I have a slightly reductive view of wokeness/political correctness that I think is worth considering. It's not a complete explanation but I think it might be a partial one.
It strikes me that a significant motivation for wokeness is *not being confident in one's own first-order abilities*. When a college student in a poetry class puts his hand up and says "I think the metaphor in the second stanza is sexist", it's sometimes because the student doesn't have anything interesting to say about meter or imagery or the other things the professor might have hoped to hear about. Critiquing injustice is almost always *easier* than whatever it is a group of people is supposed to be doing at any given time.
I think Matt is right that white leftists are more likely than white conservatives to prefer doing collaborative work in a non-hierarchical way, but that isn't necessarily a problem if they're good at what they're doing. The more serious risk is that woke-ifying all human activities serves the vested interests of people who aren't very good at doing actual things.
I also think David Graeber's theory of "bullshit jobs" is relevant here. A larger and larger share of white-collar professional employment seems to consist of positions that are essentially bureaucratic: people who get paid to monitor and surveil the people doing the first-order work. (Insert gif of guy digging hole with people standing around watching.)
I think Graeber's book is amazingly important and raises serious questions about whether neoclassical economists understand anything at all about how labor markets work. But it's also worth considering whether the "bullshit jobs" phenomenon might be a major cause of workplace wokeness. For whatever reason, the phase of capitalism we're currently in has produced an enormous class of people who don't need to be good at any useful first-order activity, and who have a strong vested interest in developing new reasons for everyone else to be monitored and surveilled.
Oops, somehow I left out the thesis here. My point was that Okun's argument (every aspect of a group activity that's conducive to effectiveness or efficiency is racist) has an especially powerful appeal for people who don't know how to do first-order things and resent seeing other people accomplish anything. *Of course* people who do workplace trainings want to include that idea in the trainings.
You may be overstating the bullshit jobs case. Other people's jobs often seem like bullshit until they leave and you have to do part of it yourself.
And yet you may be understating the issues with wokesim. People don't just use it to seek validation, they often use it as a weapon to accuse others and get ahead in bureaucratic power struggles. To be fair, most of it is just dumb trainings and speechifying, but there is a malign aspect as well.
Okun's book certainly sounds (from Matt's description) like it's oriented at the people who are trying very hard to make sure that nobody can measure whether they're doing any useful work, criticize them if they aren't doing any work, or try to force or incent them to do more useful work, using "racism" as the rhetorical superweapon that it is in certain circles.
(I think the concept of a "rhetorical superweapon" from the rationalism community is a kind of dangerous one, because it feels like it sometimes turns off analysis. But an important one, because there are certainly circles where saying "X is racist" completely shifts the discussion and puts everyone on the defensive, and that's... obviously useful to some people.)
It's a mix of things. There's certainly a more sinister or power-mongering aspect in some cases.
I think reading Graeber's book may have changed the way I think about work in general. As an economics major I was taught that people are employed because the work they do has a marginal value to society that's equal to the salary they earn. Graeber was an anthropologist and clearly had no time for that approach; he thought bullshit jobs existed because people in certain social strata needed an affirmation of their status, and the need produced the jobs whether they had social value or not. Antiracist management consulting starts to look like the newest subsector of a much larger share of the economy that exists because people have a deep need to believe they're doing something useful, not because they are.
You’re saying two things are in opposition, when they’re not. Someone hired to affirm status *is providing a service*, the value of which is *definitionally* what they’re paid. Yes, a lot of it can be explained by the misappropriation of funds (and of course, that’s why universities, being governmental or charitable organizations, are particularly susceptible to it) but I dunno, I think you’re underrating the value gained by some service jobs.
I am so skeptical of the bullshit jobs concept. Like, if most jobs are bullshit then why can’t PE firms buy up companies, fire half the staff, and make profits go up 4x (100 revenue, 90 costs, 2/3 costs labor, so 10->43 profit)? Also, thinking about my job, it’s just so offensive to think the various support from other parts of the business is bullshit - it’s not! Could they be done more efficiently? Probably, but it would be hard work because that work is important.
