Google’s being sued by an ex-recruiter and part of the suit is the claim that the company discriminates against white and Asian people during the process. Our own intutition is that, dependent upon how accurate you wish to be in your use of language, the company definitely does do so. On the simple grounds that it’s not possible to discriminate in favour of one group identity without discriminating against others. There is rather a large amount of mealy mouthed obfuscation around concerning this point of course, but that is still reality. Even if it’s true that American society (or capitalism, The Man, whatever) discriminates against certain groups it would still be true that anyone themselves discriminating in order to correct these injustices is still, well, discriminating:
The Alphabet Inc. unit had “irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men,” according to the complaint filed in state court in Redwood City, California.
Arne Wilberg, who worked at Google and its YouTube unit for about nine years both as a contractor and an employee, claims he was terminated in retaliation for complaining to human resources about the company’s hiring practices.
Well, yes, we know, it’s a suit and an allegation in one to boot.
The critics of Google’s effort to promote workforce diversity now include one of its own former recruiters, who claims in a lawsuit he was fired because he didn’t toe the line on rejecting white and Asian male job candidates.
Whether they did that and whether he was fired because of it isn’t our point here at all:
Google spokeswoman Gina Scigliano said the company will vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit.
“We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity,” she said in an emailed statement. “At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
Well, yes, but. If increased diversity means that equally qualified candidates (to be as polite as we could be about it) are discriminated among on the grounds of under-representation of race, gender or anything else, then that’s discrimination. It may well be positive in favour of members of one group but it’s equally negative against those other equally qualified but not so diverse. There’s really not any way out of this logic.
Sure, there’re attempts, as with the allegations of racism. Those oppressed cannot be racists because only those with the power can be so. It’s a common enough statement that and it’s also nonsense through and through. So too is the idea that discriminating in favour of one group isn’t discrimination against those others. After all, what is the historical allegation in the first place? That everyone had positive discrimination in favour of white males if memory serves.
Are modern hiring practices discriminatory? Sure they are, discrimination in favour of under represented groups, in favour of diversity, it’s still discrimination. Whether it’s the right thing to do or not, it still is discrimination.
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Surely Google has both a policy to hire on the basis of merit and to seek out qualified minorities, as though both could be the primary criterion. This whole Affirmative Action business started out as a plea that, "When all other things are the same, we hire the Negro." That is, whenever personnel departments forget what their real job is, or can be persuaded to subordinate their real job to executive posturing and PR. Of course you cannot favor some without disfavoring all the rest.
(Of course, suing your employer for policies that theoretically discriminate against your race but evidently did not keep you out, is as much a lose-lose scenario as Damore nailing his theses to the Google boardroom door.)
At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
The evidence that diversity helps cultures or products is mixed and probably false.
https://ceo.usc.edu/files/2016/09/1996-16-t96_16-Teams.pdf
By all means let them be unapologetic about searching for Black astro-dynamists or whatever. I totally support such searches. Indeed if there is an enormous pool of talented Black computer geeks out there, Google has a positive duty to search them out and hire them.
But we know there aren't. If they want qualified people, they need to hire Whites and Asians. If they want to meet their quotas, they need quotas. But that means hiring unqualified people who will bring a lot of issues with them. Such as the secret knowledge that they have not been hired for any other reason than the colour of their skin which leads to doubts, anger and acting out.
Whites don't succeed because society is structured to give them a leg up. Society is structured the way it is because Whites are so successful and they have created a world in their own image. As have Blacks. See Baltimore.
Back to my Taxi Licensing experience again. What you do is target your advertising, not discriminate in your recruiting.
A business hiring on race, whether white supremacist or ‘progressive’ affirmative action will lose out. Let the market deal with both of those clowns.
A business hiring on race, whether white supremacist or ‘progressive’ affirmative action will lose out.
Why do you think that when the weight of evidence is to the contrary? To ask Steve Sailor's question, how much faster do you think Google and Facebook could have grown if they had hired more Blacks back when they were young?
The evidence seems to be that team work requires open, free and fair communication. Which can only take place among very homogeneous groups. As soon as diversity rears its head (that is, even before Diversity becomes official policy) that team work drops off.
