An Elegy for DEI
Promotion alert! My podcast has a newsletter!
Hello readers! A short post today.
I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter that I’ve started a podcast, Optimist Economy. Each episode, my cohost Robin and I talk about a problem or solution in our economy—what do we know, what can we do, and how do we talk about it. Our goal is to leave listeners informed and empowered (and hopefully a little amused!)
The conversation also helps me synthesize what I think about an issue and how I want to talk about it. So we created a newsletter for the podcast to stay in conversation with our listeners and put my synthesized thoughts back out in the world. Our second episode was on DEI. It inspired me to write the essay I’ve previewed below. It is a reflection on fairness as much as it is DEI.
Lack of Diversity, Inequity, and Exclusion
Between Trump’s executive order and the number of private companies that are pulling back on their own efforts, we are quite possibly at the end of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement.
What’s amazing to me, thinking of DEI truly in retrospect, is how much we failed to learn from it. Or, as I said in the show, “the two things we didn’t learn from DEI that we should talk about at its funeral.”
A note: I’m going to present this essay using black-white gaps in our labor market as the emblematic example of why DEI was needed and how people reacted to it. When it comes to discrimination in the United State, black people, sadly, come first. If I were talking about male-female, straight-gay, cis-trans, native-immigrant, the supporting evidence would be different, but the conclusion would be the same.
First, What We Already Knew
If there were a way to sum up the motivation for DEI in one figure, it would be this one: the unemployment rate of black and white workers since 1972. What you’ll notice is that the average black unemployment rate—in good times or bad, in past decades or the present—is twice the white unemployment rate, or higher. Always.
To keep reading, head over to the Optimist Economy newsletter.
If you haven’t already, would you do a video that explains to the average person working in corporate America what may happen to Capitalism and their companies/roles if the country continues down the path we’re on to authoritarianism?
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