifically is discredited, but the niche "things you express support of and donate to to show your solidarity" is not). And most people don't even know that BLM is discredited.
* things that were true all along (the mean voter hates quotas)--the voter has no influence in ending the quotas that he hates, especially since as Hannania points out, the quotas have their root in laws that the voter can't get rid of
* intra-left fighting (Palestine)
* wishful thinking (I'll accept Trump getting in office as a gain for the right *after* Trump gets in office)
* things that operate on such a shallow level that they have no influence, or which otherwise lack influence (by what means do you think conservatives on Facebook will dismantle wokeness?)
People have always opposed affirmative action, but SCOTUS finally struck it down.
They struck down a specific case of it with loopholes big enough to drive a truck through. And the courts ignore the Supreme Court constantly whenever the ruling opposes the left. Look at what's happened with guns already.
Also, the Supreme Court is an outlier because Trump put conservatives on it making the present Supreme Court is a holdover from the past.
> BLM specifically is discredited, but the niche "things you express support of and donate to to show your solidarity" is not
In mid-2020 we had a situation where employees were demanding that their employers donate specifically to the BLM entity (not just broadly to social justice organizations - it HAD to be BLM) by threat of either quitting or disrupting the normal course of business. It's hard to imagine that happening in 2024. As for the general niche, I'm not sure what's problematic about people donating to express solidarity with a minority group? The issue was the coercion to do so. (maybe I'm misunderstanding your point)
> by what means do you think conservatives on Facebook will dismantle wokeness?
My point was not that this is a super effective political movement. I'm just pointing out that conservative and/or anti-woke viewpoints are not in the minority, they are an ascendent/majority position. Or at the very least, widespread and hardly suppressed.
Last I checked, the word "Black" still gets sacral capitalization per the AP style guide, and Trump hasn't actually been re-elected yet. The thermostatic equilibrium did shift back after Biden took office, which is a reason for anti-woke types not to want Trump to win.
Perhaps for anti-woke types who mostly care about culture. I mostly care about policy, and I care about wokeness mostly in as much as it affects what policy gets passed. A backlash against wokeness is worth little if it doesn't actually result in anti-woke politicians getting elected, and enacting some anti-woke policy, or at least not enacting more woke policy, as left-wing politicians would.
Grammarly, at the very least, seems to principled about capitalizing every ethnicity. Indian, Asian, Black, White, Arab, Jew. "Indian" and "Asian" and "Arab" had squiggly red lines under them when I wrote them with the first letter lowercase, "Black" and "White" did not but only because the spell checker probably thought I wanted to use them as colors, other spell checkers like those of google and microshit want to capitalize them too, as well as "Jew", which Grammarly also didn't see as an ethnicity.
Fair enough, but I think you contradicted yourself.
> Indian, Asian, Black, White
> "Black" and "White" did not
So which is it?
I didn't mean to imply that all those ethnicities were capitalized on the suggestion of Grammarly, I mentioned a bunch of them upfront then indicated the subset which Grammarly wanted to capitalize.
People who don't hold dissodant views struggle to understand how hard it is to operate in a world that doesn't tolerate dissident views.
For what it's worth, I saw this happen to one of my professors, literally for a single joke. I have never seen anyone bitten by a snake or spider.
Not trying to be annoying by asking this follow-up, but doesn't 1 instance in the entirety of your however many decades of knowing hundreds/thousands of people in your personal life (you didn't explicitly say that it was only 1, but I imagine you would have mentioned others if there were more) suggest a quite low base rate?
FWIW my count is 0 snake or spider bites, 1 scorpion bite, 1 shark bite, 0 cancellations by woke mobs.
When something has a large downside and low probability of happening the behavior selects for people with low IQ and low impulse control. The classic example is in crime where extending prison sentences doesn't deter crime, but increasing the rate of catching criminals appears to. The opposite is true for high payoffs with low probabilities (so long as the EV is actually high), such as starting a business. That selects for good traits like high intelligence. High payoff low EV still selects for low IQ. Lotto tickets for example.
Maybe its better for the company if every guy feels like he can say "nice ass" to any woman at the company, but if I get away with "nice ass" 50 times, and time 51 I get bussed out of the profession, that screws me over royally.
I would distinguish between 1) the regime of affirmative action and legal enforcement against anything perceived as "discrimination," and 2) wokeness as a broader cultural phenomenon. Hanania conflates these two things, possibly deliberately for marketing purposes.
If one simply made the claim that civil rights law is upstream of 1), I'd say that's quite credible. To give an account of 2) in terms of civil rights law is far more dubious.
Remember that time a kimono exhibit in Boston got shut down for being anti-Asian? It was by a Chinese activist, even though the Japanese organizers were all for it. Talk about a cultural misunderstanding!
I enjoyed this review,, and I think Scott did a good job applying its lessons to some more recent events. Here’s my response to certain points and critiques:
1) Yes, civil rights law does not directly explain why things got so crazy in the 2010s. In the book, however, I take issue with the idea that this period of time was as much of a watershed as people think it was. The basic ideas – disparate impact, tests are racist, crime fighting is racist, etc. – were already woven into American life for decades. I argue that the 2010s was the culture catching up to law. This is why I called the book “The Origins of Woke,” as it was not meant to be an all-encompassing explanation for everything that happened as a result of civil rights law.
Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth. It would of course be massively incomplete, inconsistent with some evidence, and not be an all-encompassing theory of everything. If someone was going to study a topic they’d ideally want to know more than one sentence about it, but to the extent to which we can put the blame on one thing in order to make the world legible, this is it.
2) I agree that the judges and bureaucrats took the law in the direction they did in the first place for reasons not having to do with civil rights law. I see guilt over the black issue as the cultural core of this, and civil rights law determined the path this instinct took, that is, what “caring about black people” meant in practice and which groups the same template got applied to.
3) I stick by the absurdity of the Di-az/Diaz story and using it as an example. In my universe there’s no way that any words used against an individual can justify the payout they got. Yet I could’ve provided a more balanced summary of the case, and I regret not doing so.
4) I left a comment about the alleged inaccuracies of the “walk-up” and “great view” controversy at the link, I don’t think that was misleading at all.
5) Yes I didn’t talk about the origins of inequality. That would have been a bad strategy. I prefer what Scott calls the “meta-honesty” approach, where you tell people exactly what you’re not going to talk about and why. This means that the pieces are all there for an intelligent reader to figure out what you think, while making things hard for the cancellers and political opponents. This is a political book, and I sometimes do politics, which I justify with the meta-honesty approach. Scott has a revulsion towards this, which I consider having the flaw of being too pure for this world. I, in contrast, have an appreciation for politics as an art, and this is maybe just an aesthetic thing. But I will never lie to or mislead you about what I think, and believe others should live up to the same standard, even if they sometimes practice selective silence
> Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth. It would of course be massively incomplete, inconsistent with some evidence, and not be an all-encompassing theory of everything. If someone was going to study a topic they’d ideally want to know more than one sentence about it, but to the extent to which we can put the blame on one thing in order to make the world legible, this is it.
Of course, that just invites all the nit-pickers to come and pick. Ever notice how the Venn diagram of people willing to demand evidence for ideas they don't want to believe and people willing to accept such evidence when it is offered is two non-overlapping circles?
"A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?”
Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. "
Is that correct? Do you have a counter-argument to this? Because to me (a left-leaning centrist on the American political spectrum) it's a pretty damning indictment.
The point of civil rights law, to a left leaning American, is to address the discriminatory treatment directed toward populations with too little political power to defend their own interests. One can argue about the means to do so, and perhaps certain policies, such as Affirmative Action, were unequal to the task, or even did more harm than good by that metric. But the goal itself, that the US has a moral duty to attempt to address discriminatory treatment of relatively powerless populations, still remains.
Unless there is some rational argument against it. Is there?
> Unless there is some rational argument against it. Is there?
Read "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," by black scholar Thomas Sowell. The rational argument against it that he makes is a simple appeal to the data: black Americans were doing just fine on their own at working their way towards equality, a slow but steady trend that continued for a century... and then abruptly hit a wall after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 got a bunch of bureaucracy involved, and has been backsliding ever since. Sowell's argument against it is that it is not achieving its stated goals, and is in fact accomplishing the opposite thereof.
I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but that sounds pretty rational to me!
That doesn't dispute the goal of racial equality at all, just the means to achieve it. If it is true (I don't know) that the CRA interfered with a consistent trend toward black equality, that would be an argument against it. But is that what Hanania argues?
> That doesn't dispute the goal of racial equality at all, just the means to achieve it.
That's a fair point... at first. But then 60 years went by. The thesis that the Civil Rights bureaucracy was actively making things worse for the people it was supposed to be making things better for was supported pretty strongly by the evidence as early as the 1980s. If the goal was truly racial equality, people motivated by that goal would have reassessed it and hit the brakes at some point, rather than relentlessly doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on the failing policy and building the bureaucracy ever-larger over the course of the next 40 years.
There are really only two possible explanations for what actually happened. 1) People on the Left are universally really, really stupid and literally no one influential *ever* noticed what was going on, or 2) the stated goal and the actual goal being worked towards are not the same. And explanation #1 is obviously not true.
I'd propose 3): Bureaucracies and political movements have a life of their own once started, and can persist for decades even when they are actively harmful to the thing they are supposed to be remedying. See the Baltimore public school system and the Nuclear Regulator Commission for examples.
Well said. OTOH, given ambiguous data, I am comfortable trusting the anecdotal evidence of the people the policy is impacting most directly, and black people didn't (and don't) seem to want to reverse civil right legislation. They must think it's benefiting them somehow. The one's I know tell me that it's far from a perfect policy, and they might have preferred a different approach, but it's better than nothing.
Which tells me that before one suggests that we reverse civil rights, one has to propose a better, more effective alternative that will accomplish the same goal.
Anyone got one?
There's a fundamental disagreement between the left and the right about what "equality" should ultimately mean. The right thinks that everybody plays by the same rules and get what they deserve, whereas the left thinks that everybody deserves to have more-or-less the same given the same amount of effort.
The left is currently ascendant (for various complicated reasons, the main of which is I think that fascism is more discredited than communism), so their preferred definition wins out where the elite opinion is concerned, and wokeness is ultimately downstream from there.
> The right thinks that everybody plays by the same rules and get what they deserve, whereas the left thinks that everybody deserves to have more-or-less the same given the same amount of effort.
The position you ascribe to the left is actually much closer to the conservative position. What you see in practice — actions speak louder than words! — is that the left thinks that everyone deserves to have more-or-less the same outcomes, period, and that anyone bringing up "effort" is secretly X-ist and Whateverphobic and is trying to confuse the real issue which is obviously discrimination.
Those things aren't really in conflict though. If for some reason the same amount of effort from the average member of some group is less productive than that of others, then productivity can't be maximized without discrimination. The left thinks that sacrificing productivity is worth it, the right doesn't. The average Joe isn't entirely on board with the left too yet, hence why all the obfuscatory rigmarole.
"If for some reason the same amount of effort from the average member of some group is less productive than that of others, then productivity can't be maximized without discrimination." That doesn't follow. Equal treatment will result in unequal outcomes, from which the left will wrongly infer discrimination, but there is no need for actual discrimination.