The book is definitely worth reading. A lot of bullshit jobs as discussed in the book are driven by regulatory or quasi-regulatory requirements, so they can't be eliminated even though they're mostly bullshit. Another big chunk of bullshit jobs are people in important-sounding leadership positions.
Notably, bullshit jobs aren't necessarily jobs that don't produce revenue for the company - they're just jobs that don't make the world a better place. So a PE firm can't crank up profits by ditching all the bullshit jobs. For an insurance company, all the layers of bureaucracy are a feature that helps them minimize claim payouts while still clearly having an "official" process that complies with regulatory requirements. But the jobs are bullshit because all they can do is give stock responses and pass things up the chain.
I've always been at a bit of a loss why regulatory compliance was considered bullshit. Regulations might be bullshit, but legal compliance certainly is not. What else is a profit-seeking business to do?
Well, it's worth noting that the book is actually focused on the psychological impacts of bullshit work on workers. It's not a book full of actionable business advice - it's a book about why so many people seem to be miserable despite very high material standards of living.
The point is that being asked to spend 8+ hours a day on tasks that have no discernible impact is ruinous on mental well-being. Spending your life's work dealing with regulatory compliance issues that you believe in your heart are pointless, all for a company that produces a product you believe is bad, is not a recipe for a fulfilling career.
I suppose my real quibble is with the premise—that "fulfilling" careers are likely or even necessary. Life often sort of sucks, and the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to be fulfilled, regardless. The vast majority of human history is filled with somewhat miserable folks doing thankless tasks that don't fulfill them in order to have food and shelter. That will continue apace.
The capitalistic framing—mind you, I'm not anti-capitalistic—that one's job is one's life is the root issue here. Find fulfillment elsewhere, not in your job.
This is still very much missing the point of the book. The book suggests that we have made a profound mistake and have a deep misunderstanding of what sorts of tasks are miserable.
The usual thought is that menial labor is unfulfilling and miserable, whereas knowledgeable, skilled work is more fulfilling. Bullshit Jobs questions that premise. Manual labor like farming, stocking shelves, or working an assembly line can be difficult and thankless, but at the end of the day it is easy to see how your labor is benefiting society. When your job is to attend meetings and come up with impressive-looking PowerPoint slides, it is difficult to see how your labor is benefiting society.
If this is the case, then as we increasingly automate our economy and more people move into "bullshit" positions, we are not creating a happier, more comfortable world for people to live in - we are creating a nightmare dystopia that saddles huge sections of the middle class with all sorts of new and interesting mental illnesses.
I don't know that I fully agree with the take, and I think too much of it is based on a self-selected bunch of anecdotes rather than clear data. But the thesis is provocative and worthy of consideration, and shouldn't just be written off as whining.
But I mean with the wrong perspective any job could be considered meaningless. I’m a heart surgeon but dammit I’m no better than the average heart surgeon so really I could be replaced by an average heart surgeon and no lives changed I’m a waste I should have done something else. Your mental health may be improved by finding meaning in your work rather than pursuing a much harder task of finding meaningful work(since you’d have to change jobs and then might find that meaningless and then have to change again and make no money as an underwater basket weaver and go back to your meaningless heart surgery like a big failure).
I think my main problem with the book is that the regulatory bullshit jobs actually exist to protect against bad faith rentseeking behaviour like frivolous lawsuits and such. Nobody says that being a police officer is a bullshit job because it's more obvious that people will commit crimes in their absence, but it's also true that people will take the piss in the absence of those regulatory functions!
What I find kind of ironic about that though is that there are indubitably people who will *still* cheat the system while those of us who try to follow the rules spend increasing amounts of time on compliance issues. It's a real drag on productivity.
