One of my big concerns with DEI is that while yes, there has been pushback and some walking back of DEI, it never quite walks back to the original starting point. What happens instead is that some bad ideas/policies never quite go away, to the point where a generation of people come up who don't even realize that what they consider the status quo hasn't been so forever, and is actually quite recent. These bad ideas get entrenched as the institutional memory of the change (and the "reasons" for the change) fade.
One example is the Ethnic Studies requirement in California. Newsom signed into law Ethnic Studies as a graduation requirement for every California high school student, back in 2021. The implementation of this law has been slow in high schools, but community colleges and universities followed suit, so now Ethnic Studies is a general education requirement, even for associates degrees. To meet this requirement my own school had to hire several ethnic studies professors, as what used to be a barely-existent discipline became one with high enrollment basically overnight. Presumably this happened at every school, all over the state, costing taxpayers untold sums of money. I remember having a conversation with our nursing counselor at the time, who of course didn't want to be seen as going against DEI orthodoxy, but complained that the nursing associates is a high-unit degree already, so they had to remove a class directly related to nursing to make way for the Ethnic Studies course.
The law Newsom signed was based on two flawed studies that essentially said the opposite of what was claimed by the authors (Richard Sander did a wonderful take-down of the papers here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/studies-fail-to-support-claims-new-california-ethnic-studies-requirement), but now that the law is in place and years have passed, this situation is the norm. Regardless of how much DEI is rolled back, Ethnic Studies as a requirement has become the norm, and most people have no idea what sort of shoddy research its implementation was based on, and it's unlikely at this point that that requirement will go away. In fact, a new standard is currently being developed to unite the CSU and UC GE requirements and it of course contains Ethnic Studies as a category.
IMO, the clean-up metaphor is premature. The battle is still being fought. Many more dragons need to be slain before we can start to bury their carcasses.
And it remains a battle whose outcome is not yet certain.
Almost all recent progress has come from actions of the Trump administration. And EVERY Democrat in Congress is still a big proponent of DEI.
If the Democrats win the Presidency in 2028, all that progress will very likely be reversed.
So: the #1 task of anyone who wants to defeat DEI should be to work to elect Republicans to as many offices as possible.
I think the issues with dei-- to me dei fights racism with racism, sexism with sexism, etc, reducing individuals to stereotypes about their immutable characteristics, are not clear to my fellow Democrats. Too often the discussion becomes " if you don't like dei you must hate people based on ethnicity, etc." That false choice continues to be assumed. We have a long way to go.
I agree. I too am a Democrat (registered for over 50 years). But I now vote straight Republican, and have since 2022, primarily because the Democrats in office now unanimously support obliterating women's sex-based rights and continuing the ongoing crime against humanity of child mutilation, sterilization, and de-sexing, including taking children away from parents who do not "affirm" their child's sparkly new "gender identity" that was picked up in a public school that kept the child's mental health status secret from the parents (due to a state law passed unanimously by Democrats).
I think one of the biggest travesties is how many people were led to believe this narrow and controversial worldview, who still have these views today, who still plan on fighting for it to no end without question, and who still plan on voting accordingly, e.g. for socialism and many other extreme, detrimental far left ideas, as if they're in an existential battle for humanity. It is scary how little critical thinking is happening on a societal wide scale around these topics still to this day, even as you try to show them data otherwise. I'm in education where it is particularly concerning. The questionable information is everywhere, like how micro plastics are these days.
"Universities are now staffed by DEI-era hires who carry these assumptions into their teaching, research, mentoring, peer review, and administrative work."
This issue is huge. These people will shape future hires and content taught by their departments for the next 30 years. A few inappropriate hires can destroy a department. And if such hires happen in a high prestige department, the authority of the department will cause the poor work to continue to have outsized and undeserved impact.
The cost of omission includes those of us who have required years of therapy to get over therapist-caused trauma by our crossdressing husbands' therapists. Those ones who diagnosed husbands in the first appointment and when hubby schleps wife along, we are told we should have noticed his "feminine tendencies" and we're "holding grudges" about his secret spending, lying about his whereabouts and the secret trysts with others like himself--meaning we have to have tests for the AIDS virus. The children he fathered are included in this cohort. This is a professionally promoted cult which damages women and children in large swaths.
