Aug 15, 2022·edited Aug 16, 2022Liked by Glenn Loury
I agree 100% that top performing students largely stay away from divisive social justice activities. I have years of experience with new students at a top university, and can predict with fair accuracy which students will wield the social justice shield and sword. Top students of all backgrounds - in the top 5% - rarely address DEI topics if given a choice. If they do, it is usually in an uplifting, positive way in the manner of Martin Luther King Jr’s I had a Dream approach coupled with America as melting pot world. Ditto the second tier students- top 15% to 5%.
Below the top 15%, the correlation grows between declining ranking and use of a negatively formulated DEI viewpoint. Women are more likely than men to do so ; black and Latino much more likely to do so than white or Asian. But, interestingly Indian and Pakistani women are much more likely than Indian or Pakistani men to do so, and much more likely than Chinese or Korean women to do so.
When you factor in occupation and education of parents into the equation, those lower performing students with upper middle class parents - doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers- then the correlation is huge between lower ranking and the use of a snarky, divisive DEI viewpoint.
Clearly minorities and women who are in a well resourced environment prior to college feel the competition with high performers quite significantly and are much more likely to react to their lesser chances by using social justice ideas to shield themselves from criticism and to cut down the high performers as being undeserving because they are white or male or heterosexual, etc.
I think there is a very simple explanation and one that John misses slightly with the idea of insecurity. That explanation is incentive. If you're at the tip of a hierarchy - any hierarchy - there is no incentive for you to want to change the way it's structured. No matter how the new hierarchy shakes out, there is no advancement for you. Whatever problems he may or may not see with capitalism, Elon Musk is not going to try and change it. He has nowhere to go but down. The driving factor is, to my mind, opportunism. Changing the system makes a lot of sense if you have room to move up the hierarchy. You probably won't end up worse off, but you may end up better. Like a whole host of human endeavors, the motivation may be masked by rationalizations, but self-interest powers it.
But the traditional way of moving up the hierarchy is by adding to productivity. The problem with DEI methods of doing it is that it redistributes opportunity to less qualified candidates, which ultimately lowers productivity, without calculating what might be lost from using that method. It's the affirmative action mismatch theory that Glenn talks about all of the time. Affirmative action can be good if those who are admitted can handle the work. If they can't, what you have done is deprived someone who could handle it of the opportunity which is bad for productivity.
I agree 100% that top performing students largely stay away from divisive social justice activities. I have years of experience with new students at a top university, and can predict with fair accuracy which students will wield the social justice shield and sword. Top students of all backgrounds - in the top 5% - rarely address DEI topics if given a choice. If they do, it is usually in an uplifting, positive way in the manner of Martin Luther King Jr’s I had a Dream approach coupled with America as melting pot world. Ditto the second tier students- top 15% to 5%.
Below the top 15%, the correlation grows between declining ranking and use of a negatively formulated DEI viewpoint. Women are more likely than men to do so ; black and Latino much more likely to do so than white or Asian. But, interestingly Indian and Pakistani women are much more likely than Indian or Pakistani men to do so, and much more likely than Chinese or Korean women to do so.
When you factor in occupation and education of parents into the equation, those lower performing students with upper middle class parents - doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers- then the correlation is huge between lower ranking and the use of a snarky, divisive DEI viewpoint.
Clearly minorities and women who are in a well resourced environment prior to college feel the competition with high performers quite significantly and are much more likely to react to their lesser chances by using social justice ideas to shield themselves from criticism and to cut down the high performers as being undeserving because they are white or male or heterosexual, etc.
I think there is a very simple explanation and one that John misses slightly with the idea of insecurity. That explanation is incentive. If you're at the tip of a hierarchy - any hierarchy - there is no incentive for you to want to change the way it's structured. No matter how the new hierarchy shakes out, there is no advancement for you. Whatever problems he may or may not see with capitalism, Elon Musk is not going to try and change it. He has nowhere to go but down. The driving factor is, to my mind, opportunism. Changing the system makes a lot of sense if you have room to move up the hierarchy. You probably won't end up worse off, but you may end up better. Like a whole host of human endeavors, the motivation may be masked by rationalizations, but self-interest powers it.
But the traditional way of moving up the hierarchy is by adding to productivity. The problem with DEI methods of doing it is that it redistributes opportunity to less qualified candidates, which ultimately lowers productivity, without calculating what might be lost from using that method. It's the affirmative action mismatch theory that Glenn talks about all of the time. Affirmative action can be good if those who are admitted can handle the work. If they can't, what you have done is deprived someone who could handle it of the opportunity which is bad for productivity.