I would argue that what the Left wants doesn't exist, because "The Left" isn't a homogenous mass of voters all of whom want the same thing (much like conservative voters). But to the extent that one can over-simplify and over-generalize, most self-identified left wing or progressive voters are more likely to focus on removing the effects of prejudice and discrimination on the average outcomes of historically marginalized populations.
I mean I think to call black Americans a powerless population is like calling Iran a secular state. All of our institutions have been for decades obsessed with eliminating inequality between them and whites, there are few if any instances in human history where there’s been more of a good faith effort to uplift a group at such large expense. We basically threw out the constitution to do so. Leftists are just wrong, because they start with the premise that equality is achievable.
This is a reasonable view now, but was much less reasonable in the 1950s and 60s (when civil rights laws were originally written). Do you think the harder racism of the 60s (e.g. blatant things like bus segregation) would have gone away to the degree it did without civil rights laws? (Bearing in mind that much of this was local law in fairly un-woke areas)?
(You may reasonably say "some stuff was needed but we went too far" or "we made a bad tradeoff with nonzero benefits". I'm not sure what your argument would be though).
There could have been a bright-line distinction between anti-discrimination law applying to state and local governments, and anti-discrimination law applying to private entities, and they could have only enacted the former. Or, indeed, government discriminatory practices would have likely been struck down as violations of the 14th Amendment within a short time, without the need for a law, like school segregation was. And even if discrimination wouldn't have disappeared everywhere, people could have moved.
So here’s an epistemic game for u.
U know that the mainstream view is that existing institutions are obscenely and comically unfair to blacks. U know from experience that the exact opposite is true. U know that the truth doesn’t actually affect the narrative except by intensifying it. U know that obvious liars can and do prevail.
U know that those obvious liars base their legitimacy on a prior movement in which they alleged the same things they allege today.
How certain are u that ur understanding of what America was is accurate?
Now read the following article closely. Read it very closely. Don’t fill in any gaps with charitable assumptions. Do u get the impression that the people described herein are actually being oppressed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
U my friend, are nothing more than the teen, raised under Stalin who sees that things are shitty. So he rejects Stalin in favour of Lenin, and imagines that Stalin’s only error was to betray the movement or take it too far. But no, Lenin was actually a piece of shit too and actually the Tsar for all his flaws was the better guy.
That's a matter of opinion. I don't think anyone can objectively measure the extent to which US institutions have attempted to eliminate inequality. To go by the self-reported experiences of members of relatively less powerful communities like black Americans, it's more lip service than anything else. Implicit racism still seems prevalent in our culture.
I agree that contemporary America has tried to do a lot, compared to previous time periods and other regions (though Western Europe would assert themselves). And I would propose that if you offered anyone, including a member of one of these communities, to magically switch places with a randomly chosen individual from, say, 100 years ago, you would get no takers. Conditions have improved.
This does not imply that we have succeeded, or that we have done all we can, or that we should not strive to do more.
I think the main point of Hanania's book, as I read it, is that there is (roughly speaking) 1/3rd support for the actual system we have today, and 2/3rds support for what the system we have today pretends it is, and so it is a political failure that we have the system we have today, given supermajority opposition to it.
[That is, a supermajority of Americans are against explicit racial discrimination, including quotas. Then why do we have a system that uses quotas to determine presumption of guilt, while not allowing quotas as a methodology?]
Are quotas worth it? Well, that's something you should try to convince Americans of first, rather than just sneaking it into policy.
The problem with political approaches based on these poll results is that a supermajority of Americans also believes in substantial racial equality. What would happen if somebody somehow got rid of the current system of backdoor/sub rosa quotas and the predictable result ensued? I don't know, but it probably wouldn't be pretty.
- Race and sex discrimination by the government are human rights violations, that of equality before the law. Discrimination by private entities is unfortunate but not a human rights violation. But laws that make private companies discriminate (as the de facto guilt-presuming anti-discrimination laws do) are discrimination by the government.
- At a point when racism is as taboo as it is in present day America, where a large fraction of the population pretty clearly sincerely supports either color-blind liberalism or id pol progressivism, there is no risk that widespread discrimination would return in the absence of civil rights law. It's another question if there was a good reason to make the laws in the 1960s, but even if there was one, they have served their purpose and are no longer needed.
- As a libertarian, I generally prioritize freedom over equality; I oppose outlawing action A while action B is legal, if A doesn't leave anyone worse off than B, as it would punish a victimless action. If some white people are working for a company that only hires whites, that doesn't leave black people worse off than if none of them are engaging in any economic activity, which would be legal to do. It fails to benefit black people, as some alternative actions would do, but it doesn't hurt them.
- Generally, in a free economy, some companies will refrain from excluding people based on race/sex, as it's against their interests to leave cheap labor unused. If those companies outcompete more racist/sexist companies, more companies would adopt their policy, even if not all companies would stop discriminating. This would likely lead to a not too oppressive environment even without anti-discrimination law (while Jim Crow was, to a significant extent, enforced by laws).
Besides, there are of course middle grounds between the current system, and repealing all civil rights law.
One version, perhaps within the Overton window, would be to leave in place a narrow anti-discrimination law that makes it explicit that requires proof of discriminatory intent is required, statistical discrepancies or hostile speech (other than speech planning a violation of the law) can't be used as evidence, and it applies to historically disadvantaged and advantaged groups equally. One may worry that some courts may still find a way to twist it into mandating affirmative action; but if culture shifts rightward to the point where seriously curtailing civil rights law is feasible, it's perhaps less of a concern.
And even Hanania primarily advocates executive and judicial decisions as the realistically feasible ways to curtail the effects of civil rights law, each of which would leave at least basic anti-discrimination law in place.
I think this is basically what Thomas Sowell also advocates--keep laws against explicit discrimination and restrictive covenants and such, but get rid of affirmative action and disparate impact.
“I, in contrast, have an appreciation for politics as an art”
Yes, politics is to a large extent the art of impression management.
But then again, there is also a (rational) science of impression management.
My observation would be that there was an improvement of racial relations from the 1960s to the 1980s (peaking with stuff like Cosby Show and Eddie Murphy movies where black people were portrayed as just, y'know, *people*) then things got slowly worse.
My theory: there was an assumption in the 1960s that if you removed all the (obvious and real) discrimination and segregation then blacks would eventually catch up with whites. At first they did, so everyone was reasonably happy, but after a single generation this process stalled, which caused renewed frustration.
I’d also refer people to my piece that responded to some earlier reviews of the book here. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/against-ideaism
You could call this Kolmogorov complicity. Or maybe Straussianism.
> I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason
And that's a great example of why rationalists never win. This entire situation with the right is an example of what amazing things can happen if you simply use every single tool at your disposal.
The ends justify the means. If you don't understand that, you are always going to lose to people that do.
Well yeah, to win in politics you can't just make rational arguments all the time. Most people are not rationalists.
But sometimes people want to have honest discussions and think clearly about stuff, rather than work their most powerful dark arts spells on one another. This is a place where we're hopefully doing more of the honest discussion thing.
I completely agree of course. The comment you're responding to here is an observation about how the world works, not how I want it to work or how rationalist communities work.
Your comment is self-defeating - actual amoral psychopaths following "ends justify the means" reasoning don't *say* that they're doing that, they talk about how nice and principled they are. You're still being too honest!
(see also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ )
"Situation with the right"
Please explain? Are they the one's jailing people for years for a political protest and breaking 300 years of political precedent by trying to jail a presidential candidate?
"None of these are great options"
Why must you poison-pill each option, with a caricature.
I think it's more "how you'll inevitably be described by anyone who disagrees with you" than a charicature. And since people know this, they avoid letting themselves get pinned to one (even if their actual view is a reasonable version of it).
> I think it's more "how you'll inevitably be described by anyone who disagrees with you" than a charicature.
[Insert "why not both" meme here]
Disagreement does not make an option "not great", unless Scott just meant it as "not popular". But I think he would have used words more precisely.
Churchill was a hardcore eugenicist and hereditarian, but definitely did not love Hitler and want to marry him. In fact he hated Hitler for perpetrating a genocide of the "most remarkable race".
I wonder what the book says about what would seem to me to be a crucial "why" aspect: the international one.
To me, it seems like the reason for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, has been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways.
Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.
The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went "Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad.
It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are. Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade, the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine.
Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.
I agree on the Cold War context, but it wasn't that "credible" to give such credit to the USSR. They claimed to be anti-imperialist because they opposed the existing western colonial powers, but they were imperialists themselves and punished minority groups under their rule for membership in said groups.
Yes, of.course - the point wasn’t what happened, the point was what it looked like. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars etc just didn’t lead to internationally spreadable photographic moments in the same way as segregation.
> the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice
The Soviet Union deported entire peoples, and was not above massacres targeting ethnic groups, like at Katyn.
Katyń wasn't targeting an ethnic group. It was targeting a military elite of an occupied country. The country in question was an ethnostate, so the elites were of one particular ethnicity, but it wasn't their ethnicity they were targeted for.
This is not to deny that, behind its internationalist facade, USSR cultivated ethnic divisions and did lots of awful shit to its minorities, Poles included. It's just that Katyń in particular just isn't a good example of that, the USSR just happened to do a lot of awful shit in general.
But all of that is illegible, especially before the Internet. What's legible is "Unlike Western Imperialists, who have a 150+ year history of enslaving and exterminating people, the Soviet Comrades are normal ordinary everyday people who have overthrown their imperial overlords and are now spreading the light of the revolution everywhere."
What did the Soviet Union have as allies? The previously colonized South and Southeast Asia, the previously colonized Middle East, the previously colonized Africa. What did the US have as allies? Western Europe, and whatever puppets they could install in South America and Southeast Asia. A bunch of satellite kingdoms in the Arabian Peninsula, and Israel (but only after it lost its underdog status in 1967, when it was an underdog in the 1950s and early 1960s it was very much still a Soviet darling) in the Middle East.
Not that I believe any of this, but you have to admit that they had a pretty good case relative to the ideological and media atmosphere of the 1950s/1960s/1970s. Of course they are unoptimized for an internet connected ACX commenter in the mid to late 2020s, a Polar Bear would make a terrible Sahara animal too.
It's disturbing how much of the US's progress between 1940 and 1990 can be attributed to keeping up with the (image of) the USSR.
Hey, it got us to the Moon! :-)
More soberly:
I suspect that, in the _absence_ of the USSR, the right wing in the US would have been livid about most of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model .
Or it could be the opposite of that, depending on how you see the causality. Did Americans decide that Soviet Union was evil *because* it was communist... or did they decide that communism was evil *because* it was the ideology of their enemy?
In a parallel reality where Soviet Union somehow magically decided to stop expanding after WW2, maybe all communist and socialist countries would be considered "weird, but our allies", kinda like Saudi Arabia in our reality.
Many Thanks!
>or did they decide that communism was evil because it was the ideology of their enemy?
Could be. I don't know how much control my rulers (writing from the usa) actually have on the press, and how much of the demonization of my rulers' current enemies is direct, top-down propaganda. There is obviously _some_ of that (and it has happened in past conflicts as well, to the point of renaming foods - remember "freedom fries" when our rulers got into a squabble with France).