Here, my conversation with a therapist specializing in the ambiguous loss of trans widows:
There are several cause-and-effect fact patterns to follow related to this movement toward disastrous DEI. The communist-revolutionary derived radical postmodernist feminist agenda that exploits the fake scholarship toxic mind virus of Critical Theory that has infested the education curriculum is one.
But the primary driver of this and many other terribly costly and destructive socioeconomic "progress" ideas pushed by Democrats is money.
There are two economies. One is the private producer economy. The basis is all the business that make, build, grow, fix and sell real products. Then there are second tier value-add product and service business that support this making, building, fixing and selling core.
The other economy, one that only exists by taking from the productive economy as it produces nothing itself, is the public administrative economy.
Republicans tend to occupy the former, Democrats the latter.
When markets are saturated in the private producer economy, people do other things. The invisible hand of creative destruction and constant adding of value keeps up a churn of constant economic growth and real progress that keeps the economic wheels turning.
The public administrative side benefits from this growth. For example, if the private economy grows 10%, then tax revenue to fund the public side will also increase as the basis increases.
But we have a problem. Globalism has destroyed a ton of private producer working-class economic opportunity. Mass immigration has also impacted it. Then we stuff millions more people through the higher learning factory with expectations for a cush administrative job paying six figures and providing high social status.
This has created a big traffic jam at the top of the Rube Goldberg career path machine.
The public administrative economy is saturated and without enough career path availability. So the well-educated are doing what they can to create new paths of economic opportunity in that space that they are wired to occupy (note that they are not going off to start any new for-profit product companies).
Global warming, DEI, racial and other group victim advocacy... all of it is motivated to a large degree by elites attempting to create more money-making opportunity.
We can call this the looter economy because it has to take from the private productive economy to survive.
Democrats occupy the looter economy, and they are always looking for new creative movements played in the media that also profits from the cheap copy and sensationalism it derives. However, it is all wasteful WAY beyond the social utility it can provide. It is costly to the productive economy, and thus subtractive to the long-term health of the human condition.
It is a form of rent-seeking that Democrats do, that is equitable with the non-productive gambling and rent-seeking (the Wall Street game) that is done by gray money men in the private side of the economy. Neither add true value to real economic growth and progress. They are all takers not makers.
DEI has made a lot of Democrats wealthy but has cost the nation and world significantly.
Nice manifesto. I'd not say it's binary wrong, but I would say it's an oversimplification. You describe the 'real economy' quite well but:
> The other economy, one that only exists by taking from the productive economy as it produces nothing itself, is the public administrative economy.
Alas some administration is inevitable and even good. Money grubbing corporations can be just as top heavy as the government. Rentiers and banksters and other 'financial' types are likely to identify with the Right. I find left/right distinctions to be almost distractions. Are you a producer or are you a parasite? But of course most of the time there isn't a binary answer to that either. I toy with a new economic metric: the Coefficient of Productivity -- how much of your daily grind is actually productive? If unproductive, how much of that wasted time is imposed on you, vs. how much is your own inefficiency?
"Rentiers and banksters and other 'financial' types are likely to identify with the Right."
Not really today. They are identified with the political establishment as they are both in the game of looting and rent-seeking.
And top-heavy corporations tend to get resolved as they cannot survive otherwise. Not the case for the administrative economy. It takes targeting austerity measures to correct its tendency for beaurcratic bloat. DOGE for example. In the private side there is competition to motivate the self-correction. No competition exists on the administrative side.
> They are identified with the political establishment as they are both in the game of looting and rent-seeking.
It's a matter of degree, I'll not dispute it. Anyway, as time goes on it becomes more and more true. They say in the last election Kamala raised more corporate cash than Trump by 3X.
> No competition exists on the administrative side.
Except for changing the government. But I take your point. Seems to me that something like DOGE -- but not stupid theatrics with chain saws -- should be part of daily life in the government.
> Even if formal DEI offices are dismantled, the ideology will live on inside departments, journals, classrooms, grant committees, and professional associations.
I've read of situations where some faculty or other was ordered to stop doing some DEI/woke thing, and they basically just ignored the order. Is Harvard really admitting on the basis of merit? I doubt it. You can't order people to stop being woke, they will advance SJ by covert means if not overt means. It's an open question whether sanity can be restored by slow, patient, polite, careful means, or whether something harsher will be required -- purging the woke root and branch. Think of those Nazis throwing books onto the pyre that we've all seen. Not very appealing but can wokeness be rooted out otherwise? I'd hope so but ...