Although it is possible that James Stephenson could have really kicked ar$e if only he had a side kick played by Morgan Freeman.
The aim of socialist evil to cause collapse by spreading dissension. Hire whoever is qualified to do the job and sack them the very instant they show--in works time/context-- as having anything whatsoever to do with the proggie agenda. That is what they did --in reverse--with James Damore. The same standard should apply to leftists.
You have been hired to work in a business not engage in leftist agitation. Businesses run by leftist bullshit have considerable questions over their ability to thrive in the marketplace. A self-solving problem ultimately as those more interested in politics than money will fail in the end.
SMFS. Sorry I don’t understand your point. I don’t think ‘hiring more blacks’ would help. I believe judging people as individuals on their merits is the best way whatever colour the skin is. If that means a team full of white males so be it.
I think I remember reading that Eric Holder at Dept of Justice had civil rights lawyers threaten companies with lawsuits if they didn't hire more women and black people. I wonder what happens when federal lawyers make companies break their state's anti discrimination laws and then they get sued like this example.
smfs's point jogged something in the memory about diversity, IQ and team work in a couple of podcasts on |Economics Detective Radio I'd listened to last year or maybe 2016.
Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group) to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999; Alesina et al., 2003; Habyarimana et al., 2007) have shown that ethnic diversity negatively affects public good provision. Stazyk et al. (2012) find that ethnic diversity reduces job satisfaction among government workers. Parrotta et al. (2014a) find that ethnic diversity is significantly and negatively correlated with firm productivity.
The podcaster is a high IQ economics PhD, and also a Canadian so he tends to be a bit wet on social issues, and says this:
This may seem strange to you. If you’re like me, you probably enjoy diversity. You probably don’t observe the problems of low morale and high marginal costs that researchers have found in ethnically diverse workplaces.
If that’s the case then you, like me, live in a bubble. An apparent exception to the rule that ethnic diversity lowers productivity comes in high-human-capital groups. I say “apparent” because there hasn’t been much in the way of direct study of this particular issue. However, some results are suggestive. For instance, the same researchers who found that ethnic diversity reduces firm productivity in general found that it increases firms’ level of innovation as measured by patents (Parrotta et al., 2014b). Most of the people I know fall into this category of highly skilled, highly educated individuals, so it shouldn’t be surprising that my experience (and maybe yours) is not the norm.
Given that diversity is so costly for organizations, there is a huge industry dedicated to diversity training to mitigate these effects. However, a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review argues that diversity training seems to be a general failure.
http://economicsdetective.com/2016/07/costs-ethnic-diversity-garett-jones/
That high IQ and human capital bit is discussed in another podcast:
Garett Jones is Associate Professor of Economics and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. His book, Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters so Much More than Your Own is the subject of this episode.
The book deals with an empirical puzzle: IQ is a weak predictor for earnings. We all know high-IQ people who live paycheque to paycheque, and lower IQ people who succeed brilliantly. And yet, when we look at the relationship between nations’ average IQ scores and their incomes, the relationship is strong. Nations with the highest average IQ scores are eight times wealthier than nations with the lowest IQ scores. How can we resolve this apparent contradiction?
Garett documents five main channels for the spillover effects of IQ:
.....
2. Smarter groups are more cooperative.
Economists use the iterated prisoner’s dilemma as an idealized scenario where cooperation is at odds with people’s individual, short-term incentives. Jones looked at the many times economists have studied this in experiments and correlated the cooperation rate in these experiments with the SAT scores of the schools the study participants were drawn from. He found that higher SAT schools produced more cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.
In later research, Al-Ubaydli, Jones, and Weel (2014) found that higher IQ groups were more cooperative, but higher IQ individuals were not. A high-IQ person in a low-IQ group would not foolishly cooperate when everyone else was defecting, but high-IQ groups could coordinate on a cooperative solution despite not knowing that they were in a high-IQ group.
http://economicsdetective.com/2015/12/hive-mind-iq-and-the-wealth-of-nations-with-garett-jones/
One of the reasons I like these podcasts is they cover subjects that aren't covered by the MSM and as we know knowledge of this type of research is enough to get you fired from the likes of Google.
Hmm, blockquote tag doesn't seem to working or I go them all wrong :( Time to get the register facility going, Tim.