>In a parallel reality where Soviet Union somehow magically decided to stop expanding after WW2, maybe all communist and socialist countries would be considered "weird, but our allies", kinda like Saudi Arabia in our reality.
Possibly, but, historically, our right wing got bent out of shape over e.g. Medicare. I'm guessing that having an example of a Communist state with gulags and show trials was helpful in pointing out to the electorate that, no, Sweden and Denmark etc. are _not_ totalitarian state, look a little further east to see what a totalitarian state looks like.
_Without_ that example, I think our right wing would have attacked moderate policies more fiercely than it did. Of course, I can't run the experiment and find out...
Saudi Arabia is a strange case. If Iran wasn't there (or were still under the Shah) and the oil wasn't there I suspect that dismembering a journalist and being the home of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers might have weighed more heavily in my rulers' alliance with them. Politics and economics make strange bedfellows... I wish I had a crystal ball to see what happens to that alliance a century from now, presumably post-oil, and when Iran's government will probably be something completely different (and possibly the Saudi government too, on that time scale)...
Mostly agreed. Nit: 4 more allies, Australia, New Zealand, Japan (post-WWII, of course), South Korea
Well, Australia and New Zealand are the "Previously colonized" categories except they were never decolonized, and Japan and South Korea are the "Puppet states" category except they are two hell of puppet states.
If you're in the Soviet Camp, there are always perfectly legitimate facts you can point to in order to say that the alliance of the USA is the USA plus a bunch of broken remnants from WW2 and some of their former colonies. You would be perfectly right.
Many Thanks! Certainly Japan, while under occupation post-WWII, was a puppet during that period. Later on, particularly in the 1970s and then in the 1980s, much less so - especially in the role of economic competitor.
>Well, Australia and New Zealand are the "Previously colonized" categories except they were never decolonized
That's fair. As an American, while none of my ancestors were here during the colonial period, since the USA started as 13 colonies, I view colonies in a positive light, as the starting point for a nation that _did_ send men to the Moon. Of course, I can see why e.g. people who were under King Leopold II's thumb at one point, would feel differently.
"It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are. Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade, the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine."
Ah yes, imagine the horror of Sri Lankans besieging the American embassy because the Chicago Fire department no longer practices affirmative action. And I heard China built a stadium in Kenya which is a threat to America somehow.
It's easy to make some policy practiced on a global scale like this to look ridiculous by just referring to small-scale examples.
Certainly there are American public officials who have been tasked to pay attention to things like the image of America in Sri Lanka or the Chinese influence to Kenya. One might imagine that the potential global implications of the wave of African-American radicalism inspired by segregation might be evident when talking about a country with a history of fighting with a radical Marxist-Leninist group called "Tamil Tigers", a name inspired by (I believe) Black Panthers.
Repealing civil rights law wouldn't mean declaring that black people are morons, wouldn't mean there would be no more successful, rich and famous black Americans, and wouldn't mean the status and treatment of black people would return to the Jim Crow status quo (both because people have become much less racist in the meantime, and because part of Jim Crow was enforced by state law, which would remain unconstitutional).
While most developed countries and many others have anti-discrimination law, in most they are nowhere near as expansive in practical effects as the American ones, and they are not generally getting any significant criticism for that. If anything, one international aspect of the whole thing is that America is culturally exporting its craze. I guess it would get occasional criticism if it didn't have anti-discrimination law at all (sort of like what it gets for not having hate speech law), but having a narrow anti-discrimination law that doesn't de facto mandate affirmative action, like most countries do, wouldn't even have as much effect.
Also, the more anti-racist America is becoming, the more people are convinced that it's full of systemic racism, because ever slighter incidents of (alleged) racism are getting ever more attention, and because one of the tenets of anti-racism is that racism is a pervasive problem. Foreigners also hear about those accusations, and don't know how little they have to do with reality. There were African countries calling the US hypocritical for calling out their human rights violations, while the Floyd protests supposedly "showed" that America had serious human rights issues in its treatment of black people. If anything, if civil rights laws were repealed, and culture shifted to the right to the point where people, for instance, don't assume racism whenever a cop kills a black person, America would be perceived as less racist.
And yes, government-incentivized racial discrimination is a human rights violation. Better foreign relations cannot justify it if it's against whites, any more than it would justify discrimination against blacks in a world where that were the norm.
>Repealing civil rights law wouldn't mean declaring that black people are morons, wouldn't mean there would be no more successful, rich and famous black Americans, and wouldn't mean the status and treatment of black people would return to the Jim Crow status quo (both because people have become much less racist in the meantime, and because part of Jim Crow was enforced by state law, which would remain unconstitutional).
A number of the promoters of this repeal implicitly or explicitly believe that black people would, whether for cultural or genetic reasons, be destined to lose status after this repeal (and white people to gain it), and explicitly advance this repeal precisely to give the whites a better position in the great game of society. Whether this reflects the motivation of a majority or not, those voices would certainly be amplified by anti-American movements looking to gain power in their own countries.
>While most developed countries and many others have anti-discrimination law, in most they are nowhere near as expansive in practical effects as the American ones, and they are not generally getting any significant criticism for that. If anything, one international aspect of the whole thing is that America is culturally exporting its craze.
America is the global hegemon and as such obviously shoulders the burden of mantaining the West in toto in a different way from many other countries. Generally speaking, more power other countries (like UK) have in the Western system, the more pressure they feel to maintain a good global image, as well.
>While most developed countries and many others have anti-discrimination law, in most they are nowhere near as expansive in practical effects as the American ones, and they are not generally getting any significant criticism for that. If anything, one international aspect of the whole thing is that America is culturally exporting its craze.
But is there concrete evidence that America would be actually considered, globally speaking, *more* racist (systematically or otherwise) than in the 1960s?
>And yes, government-incentivized racial discrimination is a human rights violation.
The point of this post, I believe, was a discussion of *why* these policies exist, why are they advanced by the Powers that Be, and this "why" is not particularly dependent on what the moral status of such measures is.
Black people would be somewhat even more underrepresented in universities and prestigious jobs. But that's much harder to point fingers at than the legal discrimination and segregation of Jim Crow, and not that much easier than the present day, somewhat lesser underrepresentation.
One interesting thing is that this is an anti-woke book whose main thesis will be heartily agreed to by the woke. "Of course wokism has its origins in the Civil Rights movement, duh", they will say.
"I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here."
Hanania believes it should be legal (and perhaps normal) for superiors to extort sex from their subordinates; I believe he's been rather open about this (but even if not, I think it's clearly implied).
I don't recall him discussing the superior/subordinate aspect.
See here, where he is a 5/5 on "There should be no law against a boss pressuring an employee for sex": https://www.richardhanania.com/p/survey-results-ii-likes-and-dislikes
Obviously, all this can be justified from certain libertarian POVs, but my personal read of Hanania is that he finds the ability to extort sex from underlings actively desirable, something that a successful man like the one he dreams of being should be entitled to, and not just a regrettable concession to the existence of free association.
You have a better memory than me. In that section he talks about "an employer mistreating you", which is does not sound actively desirable, then adds that he doesn't "believe allowing freedom of association would lead to women prostituting themselves as the norm" and justifies opposition to rules against it because "It's difficult to imagine a ban on quid pro quo sexual harassment that did not run into gray areas". You could be right about what he's actually thinking, but he's making a more libertarian than Nietzchean argument there.
Hanania does call himself a Nietzschean: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1742012271172423937
That said, yes, I am substantially reading between the lines of how he has commented on many issues over the years. I don't for one moment think that he actually sees women prostituting themselves in such a manner as a bad thing, at least as long as he can imagine himself the beneficiary.
I loved this review. My contributions would be that:
>Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result.
This DEFINITELY happens with the parts of the federal bureaucracy that I am involved with. I have daily contact with federal bureaucrats, and the recent hires/promotions are wildly more "diverse" (out of all proportion with the population honestly), and of very poor quality. So you have a lot of 55-65 year old white male civil servants of very high ability and intelligence, being replaced by pretty low capacity 30-40 year old minority women of startlingly poor intelligence and ability. On paper they have similar credentials, but they are not similar caliber people. In general obviously, there are exceptions in both cases. The preference HR policies clearly have *something* to do with it.
In the off chance some skilled white or Asian man finds his way into the civil service, you often find them leaving to go make more money as a consultant because their career is going nowhere and they are getting passed over for promotion by their idiot admin with the right diversity characteristics (I am only half exaggerating). So now you have this ineffectual federal staff who does little work, and is surrounded by a cloud of not very diverse consultants who are needed to get things done (due to procurement rules/preferences typically the owners of the consulting firms are also fairly diverse, but the consultants/SMEs themselves less so...after all somebody needs to know what they are doing).
And on the "disparate enforcement" front I would have the following nonsense to report.
One rule that is very common with federal awards is a rule requiring that all hiring on construction projects must *attempt* to first hire low income and disadvantaged people. I won't get too into the exact details, but we will leave it at that.
You need to have a plan and a policy and records for how you attempted to achieve this goal and reach out to these groups in your hiring, even if you were unsuccessful.
You might ask what about if I am hiring a lawyer or an engineer or an architect? Do I really want to hire a "low-income" engineer? YES! It includes all hiring. But wait I don't want to mess up my RFQ for a contract lawyer with a bunch of nonsense attempting to target "low-income lawyers"? Too bad!
And as far as "low-income construction workers" aren't we also supposed to pay prevailing wage rates (basically union rates), if we are paying that much anyway, we aren't ever going to find the low-income workers the most qualified. Well you have to at least try! OK how hard do we have to try? Who knows?!?!?"
What is the response to this nonsense that is basically not implementable?
Well there is little to no enforcement from the bureaucrats and almost no one takes the rules seriously, until the bureaucrats are mad at someone and want to nail them and then suddenly they act like of course everyone is expected to follow this rule that 98% of people aren't following.
A friend of mine in construction attended a "women owned business" social meetup. Not a single woman attended. All the businesses were 51% owned by the wife.
My wife owns 51% of my business. It is frankly stupid not to, you lose so much work over it without that step.
Interesting, what industry?
Consulting where governments (federal/state/local) are the main customers. (Well and the main main customers are other consulting firms, I subcontract as an SME a ton).
I've had the same experience in federal workplaces with newer hires showing shockingly low levels of intelligence and skill. Unlike what some other commenters said about people either "producing, or they're out", typically these people are rarely let go unless they do something egregious and will instead coast by for the entirety of their careers doing next to nothing. A handful of highly productive employees and contractors carry the lion's share of the workload. In my work area, I estimate that 10% of the people do at least 80% of the total work and 100% of anything even remotely complex.
As someone who worked in HR for the Canadian gov't for 10 years, this book touched me deeply
Although thinking about it more, we do have explicit quotas (called targets) and that didn't save us from anything. Although so much of our culture is taken from America, maybe there was no escaping it
[joke] Can you show us on this doll where it touched you?
The heart
Would it be a good strategy to avoid DEI by working for small companies which aren't subject to those laws?
It for sure is a good way to skip past 90% of this stuff professionally.