One of my big concerns with DEI is that while yes, there has been pushback and some walking back of DEI, it never quite walks back to the original starting point. What happens instead is that some bad ideas/policies never quite go away, to the point where a generation of people come up who don't even realize that what they consider the status quo hasn't been so forever, and is actually quite recent. These bad ideas get entrenched as the institutional memory of the change (and the "reasons" for the change) fade.
One example is the Ethnic Studies requirement in California. Newsom signed into law Ethnic Studies as a graduation requirement for every California high school student, back in 2021. The implementation of this law has been slow in high schools, but community colleges and universities followed suit, so now Ethnic Studies is a general education requirement, even for associates degrees. To meet this requirement my own school had to hire several ethnic studies professors, as what used to be a barely-existent discipline became one with high enrollment basically overnight. Presumably this happened at every school, all over the state, costing taxpayers untold sums of money. I remember having a conversation with our nursing counselor at the time, who of course didn't want to be seen as going against DEI orthodoxy, but complained that the nursing associates is a high-unit degree already, so they had to remove a class directly related to nursing to make way for the Ethnic Studies course.
The law Newsom signed was based on two flawed studies that essentially said the opposite of what was claimed by the authors (Richard Sander did a wonderful take-down of the papers here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/studies-fail-to-support-claims-new-california-ethnic-studies-requirement), but now that the law is in place and years have passed, this situation is the norm. Regardless of how much DEI is rolled back, Ethnic Studies as a requirement has become the norm, and most people have no idea what sort of shoddy research its implementation was based on, and it's unlikely at this point that that requirement will go away. In fact, a new standard is currently being developed to unite the CSU and UC GE requirements and it of course contains Ethnic Studies as a category.
IMO, the clean-up metaphor is premature. The battle is still being fought. Many more dragons need to be slain before we can start to bury their carcasses.
And it remains a battle whose outcome is not yet certain.
Almost all recent progress has come from actions of the Trump administration. And EVERY Democrat in Congress is still a big proponent of DEI.
If the Democrats win the Presidency in 2028, all that progress will very likely be reversed.
So: the #1 task of anyone who wants to defeat DEI should be to work to elect Republicans to as many offices as possible.
I think the issues with dei-- to me dei fights racism with racism, sexism with sexism, etc, reducing individuals to stereotypes about their immutable characteristics, are not clear to my fellow Democrats. Too often the discussion becomes " if you don't like dei you must hate people based on ethnicity, etc." That false choice continues to be assumed. We have a long way to go.
I agree. I too am a Democrat (registered for over 50 years). But I now vote straight Republican, and have since 2022, primarily because the Democrats in office now unanimously support obliterating women's sex-based rights and continuing the ongoing crime against humanity of child mutilation, sterilization, and de-sexing, including taking children away from parents who do not "affirm" their child's sparkly new "gender identity" that was picked up in a public school that kept the child's mental health status secret from the parents (due to a state law passed unanimously by Democrats).
I think one of the biggest travesties is how many people were led to believe this narrow and controversial worldview, who still have these views today, who still plan on fighting for it to no end without question, and who still plan on voting accordingly, e.g. for socialism and many other extreme, detrimental far left ideas, as if they're in an existential battle for humanity. It is scary how little critical thinking is happening on a societal wide scale around these topics still to this day, even as you try to show them data otherwise. I'm in education where it is particularly concerning. The questionable information is everywhere, like how micro plastics are these days.
"Universities are now staffed by DEI-era hires who carry these assumptions into their teaching, research, mentoring, peer review, and administrative work."
This issue is huge. These people will shape future hires and content taught by their departments for the next 30 years. A few inappropriate hires can destroy a department. And if such hires happen in a high prestige department, the authority of the department will cause the poor work to continue to have outsized and undeserved impact.
The cost of omission includes those of us who have required years of therapy to get over therapist-caused trauma by our crossdressing husbands' therapists. Those ones who diagnosed husbands in the first appointment and when hubby schleps wife along, we are told we should have noticed his "feminine tendencies" and we're "holding grudges" about his secret spending, lying about his whereabouts and the secret trysts with others like himself--meaning we have to have tests for the AIDS virus. The children he fathered are included in this cohort. This is a professionally promoted cult which damages women and children in large swaths.
