Eliminating systemic racism should be a lucrative undertaking

Monday, April 5th, 2021

It would be in the profit-maximizing interest of firms to snatch up underpaid performers, Steve Sailer reminds us:

If there really is much discrimination, then eliminating systemic racism should be a lucrative undertaking, not one that requires constant paid sermonizing by innumerates about how handing privileges to the politically preferred will turn out to be in our own financial interest.

Of course, if you go far enough back into America’s past, it is easy to find a clear example of an employer who did flourish due to his diverse hiring: Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. By bringing Jackie Robinson up in 1947 to be the first black big-leaguer since the 19th century, Rickey got a lucrative jump on other teams.

[...]

The Brooklyn Dodgers’ example of the payoff from not discriminating is so vivid because:

(1) There really was systemic racism against black ballplayers: the Color Line.

(2) Blacks were as good as whites at baseball. (By the way, it’s often assumed today that whites were surprised in 1947 by how strong blacks were at baseball. In reality, though, black and white stars had often played together in barnstorming exhibition tours and in Caribbean winter ball, so white ballplayers had long publicly praised the talents of their black counterparts.)

(3) Some teams stubbornly resisted integration for up to a dozen years after 1947, highlighting the contrast.

Strikingly, it’s oddly hard to find more recent examples than this of firms that long earned outsize profits by first hiring blacks or women.

[...]

This should remind us that the Women’s Lib battle was quickly and almost painlessly won during the first half of the 1970s. For example, by the time I entered UCLA’s MBA program in 1980, conscious discrimination against women in corporate white-collar hiring was a thing of the past. The only employers I can recall being told were still bigoted against women were Los Angeles’ department-store chains, which, a professor explained, wouldn’t promote shiksas beyond Buyer.

Presumably, some companies took the lead in the early 1970s and outearned their rivals by hiring more women, which allowed them to pay lower wages than the industry standard. But, a half century later, it’s hard to identify these trailblazing corporations because their rivals responded so quickly to this now socially acceptable profit-maximizing scheme.

Before 1969, discrimination in white-collar hiring was less against women per se than against married women. (In contrast, blue-collar jobs that are today 95 percent male were often 100 percent male back then, and good-paying union jobs were usually reserved for men.)

Yet, there had always been a certain number of spinster career women in upscale jobs. For instance, in the 1940 movie His Girl Friday, newspaper editor Cary Grant is desperate to keep his ace reporter (and ex-wife) Rosalind Russell from marrying Ralph Bellamy and immediately quitting the newspaper to be a housewife and mother.

Why the feeling that married women shouldn’t work? The polite assumption had been that respectable women didn’t use contraception, so a married woman was likely to be a mother by the year after her wedding, after which she’d be too busy with child-rearing for paid employment.

But by 1969, The Pill had become socially accepted, plus the burdens of housework had declined due to advances in appliances such as dishwashers and dryers. As Goldin noted, women increasingly went back to paid work after their children were old enough, so it made sense for them to get the education when young that would enable them to hold better-paying jobs.

Hence, most genteel industries rapidly switched over to hiring large numbers of young women in the 1970s.

Comments

  1. Kirk says:

    The only “systemic racism” that actually exists is that used by the system against qualified whites to promote unqualified and mostly incompetent BIPOC individuals into positions they have no business being in.

    Everything else is an artifact of wishful thinking by people who want to cosplay at being persecuted by “the system” in order to cover up their own incompetence and laziness.

    You do have individuals doing racist things, but wholesale systemic racism against minorities? In the US? Are you serious?

    Because, if you are, I want someone to explain the pervasive and effective history of unqualified minorities being promoted and hired over qualified white males, which is more of a reality than the assholes running this country into the ground are willing to admit. We don’t have a meritocracy going on around here, we have a racial spoils system that is set up to denigrate the majority demographic, and as soon as there’s enough slack run out of the system, that’s going to become a major issue and a focus of change, if not outright revolution.

  2. White Heretic says:

    Minorities are however less of a concern than women, acknowledged even by progressive studies as fairly less productive than men by as much as 44% like minorities. Of course, they explain it away by claiming they feel oppressed and thus not invested in their work for both cases, but to begin with the whole thing is probably underestimated and underplayed as much as possible. After all they are not even taking into account the constant misconduct and disruptive behavior of feral women in the workplace, they are far worse than minorities if they are men.

    The meritocracy died the day every retard could vote because they made it to a certain age and could breath, instead of being as intended by the FF where only a few selected could vote. And when I say a few selected really the bar wasn’t that high, being a white male who owned land wasn’t that impressive, but prevents parasites and worthless pissants for sure. I’d have also added being married, making sure the pedophile sodomites stay the hell away from any political influence.

  3. Dan Kurt says:

    Today in a Drs.’ office waiting room got into a conversation with a retired man while my wife was seeing the Dr. He also was waiting for his wife. He had an Intel logoed baseball cap on his head and he freely admitted that he had worked at Intel for decades before retiring. I asked him if he knew why Intel was having so much trouble getting down to the 4 nanometer design scale and lower. He spouted out DIVERSITY hiring and Credentialing being more important than performance at Intel.

  4. Kirk says:

    Intel’s death as a productive organization is following the usual pattern. The usual syndromes are in place, operating as usual, and here we are.

    There are life cycles to everything under the sun, whether you’re talking about bacteria or nation-states. You can’t avoid them, but you can seek to lessen their effect. The first thing is, big and monolithic ain’t the way to go, because when big and monolithic finally die, it takes entire continents out. Western Roman Empire, anyone…?

  5. VXXC says:

    To answer The Question about the systemic racism that actually exists today — by law and policy — against whites: The answer is our elites and managerial class are at war with the dead past.

    It’s always 1944 or 1964 with our managerial overlords. To the extent they aren’t cynically playing off groups against each other which they are. Soon they may succeed in getting us shooting and warring against each other, the beautiful thing about race war is you don’t have a choice.

    ERASE WHITENESS is a pretty clear agenda, it’s justified by fighting the past…and not quite the real past. We’re NAZIS to some and KKK to the other by virtue of our skin, this is the official religion.

    As far as these whelps and yelps about competence…bitch please, it’s 2021.

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