It seems to me that the fact that HR departments are one of the two primary bastions of wokeness in American society lends some degree of credibility to the title argument.
I haven't read the book and am no scholar of Title IX, but I'm a researcher at a university and accordingly was required to take a (surprisingly informative) course on Title IX. While the legal concepts underlying the evolution of Title IX law are impressive, they demonstrate a certain mad genius that has led to Title IX extending to domains very very far removed from women's sports.
This book is fine on CR law sucking, but we all know Moldbug already explained the origins of woke more than a decade ago in a very readable and thoughtful 3.5 million word series of blog posts, lol.
Made my day
I have read the same news stories as Hanania, but it is all so contrary to my professional experience that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. I've been working in business for 35 years have never, even once, seen an unqualified minority or female worker get hired or promoted. In my field (engineering consulting) you either produce, or you're out. My current company talks a really woke game and we have to take sensitivity training but the real story is that you had better work hard on profitable projects, or else. Plus, most of my clients are government agencies, and so far as I can tell it's the same with them. They have high standards, and people who don't meet them don't last long and certainly don't get promoted; I've never worked with a minority or female project manager or contracting officer who wasn't professional and hard-working. So far as I can tell, the wokeness in the air is just blaph and nobody pays it any real mind. Likewise, all of my employers have had bans on dating fellow employees, but I've witnessed three marriages among people who were both working for me.
On another note, my brother once went to golf camp and everybody else there said they had to learn to play golf because it was the only way to get ahead in their companies. In this as in all other ways, I can't see how corporate life has changed much at all (except, thank the Lord we don't have to wear jackets and ties any more).
And where was this? My guess is that Hanania is right about this stuff being common, but wrong about it being effectively enforced at a national level.
(Also you accidentally posted this twice.)
I have read the same news stories as Hanania, but it is all so contrary to my professional experience that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. I've been working in business for 35 years have never, even once, seen an unqualified minority or female worker get hired or promoted. In my field (engineering consulting) you either produce, or you're out. My current company talks a really woke game and we have to take sensitivity training but the real story is that you had better work hard on profitable projects, or else. Plus, most of my clients are government agencies, and so far as I can tell it's the same with them. They have high standards, and people who don't meet them don't last long and certainly don't get promoted; I've never worked with a minority or female project manager or contracting officer who wasn't professional and hard-working. So far as I can tell, the wokeness in the air is just blaph and nobody pays it any real mind. Likewise, all of my employers have had bans on dating fellow employees, but I've witnessed three marriages among people who were both working for me.
On another note, my brother once went to golf camp and everybody else there said they had to learn to play golf because it was the only way to get ahead in their companies. In this as in all other ways, I can't see how corporate life has changed much at all (except, thank the Lord we don't have to wear jackets and ties any more).
An interesting read on anti-Civil Rights (or at least, anti-Title VII), is Richard Epstein's:
Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws
I read it about 30 years ago, so I'm not 100% sure how well it holds up, but I recall it being a useful look at the topic, with a ton of citations to case law and other papers, if that is of interest to people.
My honest opinion is we'd be much better off with straightforward quotas, alongside predictably scaling taxes based on how far you deviate from the desired proportions. This could be adjusted on some regular cadence with new targets released enough in advance that companies could try and act on them.
What I think would be really good about this would be that it would set the full might of capitalism to the task of recruiting from disadvantaged groups. You wouldn't have to hide what you're doing, you could just advertise, "HEY! We need to hire 20 women. Put your hat in the ring." And then the company could just honestly assess applicants and take the best they can get from each category. If there are pipeline issues, companies in the industry would have strong incentives to spend money on improving the pipeline. Or if companies can just test applicants the normal way, they could use testing to find candidates who are more qualified than they seem based on legible credentials. And this could all be done without sacrificing the needs of communities that have legitimately been treated poorly through US history.
That might give some improvement, but it still wouldn't do away with the core problem of diversity hiring. If a company said "we need to hire 20 women, put your hat in the ring," then from that point on, any woman who worked there would be under a shroud of illegitimacy; people would have a good reason to suspect, *whether or not it was actually true,* that she was unqualified and only got hired because she was a woman.
My hope is that it would feel different if the hiring is still clearly competitive. Like she wouldn't be hired because she's a woman, she'd be hired because she's the best woman who applied.
But yeah at the end of the day, it would have some of this effect. That just seems far less corrosive to me than having to secretly pretend that's not what's going on.
It would still be discriminatory, but at least it would eliminate the doublethink, Orwellian part.
I don't think the pre-Civil Rights Law corporate workplace was a bastion of chumminess and meritocracy either. And it's hilarious to look at the mid-20th century corporate culture in the US and think, "There was a bastion of innovativeness!" Those were the folks who almost ran the US auto companies into the ground, until they got saved by "voluntary quotas" imposed on foreign competitors.
I understand that the remark I'm about to make does not constitute an argument against Hanania on wokeness. It's cheap ad hominem. But yikes! The guy deserves it.
In a tweet he made last year (https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1711179945052098742) he made the claim: "Pretty sure if you gave me a year I could write Shakespeare quality work. Like if someone hadn't read all of Shakespeare and you randomly gave them me or him, on average they couldn't tell the difference." I suppose we should all feel privileged to know someone who is only a year from greatness.
That, just by itself, causes me to add an extra layer of doubt onto everything that he suggests, unless he explicitly says that it's someone else's idea.
Reminds me of the Onion classic; "I Could Write A Better Rubayit Than That Khayyam Dipshit"
This is even cheaper than you admit because his point is that Shakespeare is not actually objectively that great, https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shakespeare-is-fake.
I
I think any top 10% percentile motivated writer could do this with a few caveats. Like, they could almost certainly produce sonnets that would fool people. Plays would be harder (because you need a lot of period appropriate knowledge about the material reality of Shakespeare's world and not just the language to be able to write convincing narratives).
I'm pretty good at poetry. I bet if I spent an entire year practicing, reading, and studying Shakespearean and other period poetry, at the end of it I could produce some sonnets that non experts (and especially randos) would have basically 50/50 odds at guessing are Shakespeare or not.
It's important to remember that, forasmuch as we consider Shakespeare elite today, his contemporaries certainly did not! He mostly produced lowbrow plays to entertain the masses, largely by putting new twists on old, familiar stories. (Taking the old Danish legend of Amleth, about murder and revenge, and mixing a ghost story into it; adding quirky side-characters into The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet; rewriting the perfectly legitimate king Mac Bethad as a usurper and tyrant under the influence of dark powers, and so on.) He's remembered today, not because his works were particularly original or high-quality, but because they were *entertaining.* He wrote to entertain the masses, and he succeeded!
Hot take: "the modern-day Shakespeare," then, would be the guy who took the Hero's Journey — the oldest, most well-worn narrative in the history of storytelling — and mixed in elements from sword-and-sorcery pulp fiction, samurai films, and WWII dramas, set the whole thing in space, and managed to bedazzle the whole world into thinking he had come up with something wildly original.
I'd say the entire dichotomy of highbrow/lowbrow is kind of nonsense, but that's getting way off into a tangent. My basic point was more that the Romantic idea of an artistic "genius" is crap. Like any other craft, there is a just a sliding spectrum of talent and the thing that makes somebody a top 1% percentile writer overlaps with things that make people talented generally (intelligence, perseverance, obsessive focus, hard work, etc.). There are many thousands (probably millions) of people alive today capable of writing Shakespeare level poetry no matter what skill level he actually was.
I think you need to know more about Shakespeare. Try starting with the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
...yes? What about it?
Fooling people is setting the bar rather low. Hanania said that he "could write Shakespeare quality work." How are we to determine that?
It seems like that gets answered in your own original comment:
"Like if someone hadn't read all of Shakespeare and you randomly gave them me or him, on average they couldn't tell the difference."
This seems about like the same test I was proposing. He's basically throwing flack at the entire idea of a singular artistic genius whose genius comes down to something like "he possesses a mystical affinity for words which is why everybody was enraptured by him, and yet only an elect few, themselves with magical word affinity, can identify it." Artistic genius as much as it exists looks more like Taylor Swift and is some mixture of craft talent, personal charisma, good marketing, luck, timeliness and a bunch of other factors. Hardly anybody could become the full package deal of what Shakespeare was today (just like most people can't be Taylor Swift), but many people could write Shakespeare level poetry. There are many people who could write functionally interchangeable Taylor Swift type song lyrics.
*Edit* A silly example that kind of drives the point home. Think about how many high quality Elvis impersonators there are.
I didn't say I was just going to put in a few thous and thees though. I said I'd read and practice for a year and I'm specifically saying I think I could fool educated non-experts. Furthermore, the reason I couldn't fool experts isn't because Shakespeare has some magical skill I lack but because he has idiosyncrasies I lack that an expert is going to be super plugged into. Just like I'm going to be much more likely to notice something off about an evil doppelganger of my sister than her co-worker is who is in turn more likely to notice than an acquaintance from church who is more likely to notice than a rando.
Beyond that, if Shakespeare's quality is something only highly educated people can recognize the whole argument for his greatness falls apart. The argument for his greatness is that he has a singular way with words that people in his day and down through all the ages since have recognized. Not just some cabal of experts. People in general. Nobody tries to get 10th grade public school students to examine and appreciate the singularity of the equation for relativity. They just get told Einstein was brilliant. But they *do* have to read Romeo and Juliet, supposedly because there is something timeless and singular and beautiful about it that they can understand without specialized training.
And beyond even this, it's downright baffling to me how worked up people get when you won't accept that Shakespeare was some like von Neumann of writing or just won't accept that there even is such a thing as a von Neumann of writing. (If there was it would probably be something more like being a brilliant writer in multiple languages. Or else being a brilliant artist in wildly different media - like being a great painter, writer, & singer). I don't dispute he was some top 10% percentile writer. Probably even a top 98% or 99% percentile writer. He clearly also possessed other qualities that made him good at *celebrity* a la Taylor Swift like I already said, which makes him more singular. But that doesn't mean any number of bang up writers today aren't his equal in craft. And many of like fairly "meh" quality (Rowling, Stephen King, et al) absolutely match or exceed him in celebrity.
He's evading the issue and so are you. You don't have to believe in the magical mystical affinity crap to believe that Shakespeare likely was a good as it gets, and considerably better than most. One doesn't have to go overboard into bardolotry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardolatry) to maintain that Shakespeare was of the highest quality.
Your assertion that "many people could write Shakespeare level poetry" is empty assertion. I'm quite willing to believe that there have been and are other poets of that caliber. But that "any top 10% percentile motivated writer" could do it. I want proof.
I think judging quality in these matters is very difficult. Who's the fastest sprinter? We can measure that. Who's the best boxer? That's trickier. If we're talking about living boxers in fighting shape, they can fight. But was Muhammad Ali better than Sugar Ray Robinson better than Mike Tyson, that's much trickier. Two different weight classes, three different eras.
Judging writers is much more difficult. Hanania's claim isn't so much wrong as it is meaningless. The same with your claim about the top 10%.
If there's no such thing as a "top 10% percentile" writer in craft skill because it's impossible to measure writing quality, then it's also completely impossible to say Shakespeare is the highest quality. All you can say is that he was a really popular writer in his day who got enshrined on a pedestal and maintained relevance because of said pedestal long after his death. Rather like Homer or Mark Twain.