Here, my conversation with a therapist specializing in the ambiguous loss of trans widows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06KGYUogdB8
There are several cause-and-effect fact patterns to follow related to this movement toward disastrous DEI. The communist-revolutionary derived radical postmodernist feminist agenda that exploits the fake scholarship toxic mind virus of Critical Theory that has infested the education curriculum is one.
But the primary driver of this and many other terribly costly and destructive socioeconomic "progress" ideas pushed by Democrats is money.
There are two economies. One is the private producer economy. The basis is all the business that make, build, grow, fix and sell real products. Then there are second tier value-add product and service business that support this making, building, fixing and selling core.
The other economy, one that only exists by taking from the productive economy as it produces nothing itself, is the public administrative economy.
Republicans tend to occupy the former, Democrats the latter.
When markets are saturated in the private producer economy, people do other things. The invisible hand of creative destruction and constant adding of value keeps up a churn of constant economic growth and real progress that keeps the economic wheels turning.
The public administrative side benefits from this growth. For example, if the private economy grows 10%, then tax revenue to fund the public side will also increase as the basis increases.
But we have a problem. Globalism has destroyed a ton of private producer working-class economic opportunity. Mass immigration has also impacted it. Then we stuff millions more people through the higher learning factory with expectations for a cush administrative job paying six figures and providing high social status.
This has created a big traffic jam at the top of the Rube Goldberg career path machine.
The public administrative economy is saturated and without enough career path availability. So the well-educated are doing what they can to create new paths of economic opportunity in that space that they are wired to occupy (note that they are not going off to start any new for-profit product companies).
Global warming, DEI, racial and other group victim advocacy... all of it is motivated to a large degree by elites attempting to create more money-making opportunity.
We can call this the looter economy because it has to take from the private productive economy to survive.
Democrats occupy the looter economy, and they are always looking for new creative movements played in the media that also profits from the cheap copy and sensationalism it derives. However, it is all wasteful WAY beyond the social utility it can provide. It is costly to the productive economy, and thus subtractive to the long-term health of the human condition.
It is a form of rent-seeking that Democrats do, that is equitable with the non-productive gambling and rent-seeking (the Wall Street game) that is done by gray money men in the private side of the economy. Neither add true value to real economic growth and progress. They are all takers not makers.
DEI has made a lot of Democrats wealthy but has cost the nation and world significantly.
Nice manifesto. I'd not say it's binary wrong, but I would say it's an oversimplification. You describe the 'real economy' quite well but:
> The other economy, one that only exists by taking from the productive economy as it produces nothing itself, is the public administrative economy.
Alas some administration is inevitable and even good. Money grubbing corporations can be just as top heavy as the government. Rentiers and banksters and other 'financial' types are likely to identify with the Right. I find left/right distinctions to be almost distractions. Are you a producer or are you a parasite? But of course most of the time there isn't a binary answer to that either. I toy with a new economic metric: the Coefficient of Productivity -- how much of your daily grind is actually productive? If unproductive, how much of that wasted time is imposed on you, vs. how much is your own inefficiency?
"Rentiers and banksters and other 'financial' types are likely to identify with the Right."
Not really today. They are identified with the political establishment as they are both in the game of looting and rent-seeking.
And top-heavy corporations tend to get resolved as they cannot survive otherwise. Not the case for the administrative economy. It takes targeting austerity measures to correct its tendency for beaurcratic bloat. DOGE for example. In the private side there is competition to motivate the self-correction. No competition exists on the administrative side.
> They are identified with the political establishment as they are both in the game of looting and rent-seeking.
It's a matter of degree, I'll not dispute it. Anyway, as time goes on it becomes more and more true. They say in the last election Kamala raised more corporate cash than Trump by 3X.
> No competition exists on the administrative side.
Except for changing the government. But I take your point. Seems to me that something like DOGE -- but not stupid theatrics with chain saws -- should be part of daily life in the government.
> Even if formal DEI offices are dismantled, the ideology will live on inside departments, journals, classrooms, grant committees, and professional associations.
I've read of situations where some faculty or other was ordered to stop doing some DEI/woke thing, and they basically just ignored the order. Is Harvard really admitting on the basis of merit? I doubt it. You can't order people to stop being woke, they will advance SJ by covert means if not overt means. It's an open question whether sanity can be restored by slow, patient, polite, careful means, or whether something harsher will be required -- purging the woke root and branch. Think of those Nazis throwing books onto the pyre that we've all seen. Not very appealing but can wokeness be rooted out otherwise? I'd hope so but ...