But I will add that the mere existence of Shakespeare apocrypha and/or fraud accusations shows that there is nothing so immediately singular and identifiable about his flavor or quality that even experts who study him their whole life 100% agree.
I never said he wasn't a fantastic writer. I haven't actually read enough Shakespeare to make any kind of personal assessment about him. I liked Julius Caesar in high school. That's about what I've got. Even going with a very exclusive definition of "fantastic" I said fantastic writers are like 1 in a million rare and not 1 out of every human who ever lived rare or even 1 out of every age rare. And I think the "fantastic writer" threshold is actually way lower than that. I base this on having read many other writers who are billed as mystically fantastic and among the best who ever lived (Mark Twain, William Blake, Charles Dickens, etc.) These people are extremely good writers. I can name some decidedly less known people (say, Ursula K Le guin off the top of my head) who I'd absolutely place in their caliber. At any given moment, there are *many* people in this league alive.
I obviously can't prove it. If there was an eccentric bajillionaire who would fund my finances for a year at wage parity, I'd be willing to try it.
It's also a bit strange how few comments (or the article itself) are mentioning Hanania's pretty famous reveal as a former hardcore white supremecist online troll. That doesn't feel like an ad hominem for someone now advocating for the dismantling of American civil rights law.
Yeah, this is bizarre. Dude is very obviously intellectually dishonest, and people are just choosing not to notice. There isn't even any solid reason to believe that he's stopped being a hardcore white supremacist online troll under another name; it's not like his public beliefs have changed meaningfully.
You shouldn't trust anything Hanania says, because his real agenda is spectacularly vile and stupid. Many of the things he says are just camouflage for, or deceitful attempts to implement, that agenda.
> Many of the things he says are just camouflage for, or deceitful attempts to implement, that agenda.
...And it is looking increasingly likely that those attempts will be successful. You don't win a culture war through rational debate. You win by taking power by any means necessary and eliminating the opposition.
All the more reason not to trust a word spoken from his mouth or written from his fingers.
Because, dipshits that we are, we actually believe the bullshit we spout about everyone being given an opportunity, and arguments taken on their merits.
I share your frustration, but there's no alternative to it. In order to protect all those things that Hanania wants to dismantle, we have to give him the same level of courtesy as anyone. Even though there's plenty of evidence that he doesn't deserve it.
The circa-2010 woke turn feels like it was a convergence of factors, including but not limited to millenials starting coming into positions of influence and the rise of Tumblr. But I think Hanania would say that the conditions for millenials to get a political-correctness focused education and for Tumblr to have become the hotbed of social justice thought that it eventually became are mostly downstream of civil rights law.
I think a big hinge point for this argument is the role of academia. Did academia start the wokeness (probably due to cultural residue of the 1960s) or was it just a bit player, becoming woker because that was what the job market (and therefore students) demanded? I think both mechanisms exist and reinforce each other.
I am a big proponent of academia being the "reservoir" for this stuff, and particularly the "studies" departments. You had a few departments at most schools non-stop churning out "woke" people for decades. Women's studies, AA studies, native studies, sometimes sociology or criminology.
Even in the late 90s these departments were just overflowing with this nonsense and the other departments thought it was just as silly then as it is now. But I think there was this assumption it would sort of stay in its ghettos, or maybe slowly wither and die because its ideas were bad. Instead it used its rhetorical power to slowly conquer the school admins and other departments.
Then I think that social media sort of worked as an accelerant to spread the ideology/religion (it really is a surrogate religion) like wildfire especially among the young (who are always primed to find things wrong with the world and injustice).
I think one of the biggest disservices we do young people is not teaching them to do basic research on "new" ideas. When you think you've discovered something new and mindblowing, do some quick checks to see if it's been thought of before and what its history is.
Weirdly, this is a _good_ use case for large language models. Even though they hallucinate and get facts wrong, if one just wants to find synonyms (or, more to the point, equivalent _phrases_, which a thesaurus can't give you), an LLM can help. Of course, then one needs to use a real search engine to find real references.
It wasn't retorical power, it was "agree with everything we say or you get fired" power.
Meh I think that is tied to the rhetorical power of redefining words like "violence" and "harm" and "racism".
When you figure out the trick of radically expanding the definitions of "harassment" or "racism" and having academic articles you can point to to back you up, you then get to call people at work racists with a straight face and workplaces have to take it seriously.
You don't want to be pro-harassment do you?
Another favorite is redefining stress as "trauma." I've even heard trained, professional psychologists commit that egregious abuse of our language, and it's honestly a little bit scary, because it means they're being formally taught that in school, which is the precise opposite of the antifragility model they should be learning!
Here is an analysis of Orwellian woke language policing at the University of Waterloo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2g2oE0Q6fc
"The Origins Of . . . Inequality" section has a glaring (and repugnant) omission.
Black people are poor, and poverty more or less predicts rates of everything else.
They aren't poor because they are stupid. They aren't poor because of their culture. They aren't poor because of racists. They are poor because their parents were poor, and poverty takes generations to escape.
If you care about black people (if you care about humans generally) then you should care about poverty.
Editted to add:
I am not talking about it being hard to escape temporary set backs. If you took a well raised rich person, someone educated and provided with excellent examples of how to sensibly navigate life, and wiped their savings then many of them might quickly recover.
The point is that if you grow up in a generationally poor household you likely aren't provided such role models, and you are likely exposed to significantly higher stress during key developmental milestones. You aren't in an environment that nurturs or encourages the right behaviour. This dynamic becomes a generational issue, as you then likely pass on similar problems onto your children.
Isn't that just option #2 from Scott's quadrilemma?
> They are poor because their parents were poor, and poverty takes generations to escape.
No it doesn't. It takes any given individual a few years of good decision-making.
What is this claim you're arguing against, that the success sequence can take someone from poverty to "just above the poverty line"? You're refuting a claim that, as far as I can tell, was never made, and it appears to be predicated on the notion that there are three basically adjacent categories: poverty, "just above the poverty line," and "generational wealth," which is far out of reach even though there's apparently nothing in between it and "just above the poverty line."
To put it simply, nothing you just said makes any sense. Mind clarifying a bit?
"the racial inequality gaps are still largely due to the compounding effects of past wealth"
Do you have any evidence for that?
>I’m still never going to catch up to someone who inherited millions of dollars or a family home or business and is just collecting the compound returns on that.
Sure, and neither will I, but that is a tiny fraction of the white population.
>will always be way poorer than white people with generational wealth
Huh? Do you think that this is a substantial fraction of the white population? The net worth of a typical white family is $170,000, not millions. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/
Its funny I was born poor in housing projects and made it out pretty easily, as did almost all my friends who actually attempted to do a half decent job at school.
The ones who fucked around with drugs/drinking or were shitheads did not. There were a few exceptions, but I bet you could have 80% predicted who would "make it out" at age 12, and probably 90% at age 16.
1) Take school seriously.
2) Don't get anyone pregnant until you have a stable income and a marriage.
3) Magically find you are not poor.
That's not quite The Success Sequence word-for-word, but close enough. Funny how easy it keeps being for people to rediscover independently.
You can always find an exceptional individual, but that doesn't necessarily make a difference on the statistical level.
Consider an alternative hypothesis, where people are on some kind of bell curve. The ones in the middle (the majority) end up about as rich or as poor as their parents were. The outliers on one side end up much richer, and the outliers on the other side end up much poorer (and if it is impossible to end up much poorer, they simply end up dead before they can reproduce).
If this reflects the reality (maybe it does, maybe it does not), you could always find a smart kid from a poor family who says "I just followed the common sense, duh" after ending up middle-class. But the thing is, most people from poor families do not end up there. On the other hand, a similarly smart kid from a rich family would end up with a fortune instead of mere middle class. The time and effort one spends reinventing the middle class lifestyle on their own, someone else can spend to invent something even better.
It would be easy to verify this by looking at all of the poor people who immigrated to America and seeing if they are still universally poor generations later.
IIRC Asian Americans interned during WW2 returned to pre WW2 wealth within a decade.
Wealthy people having temporary set backs is completely irrelevant to the point of generational poverty.
I think there has to be something more going on than just "it's hard to come up out of poverty." It seems like other racial groups have arrived generally very poor and then quickly risen. Though I do think it makes a huge difference that most families arriving from other racial groups are self-selecting.
This runs into the problem of non-poor black performance. In fact, non-poor blacks are the primary beneficiaries of Affirmative Action on campus, and then as a result in corporate hiring. Harvard et al are making aesthetic choices about how they want the graduation photo to look like, not actually trying to achieve any sort of real diversity.
OK, the quadrilemma Scott poses here -- I have a memory of some other writer posting basically a very similar quadrilemma recently, just framed a bit differently. It was... I forget, Matt Yglesias? Noah Smith? Josh Barro? Someone from like that cluster of political writers, pretty sure. Was it on Substack or on Twitter? Gah, I wish I'd saved the link. Just I think it would be amusing to compare the two and how they delineate and frame the options.
Or I guess that should be "tetralemma". Not the point! :P
I think everyone quoting Havel and similar second-world dissidents (slash elite aspirants and subsequent regime change winners) would do well to remember they were operating on a very grass-greener-on-the-other-side mentality (and then, as the new elites, on a "works for me" mentality).
What Havel describes is not "communism", it's just how hierarchical relations work, always did. For us common folk, basically nothing changed. (Except that modern capitalism destroyed industry, and with it organized labor, and severed social ties, so it's much harder to organize and resist, both actively and passively. The more alienated from fellow humans you are, the bigger pressure for you to conform and never stand out.)
Hanania, in particular, would do well to remember that the same is true for the times past that he glorifies (or seems to, per Scott's description, I've not read much of Hanania himself, admittedly). Sure, mores changed. (And I'd assume he liked the old ones more.) Sure, the intra-elite competition got worse, and the entire elite class more parasitical.
Still, you don't need idealistic explanations where materialist ones perfectly suffice. For real origin of wokeness, consult Turchin and his theses on elite overproduction. Everything past that - all their slogans, rallying flags - is just window dressing, a distraction from what's fairly regular and universal middle class norms of conformity.
The thing I enjoy about Hanania is his uncomprimising self-awareness.
Other conservatives try to claim that Civil Rights movement was fine and good and it's this modern wokeness thing that is a problem and a perversion of the civil right and MLK himself would be ashamed and so on. Hanania refuses to delude himself like this. He is very explicit: yes, wokeness is the product of civil rights and therefore civil rights protections have to be repelled.
He is ready to actually follow his conculisons of the cliff. Why yes, he does care about pronouns more than genocide. He refuses to hide this from himself and engage in regular double-think. In this way he is such a breath of fresh air among conservatives.
"Why yes, he does care about pronouns more than genocide."
Come on
What?
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-do-i-hate-pronouns-more-than
What (based on your review) Hanania 'should' be angry about is not woke culture but rather the fact that lawyers have captured every part of Americas decision making. The US has the 2nd highest number of Lawyers per capita in the world. I recommend reading The Captured Economy if interested.
I broadly agree with the book's thesis.
Twitter used to ban and censor prominent right wing voices often. It led to a left wing culture on the platform. Then twitter started to ban and censor right wing voices infrequently. The culture moved right. Civil rights law was acting in a similar way for the broad culture. Take out a couple leaders, most others fall in line voluntarily, and the few remaining dissenters are easy to round up. But, none of it works if you don't have a cudgel, as people prefer truth ceteris paribus.
For another example. The CDC and other government bodies shilled the COVID vaccines for people with prior history of the disease. We got a tiny minority of vocal dissenters. Most experts either went along or stayed quiet. This created a consensus so strong, it is still taboo to discuss openly.
"The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen."
"Princeton University’s Asian American Students Association seeks to empower undergraduates with greater awareness of AAPI political, social, and cultural issues on campus through our speaker series, social events, open discussions, and alumni networking." https://aasa.princeton.edu/
"You had to act enthusiastic about the communism,"
The NLRB has had to take repeated measures to insist that employees in American workplaces can't be compelled to occupy a particular emotional state while at work. So I would say this is perhaps not a blow against communism specifically.
Religions also demand emotional rituals, with the consequence that undercover atheists have to emotionally disconnect and contort themselves into pretending that they're enthusiastic about the rituals.
Sure, Moloch would prefer what liked him.
Have communists contries took similar measures to strike that down?
(One of the?) classic case(s?) is the airline industry's treatment of flight attendants:
"Smile. Now hold that expression for six hours."
Spoke to an Spanish major about a paragraph I found interesting, this one:
> Hanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway - the much-remarked upon rise in Hispanic white supremacists seems like a weird yet promising sign here.
I think in a book that's being critical of civil right's laws as an institution should point out that the history of this is a little more nuanced when you remember that we never have had a true neutral point in terms of civil rights. Her response:
"In 1954, Hernández v Texas altered the classification of Mexican-Americans in order to give them protection against discrimination under the 14th amendment. As the population of Mexican-Americans grew, the United States classified them as white. However, when they brought forward their concerns regarding racist and discriminatory practices, the government ignored their claims since they were white and therefore not protected under the 14th amendment like black americans. As a result, MexicanAmericans made the argument that they were a class apart from white Americans. Many Mexican Americans feared that arguing for a change in classification would result in the mistreatment equal to what African Americans were experiencing at the time. The “class apart” argument was formed to demonstrate that while they were classified as white they were still treated as “others” by white society. Stating that Mexican-American activists demanded to be classified as “white” ignores the complex history of racial classification in the United States and the subsequent challenges faced by Mexican-Americans in their fight against racial discrimination."
I think the original paragraph definitely hides the fact that white / non-white was a pretty bad binary to be on one side of socially, but you needed to be on the other side of it for legal protections to apply.
But if you complain about "misogynistic rap music", aren't you de facto discriminating against Black people who like and identify with this music?
If you can link the civil rights movement and laws to the critical woke academic crowd, you have the link. That crowd's ideas were expanded and implemented in the Obama administration through disparate impact, especially in education and law enforcement. With the federal government peddling this it quickly worked it's way through the media, HR departments, and ultimately the family rooms of previously rational Americans.
I don't have the link off the top of my head but I imagine there is something there.
I’d like to correct a big misunderstanding (source: worked at the EEOC for a number of years):
Scott says: “(here “the applicant pool” is an abstraction, often but not always the same as the general population, which is poorly defined and which bureaucracies can interpret however they want. It’s definitely not the same thing as the actual set of qualified applicants to the business!)”
This is simply not true. Companies are required to track and maintain records of candidates. When the EEOC considers a hiring discrimination case, they obtain this data and can use it to see if there is a statistically significant difference in hiring rates between applicants who are in the protected class and applicants outside the protected class. Ideally, the expert the EEOC uses can account for job-related characteristics of applicants (previous experience) and the characteristics of the job applied to.
(This is part of why there should not be hard quotas, job-relevant characteristics are sometimes correlated with protected class-status.)
If the company does not have quality applicant records, the EEOC needs some benchmark to compare the share of protected class members to. Usually, this is the share of the protected class within the geographic vicinity of the firms locations who work in the firm’s specific industry. This is obviously imperfect, but here are a couple of relevant points:
(1) In almost all the cases I was involved with, we heard directly from former employees or often HR personal from the company about specific issues, and there was substantive anecdotal evidence that discrimination of some form was happening. Usually, this anecdotal evidence is pretty serious, and I think it’s reasonable that this shifts your priors. If there are very large differences between the share of workers in the census and at the firm in the protected class, it seems reasonable to say the company should be able to explain this.
(2) The company really should be keeping track of its applicants! If they aren’t, or they don’t give the data they have (illegal) the EEOC has to do something.
(3) The shortfalls I saw were almost always pretty large. We aren’t in a situation where, oh, the Census shows 30% of men are servers, but in your restaurant its only 27%! It was more like: the Census shows 30% of men are servers, you have 3 male servers across all of your 20 locations. The court uses the same cut-off for statistical significance on proportions tests as most research papers (.05 p-value) anyway.
Are there reasonable criticisms of these methods? Of course. But we had to try to reach the truth the best way we could, or at least to do a thorough job of analyzing the data and then let the judge/jury decide from there (Though most cases ended with mediation).
The issues with using disparate impact are mitigated by the fact that the disparate impact measure has to be job-related. It would be inappropriate to have a test for whether a person could lift 50 .lb boxes for a computer engineer role, but you probably should have a pre-employment test for that if the job is a construction worker. Yes there are issues with this measure, and yes it comes down to argument and precedent, but it’s probably better to use this imperfect method than allow firms who want to discriminate an easy get out of jail free card with spurious requirements.
There are always going to be tradeoffs in the way you set rules, (I personally don’t know how I feel about background checks, its seems reasonable for employers to screen on this, but then again, people deserve second chances), but I think this idea of the EEOC as incompetent/SJW crusaders just does not match my experience at all. It’s easy to make caricatures when you only focus on the extreme downsides of any tradeoff.
Thank you for providing this perspective.
+1
“but it’s probably better to use this imperfect method than allow firms who want to discriminate an easy get out of jail free card with spurious requirements”
Disagree pretty hard on this.
Do you have an alternative suggestion of what to do? So let's say we have some plausible anecdotal evidence of discrimination or there is a big discrepancy between the share of some protected class at the firm and the share at other firms in the same industry/location.
Competitive markets take care of heavy discrimination because firms are punished with high labor costs. For discrimination whose costs are smaller than a firm’s current competitive “moat” we simply accept that the costs of fixing it are not worth it.
We do this for all sorts of problems. With enough authoritarian power I could ensure that nobody in the US was obese, for example. But nobody thinks it’s worth it to send troops into everyone’s house weekly for weigh-ins and pantry audits.
We’ve all just come to reflexively assume that even low-level discrimination is worse than nuclear holocaust because anyone born in the last 50 years has been raised with that message.
"The court uses the same cut-off for statistical significance on proportions tests as most research papers (.05 p-value) anyway."
That's actually pretty bad. If you were to look at an employee group across 10 different protected classes, you would have a 40% chance of at least one false positive.
Some thoughts.
First, some of the examples of how everything is disparate impact actually seem objectionable things which should not be happening. For example, complaining about using which college you attended for screening quality because they discriminate against Asians sounds crazy until you realize this is just a less extreme version of complaining about using college screening back when colleges and universities were racially segregated and whites went to the better universities. Admittedly, this is less persuasive if college and university isn’t just good for signaling, and they actually teach valuable job related skills, such that white graduates genuinely make better recruits. You could still argue that having more blacks recruited, even at the cost of quality would be better from a welfare maximizing standpoint because it would break the racial cartel and the vicious cycle of blacks not getting good jobs and hence remaining poor and hence having fewer opportunities, which would be better in the long run, but these are speculative arguments with empirical premises which might reasonably be doubted by a skeptic. Obviously, currant universities discriminating against Asians isn’t quite as bad as racial segregation, and most alternatives to university screening would involve a far greater expenditure of resources and effort, so one might well conclude that university screening is still socially optimal, and this is only one example among many, but the point is that plenty of Richard’s parade of absurdities aren’t all that absurd on closer reflection. I don’t have the time to do this for more of the examples, but I hope this illustrates what I am gesturing at.
I am less persuaded on the harm of civil rights law and affirmative action. Most of the evidence against it in the book, judging from Scot’s review, is anecdotal, and I’m always suspicious of those, because it’s too easy to chary pick an unrepresentative sample, especially for something on this scale, as any policy affecting the hole of the US will have at least thousands of false positives, no matter how good of a policy it is, thanks to sheer scale. It needn’t be deliberate, Richard hangs around other conservatives, and circulating horror stories of problems caused by policies you don’t like is something ideological communities of humans always do, so he is likely to be exposed to a non-representative sample. Admittedly, as a liberal, I might be biased against Richard’s arguments, and in my country disparate impact is usually employed to argue that e.g property qualifications for voting or prohibiting consensual same sex intercourse is unconstitutional, so I could overestimate its benefits in the American context, so take that into account when reading me.
My understanding of Duke power was that it created a rebutable presumption if there are fewer minorities (as a proportion) selected than are in the applicant pool. So if there is some perfectly good reason why you expect fewer minorities would be qualified, such as them having fewer opportunities, you can explain it to the judge or jury. The trouble in Duke power was that the justices weren’t persuaded that there was a reasonable relationship between performance on the test and job performance, and other tests have been upheld since because they bore a reasonable relationship to job performance. My steelman of a conservative would argue that this basically results in you only being able to get away with having fewer minorities if the judge/jury, who are not experts in your market, think what you are doing is a good idea. I would contend that the judges/jury are not likely to be biased in any particular direction, as half the population is conservative, and like half the judges in America are conservative. Also they are not idiots and know they aren’t experts, and will do obvious things like listen to experts and defer to common industrial practice. Richard appears to dislike deferring to common industrial practice in a market, but I fundamentally do not expect a well functioning competitive market to settle on crazy common practices that are costing them lots of prophets. To be clear, I am not denying that there will be some loss of value, rather, I am arguing there will not be a substantial cost in terms of economic value to the policy. Also, as Scot mentioned, if it really is costly for you, you can always lawyer up like Wallstreet. Like how a carbon tax won’t stop any use of carbon if it creates enough prophets. I don’t worry too much about rumors of what the government is doing because there will be at least hundreds of people who know about any important governmental action, and because when millions of dollars depend on finding something out, and the information is not that hard to find out, the true answer tends to be found out in short order. My main disagreement with my steelman of a conservative is that I consider having fewer minorities than in the applicant pool to be a non-insignificant amount of evidence of discrimination, where as he doesn’t, do to thinking racism is largely a solved problem, and believing in race realism more than me.
Regarding affirmative action, this is my thinking regarding it. We think that the government should stop people from discriminating on the basis of race, but not other factors like age or height, because statistical discrimination on the basis of a proxy will often be efficient, because it saves the administrative cost of deciding each case on its individual merits, and we expect firms, universities and government agencies to know their needs better than the legislature. What makes race different? Statistical discrimination on the basis of race has some desirable properties from the point of view of equity, as it will drag up those members of a group who are likely to need more help, since lack of merit is correlated with poverty and facing more racism, both of which reduce one’s opportunities. These underprivileged members will be artificially dragged up by more privileged members of their race who will tend to be more meritorious, if they are judged on the basis of their race rather than individually. Since a rational firm in a competitive market wouldn’t do statistical discrimination if it wasn’t economically efficient, we have seemingly a situation where both equity and efficiency are aligned so why is this bad. The obvious answer to me is that there was a widespread pattern of non-efficient discrimination on the basis of race in the recent past, so there is a reasonable suspicion that the discrimination isn’t actually efficient. Since my rationale for banning racial discrimination is true of discrimination against blacks, but not true of discrimination against whites, I am cool with affirmative action. My steelman of a conservative would agree with most of my analysis but argue that there has not been any widespread inefficient discrimination against blacks for half a century, while arguing that most affirmative action programs are economically inefficient, and indeed, bad from a utilitarian point of view, so there is in fact a widespread pattern of inefficient discrimination against whites. This opens up the pretty thorny question of whether affirmative action is good or bad from a utilitarian point of view. I haven’t been able to find many studies on this. I found one 1999 study that reported major benefits from affirmative action in universities, but a single study on such a contentious subject proves nothing, and these hot button issues tend to have dozens of studies on both sides. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any more studies on the subject, even though this seems like the sort of subject that would have several studies on it. Richard Posnar mentioned in an article in the 90s that there was some evidence that affirmative action in favor of women in academia had produced positive effects on quality, which I am inclined to give some weight, as he was dead against affirmative action at the time, but I also don’t trust this few studies, especially when they took place so long ago. If anyone is familiar with the literature on this topic, do let me know about the state of the research. There is also the complication that guessing from first principles, affirmative action might have different impacts in different fields. For example, affirmative action in an essential industry or service like medicine would likely be bad, because drops of quality in an essential field will cause far greater losses in utility. Meanwhile, affirmative action in a luxury industry like Yacht manufacturing might be net positive because the smaller cost wouldn’t be able to outweigh the benefits. I would also advance another line of argument, namely that affirmative action is analogous to welfare to the poor. Sure, the way its done is inefficient, but fundamentally, if Bob and Marten are equally well placed apart from the fact that Marten faces racism, do to which he has less social capital and may be disadvantaged in various other ways, than I expect that one dollar will give Marten more utility than Bob, because Marten has fewer options he can choose between, so the increase in available options caused by more money is more valuable to him. My steelman of a conservative would counter argue that firstly, there is no prevalent racism in today’s America, so the average person’s race will not affect their social capital. Secondly, he would argue that social and monetary capital are not fungible, and that I am misunderstanding how diminishing marginal utility works. He would argue that if agent A has less of resource X than Agent B, than yes, one more unit of X is more valuable to agent A, but if both agent A and agent B have the same amount of X but agent B has more of resource Y, than an additional unit of X will not give any more utility to agent A than to Agent B.
Here's an example of AAPI in the wild:
https://www.nhl.com/community/asian-pacific-islander-heritage
(The NHL calls is just API because of Canada)
A search of for example "AAPI celebration" will yield plenty of corporate results.
"Even though Arabs and Muslims are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country, especially after 9-11, they didn’t have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white. According to Hanania, the government’s dividing line for white vs. PoC is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about eg Uzbeks. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American and seems salty about this."
Just have to pause here and add - Scott, you didn't have a "Middle East" category on your survey of where your readership lives, either! As someone who lives in the Middle East, I found this very annoying. I had to choose between Europe, Asia, or Africa. I don't even remember which one I selected. Hope you fix it for next year!
It's a big country. They might get some looks where I live, where there is a near-zero Muslim population. But I really doubt they'd be meaningfully discriminated against. That's not one of the two groups of people that many Americans tend to have a problem with.
I don't participate in the survey, but if the categories were "North America, South America, Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa", then indeed the Middle East doesn't belong, any more than "Western Europe", "The Balkans", or "Southeast Asia" belong. The categories are top-level continents, it doesn't make sense to single out special ethno-linguistic-cultural regions.
But if the survey did have areas like The Balkans and Southeast Asia, then it does make sense to single out the Middle East too.
Which question is this about? I just remember a country question, not a continent one.
I'm trying to remember more specifically - I think the question said something along the lines of: "If you identify more with a different area, select that area instead." My husband also remembers having the thought that the Middle East was missing, so I think it is real?
Behold, USDA Form CCC-860:
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Assets/USDA-FSA-Public/usdafiles/emergency-relief-program/pdfs/ccc860_20230111.pdf
This a form to file for emergency relief funds from the USDA. Applicants must certify that they are part of a socially disadvantaged group to qualify (there are other qualifying groups but this one is relevant to civil rights law.)
"A socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher is a farmer or rancher who is a member of a group whose members have been subject to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities. Groups include: American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian Americans, Blacks or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and women (for those selecting a group that includes gender). Note that if applicant only checks "women" without also selecting the other category the selection does not make applicant socially disadvantaged for conservation programs."
Note being a woman doesn't count unless the applicant also specifies that they aren't white. So here we have a program for giving aid money to farmers with a big No Whites Allowed sign. You might come to the conclusion that this is race based discrimination. Don't worry though, the USDA isn't allowed to do that kind of thing and even tells you so on the form:
"In accordance with Federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, the USDA, its Agencies, offices, and employees, and institutions participating or administering USDA programs are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity (including gender expression), sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, family/parental status. income derived from a public assistance program, political beliefs, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity, in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA (not all bases apply to all programs). Remedies and complaint filing deadlines vary by program or incident."
Get it? Just specify that you are part of a certain race/color/national origin and/or sex to qualify for this program, but also the USDA is legally forbidden from discriminating on the basis of those very things in its programs.
OK, first of all, Mexican-Americans at the time of the passage of federal civil rights legislation were far, far from being "white lite a la Italians" in any important sense. Discrimination was real and widespread. Obligatory muh lived experience: my grandparents deliberately didn't teach my mother and uncle Spanish because at the time, having a noticeable Mexican accent would hinder their career prospects even more than just having a Spanish surname. That was a bit less oppressive than what happened to *them* growing up--my grandfather was beaten in school for speaking Spanish--but still pretty oppressive.
(It's 2024 and non-immigrant Latinos are now close to that status if not already there, but these laws were not passed in 2024.)
>For example, after some Chinese people got beaten up a few years ago, there was a campaign to #StopAAPIHate, as if AAPI were a natural category,
I remember seeing street marches, stickers on lightposts, and freeway banners around that time, but it was always "Stop Asian Hate." Maybe the people engaging in the campaign on a grassroots level didn't get the memo that they were supposed to use the clunky bureaucratic initialism? Or maybe Hanania (or Scott? unclear to me who is making this argument) is confusing a hashtag for an organic campaign; I have no doubt that both existed.
>Obligatory muh lived experience: my grandparents deliberately didn't teach my mother and uncle Spanish because at the time, having a noticeable Mexican accent would hinder their career prospects even more than just having a Spanish surname. That was a bit less oppressive than what happened to *them* growing up--my grandfather was beaten in school for speaking Spanish--but still pretty oppressive.
I had had the idea this was a not-uncommon experience for non-Anglo descendants all around the United States in more assimilatory times.
True for my father. He was taught that it was rude to speak a language in public that others might not understand.
Interesting! At the last all-hands company meeting that I attended before I retired, on my aisle in the meeting room, there were conversations in English, Hindi, Korean, (probably) Mandarin and possibly others.
Dad grew up in the 1940-50s. There was peer pressure to assimilate, and he actively refused to speak his parents' language. He regrets not being able to speak it now.
Many Thanks! Sorry that he was pressured to be monolingual. I'm not good at natural languages myself, but I'm happy to have co-workers conversing with each other in their first languages. Roughly speaking, everyone in the company coded in C/C++...
Hello,
I'm a criminal trial lawyer and I thought I'd call out a specific example of something I kind of loathe in coverage of legal cases. There's no real name for it, maybe we need a long German word, it's related to something my evidence professor called "brickpicking" so maybe we can use that.
So, instead of the Diaz trial, let's imagine a murder trial. Defendant is on trial for killing Victim. At this trial, the government uses 6 key pieces of evidence
1: Defendant's cellular phone records, which put him near Victim's house on the night of the murder
2: Defendant lied to police about ever knowing victim
3: a video shows Defendant threatening to kill Victim
4: the fact that Defendant owns the same make and model of gun that killed Victim
5: Victim's mother, who testifies that a shadowy figure roughly the same height as defendant killed victim (she didn't get a good look at him)
6: Defendant signed a confession that he killed victim, which he now denies
So, Defendant's obviously convicted at trial, right? Given these facts, it's unwise to get upset at this conviction by saying that 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 "was used to prove defendant was guilty" and this says something bad about murder trials generally or this case specifically. That's not how evidence in trials works. There's no such thing as a smoking gun and lawyers put on tons of evidence in a given trial, it's how the evidence links together that satisfies a jury, rather than any one fact in isolation. Sometimes a side even puts on a fact (5 is in an example) which doesn't seem to prove very much. Play around with these six facts. Which combinations YOU find convincing beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe even all six combined wouldn't convince you.
This is why trials tend to involve an enormous amount of evidence of varying degrees of strength. Evidence professors often analogize building a case to building a wall. A single brick in isolation doesn't do anything, but if you cement a lot of bricks together, it makes a wall that can stop a car. It's dumb to criticize the strength of the wall by finding a single brick and going "that brick is so small, how could it possibly be that this brick could stop anything" (see, brickpicking).
I think a lot of the coverage of the Diaz case by the Hanania's of the world is like this. He's getting upset that a particular piece of evidence was used at one particular trial, and he's treating it like it's the ONLY evidence that was used at this trial or a piece of evidence the juries found particularly significant. He doesn't know how significant that evidence was, and indeed its unknowable (the Diaz trials were big, we have no idea what the juries found significant)
Wait Juries? Trials? Yeah, that's the other thing, my understanding is the Diaz case involved two separate trials. two different groups of people got together and all agreed that Diaz deserved millions and millions of dollars. I admittedly know very little about this case, I have no idea what evidence was admitted at either trial and for what purpose...but I also think Hanania knows less about this than either jury, both of which was composed of a random cluster of very different humans, both of which saw both trials, and both of which concluded Diaz deserved millions of dollars. I very much doubt they did so based in part (to say nothing of primarily) on the fact that a particular racial slur was used by black employees, and even if they did this would say *absolutely nothing* about what functions as persuasive evidence in other cases like Diaz's.
Your linked article on Tesla does not include most of what you say it does-- no reference to two dozen workers, nor a video.
Frank Dobbin has a lot of interesting research in this area
https://scholar.harvard.edu/dobbin
He is an institutionalist who emphasizes internal company forces and is skeptical of law as a driver for a lot of these efforts.
his book
https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Equal-Opportunity-Frank-Dobbin/dp/069114995X
"Equal opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts--not Congress or the courts--were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination.
Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn't take "affirmative action" to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan's threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues."
A paper
chrome-extension://bdfcnmeidppjeaggnmidamkiddifkdib/viewer.html?file=https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=871071114116010004101065073089003111054025049035042016124005120010114064031005003120101119000061008038050083069064105009022105103082058064063022105005020020093073068087015102125099126000077009008104019091114110023001023029012105071116086002096097100&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE
Hanania is a really bad faith person and Scott gave him way too much benefit of the doubt.
Fundamentally, reading a book like this you shouldn't really have the attitude of, well, I don't agree with this pro-workplace sexual harassment stance, but I do agree that the race-based preferences for admissions in colleges is bad. It's just a very weird attitude to take when the subtext (and occasionally the directly stated claim) is that he thinks the great replacement is real, women are annoying whiny bitches and race realism is obviously true.
I know Scott likes to be in good faith and avoid doing the low decoupling thing of looking for subtext and association, but the subtext with this one is so overwhelming that it feels like you're being intentionally dense if you don't realize the book very clearly providing cover for insinuating all sorts of Great Replacement type stuff.
Again, I can tell why Scott didn't want to do this because unscrupulous wokesters will say "you're giving cover to white supremacists" any time you say anything less than maximally progressive. But we're all adults here and should be able to tell when someone's actually idea laundering vs just stating a contrarian position.
By all means evaluate the thesis as well, I'm not saying don't look at what he's arguing for, it's a decent argument about an important topic, but slap a giant unambiguous wanting label on this, rather than giving the most hyper literal direct reading of he once says he "supports weak forms of race realism".
Is it absolutely beyond the scope of imagination that somebody who supports an idea that's pretty much universally hated when writing a mainstream book might hint at his real views rather than stating them outright?
Relevantly, Hanania is a crypto pro Russian weasel who spreads loads of lies about Ukrainian Nazis and said they'd fold in a week after the invasion after first denying it would happen, and he used to write for a far right [literal neonazi](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-origins-of-woke-book/675348/) website. Again, that doesn't make his argument wrong and it deserves a fair shot but this is relevant to determining whether he might have much more extreme views.
Aside: A ton of people were predicting Ukraine would quickly collapse once Russia invaded. I think most experts (or at least the people who look to me like experts) were surprised.
I neither know nor care whether Hannania is a "crypto pro Russian weasel," FWIW. I spent the early 2000s being "objectively pro-Saddam" and "hating America," so YMMV.
That depends. Did you say that Saddam Hussein clearly had a right to invade Kuwait and anyone who said otherwise was being willfully naive? Or were you worried that the US wasn't good enough to pull off a complicated nation building plan even if Saddam was objectively evil?
There's a difference between (in my view wrongly) but rationally saying that it's not worth protecting Ukraine given the risks, and thinking that the west is morally degenerate and Russia represents a bastion of manly virtue that we should let ourselves be cucked by because it's no less than we deserve.
Hanania (and he'll freely tell you this himself) is deeply contrarian and seems to like picking fights with people. He mentioned in one of his articles that he used to be deeply anxious, and kind of mentally trained himself out of it over the course of years. Probably he overcorrected way too far, and the resulting combination is a man who is drawn to arguments that are totally unacceptable in polite society and a complete disregard for what other people think of him for making those arguments. This makes Hanania an interesting outlet for ideas, even if you vehemently disagree with a lot of his takes, which I think basically everyone will.
His argument on women is more that society doesn't know how to deal with women who use their emotions as a weapon. Men have been at the pinnacle of power for so long that people are used to dealing with weaponized masculinity, e.g. a man punching someone out to win an argument is stigmatized. But a woman can break down in tears and scream about how ideas make her feel unsafe and this is sympathetic. Excessively masculine and feminine outbursts are both totally disruptive to reasonable exchange of ideas, but one is ok and the other is not. Make of that argument what you will, but "annoying whiny bitches" it is not.
As far as the race angle, race realist is probably putting it mildly. Hanania is definitely in camp 4; black people are 85 IQ and efforts to ameliorate this are a waste of time. I don't think this is contentious after reading some of the stuff he wrote over the last few years, and if anything his views now are less extreme than in the past. Tying this into the immigration angle, he is actually quite pro-immigrant. Mainly because it reduces the relative portion of black people, as far as I can tell.
That "great cultural turn of around 2010-2015" matches the time where, according to another recently published book, all kinds of "the kids are not all right" mental health curves started going up. (The book says you can start to see the effect around 2012.) And the thing it blames is everyone getting internet-enabled smart phones and doomscrolling social media all the time, which seems to be a fertile breeding environment for bad memes in the same way a wet market is a good environment for coronaviruses.
Allow me to address the least important point: Di-az. In English it's almost always written as Diaz, but in Spanish it's almost always written with a diacritic over the i: Díaz. So imagine that the immigrant dad, trying to fit in, spells his name the American way, Diaz. Now the son, realizing that you can fit in just fine in America with an unusual name, spells his name Díaz. All good, except that some newspaper somewhere along the line doesn't properly capture the diacritic symbol, and instead of í, that paper writes i-. Boom: Di-az.
That's a good observation. I don't think it needs any ethno-assimilative or ethno-distinctive speculation, though. Simply suggesting that, at some point, a diacritic was mis-transposed to a hyphen, would be enough.
Trying to determine motives for anything these two plaintiffs did would seem to be a wide and fanciful quest, based on what I have heard about them.
PS -- interestingly, in Firefox, searching here for "Diaz" offers the option to "() Match Diacritics". I'm not sure searching for "Tesla" offered the same. EDIT -- yes, diacritics is an option for any search so never mind about that. BR
A way to avoid all/most of the workplace madness is to work in small companies!
Like a CEO in one of my startups used to say "until we're over 49 employees, no one has any rights!".
I follow Hanania on Twitter, and find him intentionally abrasive and weird. His two compulsions seem to be (1) contrarianism, (2) reminding everyone that he is much smarter than everyone else.
Having said that, this review seemed to mostly reinforce the point that civil rights law actually is terrible and forces companies to be racist liars with large, wasteful HR departments. I kept thinking, "I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" as Scott pointed out all the flaws in Hanania's argument while leaving intact the point that the federal government assigns us to arbitrary racial categories and threatens to destroy companies if they hire on merit, or even decline to hire criminals because "racism".
So would you say the thesis of this book is in service of a racist ideology?
I think many of Scott’s issues with the book go away if you disentangle WOKISM from PROGRESSIVISM.
To me Progressivism means “expanding rights for marginalized groups” and wokism means “a culture where everyone tries to make themselves look more progressive than everyone else”
Civil Rights Law created that culture since in order to avoid getting sued for discrimination you have to “look more progressive than the next guy”. Also the internet created the culture too since with the internet it’s a lot easier to be preformative and a lot easier to spread alleged acts of non-progressivism - hence the need to be performatively progressive.
So going through Scott’s Objections:
Question 1. Where did the woke judges come from?
Answer 1: They were not woke judges. They were progressive judges. Progressivism existed before wokism and created the civil rights law to begin with.
Question 2: How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots and The George Floyd ?
Answer 2: It didn’t. But it caused the corporate reaction to the riots.
Question 3: Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice
Answer 3: Once the culture “to be performatively progressive” exists it effects Biden too.
Question 4: How did gay, lesbian, and transgender people win their rights, normalize their identity?
Answer 4: That was progressivism, not wokism
Ha, right after reading this I logged into Goodreads, where there's a banner imploring me to "Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Month"
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” kind of sums it up.
Among companies wokeness seems rather anticorrelated to lawsuit exposure since companies with high profit per employees (and low percentage of groups potentially successfully suing according to anti-cra) are far woker than low profit per employee, high minority/groups potentially successfully suing according to anti-cra companies (because lawsuit-risks is a minor factor in wokeness and doesn't compare at all to the social stuff and internet).
Google 73790 / 180895 = 0.4079 mio profit per employee
Walmart 11290 / 2300000 = 0.00490 mio profit per employee
Home Depot 15140 / 463100 = 0.03269 mio profit per employee
Maximum punitive part of fine according to civil rights act: 0.300 mio
(Plus another massive effect the percentage of groups potentially succesfully suing (= who aren't white/asian males) is vastly lower at Google (and would be even lower if not for diversity hiring).)
So to compensate the punitive damage of a maximum fine Google loses less than the profit one (0.735) other employee "makes" per year, while Home Depot loses the profit of more than 9/one working 9 years and Walmart loses the profit of 61 employees.
(edit: sry dont know how to remove the gap between a lot of the lines (theres no gap in the editor itself))
Also CRA influence should decline over time since the fine is fixed (there has been more than 100% inflation since cra of 1991). And of course many areas are much less under CRA like contracting or ngo-grants (eg Ballmer's Ballmer group funds black-led non-profits which would be illegal as criterion otherwise),
wokeness startet/explodingly increased in 2010s while civil rights law got rather weaker (inflation + more conservative judges ruling against it) and other countries with different laws show similar trend.)
The reason for wokeness is probably the internet, e.g. even group perspective wise groups that spend a lot of time there like journalists (basically living there), academics, tech etc (even if otherwise heterogeneous like highly male and paid in tech) get very woke (idk why maybe one factor is because taboos are high-engagement/good twitter gossip, racism is an high-brow acceptable taboo, and the twitter-created taboo-evolution is enforced (= aside from making people more woke themselves theres also more punishment for non-woke) on non-participants through journalists/wikipedia and google-search)
It's a little ironic to compare wokeism to communism given that contemporary wokeism has many parallels to the Red Scare.
The worst of both worlds? Minus the epidemic of politically-motivated murder and famine?
Does wokeism murder people and cause famine? This isn't the comparison being made here.
I wasn't being cute, I was agreeing with you
I agree that it falls short on tying in the causality between civil rights law and wokeness, but the bit about how civil rights law has changed the workplace is very insightful. He paints a very neat model.
“But as the decades unfolded, green (progressives) increasingly began veering into extreme, maladroit, dysfunctional, even clearly unhealthy forms. Its broad-minded pluralism slipped into a rampant and runaway relativism (collapsing into nihilism), as the notion that all truth is contextualized (or gains meaning from its cultural context) slid into the notion that there is no real universal truth at all, only shifting cultural interpretations (which eventually slid into a widespread narcissism). Central notions (which began as important “true but partial” concepts, but collapsed into extreme and deeply self-contradictory views) included the ideas that all knowledge is, in part, a social construction; all knowledge is context-bound; there are no privileged perspectives; what passes for “truth” is a cultural fashion, and is almost always advanced by one oppressive force or another (racism, sexism, Eurocentrism, patriarchy, capitalism, consumerism, greed, environmental exploitation); each and every human being, often including animals, is utterly, absolutely unique, and absolutely of equal value (egalitarianism). If there were one line that summarizes the message of virtually all of the truly prominent postmodern writers (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, etc.), it is that “there is no truth.” Truth, rather, was a social construction, and what anybody actually called “truth” was simply what some culture somewhere had managed to convince its members was truth; but there was no actually existing, given, real thing called “truth” that is simply sitting around awaiting discovery, any more than there is a single universally correct hem length that it is clothes designers’ job to discover.”
- Ken Wilber, “Trump and a Post-Truth World”
Great article, but I idk why accepting iq differences in the races would make someone on par with Hitler. I hate Hitler but I am not blind to the IQ data.