Just to give an example, I'm about to submit a reimbursement request for the third time as each time I'm being asked for more/different evidence that I actually did what I said I did. If I wanted to cheat the system, I could just make something up. Instead, I'm increasingly demoralized by the experience, to the point that if this one doesn't go through, I might just eat the cost.
This isn't just a drag on my productivity, but also that of the 3-4 people in the loop who keep going back and forth on what is or isn't required.
Yes, but the point is that the profit motive only sometimes aligns with the goal of actually making the world a better place. In at least some cases, the profit motive is compatible with "bullshit jobs."
My personal experience with this is my last job, that was intellectually challenging, but at the end of the day amounted to devising increasingly sophisticated ways to separate people from their money while providing no additional value.
This doesn't actually quite fit the criteria laid out in the book for bullshit jobs, and I do think the book has issues, but I also think that once you read it and really think about what he's saying, you start to see bullshit jobs all over the place. I don't 100% endorse the exact framing of that book, but I think it is an idea worthy of serious thought, and it is incorrect to dismiss a strawman version of the claims he makes.
“...the profit motive only sometimes aligns with the goal of actually making the world a better place.”
Never mind the motive, pay attention to the result. Profit makes the world a better place. (Do I need to point out that I make that statement in the context of a society that ensures rights are respected under their law, protects the commons, etc.? I hope not.)
“...you start to see bullshit jobs all over the place.”
I think that most people here agree, but DG is really trying to explain people reporting a total lack of fulfillment with their job, not a theory of economic inefficiency.
It's actually pretty insightful and does go a long way towards explaining why a lot of people report that their job could disappear and it wouldn't make a difference when asked.
Is it? Only recently have corporations started to broaden their mandate beyond maximizing shareholder value. For most of the last 40 years profit above all else has been the stated goal. Which, as many on this thread have pointed out, is no way to run a society. How can we say this? Because in those same 40 years we’ve fallen in just about every quality of life category compared to other industrialized countries.
That basically is what PE firms do though. The classic Bullshit Jobs formulation, however, only has certain classes of these jobs that are unacceptable to being deleted. For instance, it considers a lot of corporate attorneys/IP lawyers to be bullshit, because of the arms-race nature of major corporate law: you only need 20 lawyers on a major case because the other guy has 20 lawyers and the stakes are high. Graeber believes this is duplication. I don't really agree, but there is your answer.
I feel like the organizations most prone to bullshit jobs might be universities. The number of middleman administrators sucking in money from those places is staggering.
Solid take, even if it's not the whole story there are elements that probably are there.
Don't forget that all the workplace diversity stuff exists primarily to protect companies from lawsuits. All the outward facing diversity, black squares on twitter, etc. is all marketing. It's done because the companies understand how to appeal to their customers and drive engagement with their brands. These bullshit jobs provide value even if they do not always directly produce value.
Corporations start hiring diversity trainers as a labor law matter to try to insulate themselves from lawsuits. But the people doing that work don't want to think of themselves as participants in a cynical game whose actual purpose is to shield capital from accountability. So it creates a hothouse atmosphere in which loopy ideological ideas can thrive, because you want to come up with a theoretical justification for the work that includes a justificaiton for the work not having any tangible benefits.
I think it's too cynical to say corporate diversity programs are just about avoiding lawsuits. Many are well intentioned and exist because employers actually believe, for good reason, their business will be more successful with a more diverse workforce (more viewpoints and creativity, less groupthink, better able to connect with customers, etc). But like often happens in corporate culture (and elsewhere), when an actually good and nuanced idea is rolled out in a standardized fashion and becomes a consultant cottage industry, it gets jargonized and reduced to something rote that starts to seem like a caricature of itself. In fact, when diversity programs are implemented in such crude fashion, they can actually create legal risk - look at what happened at Coca-Cola, where the general counsel recently got fired for announcing what basically looked like a racial quota for lawyer hiring, and came under fire for allegedly violating federal anti-discrimination laws.
The nice thing about discrimination laws and court cases is there is are actual case you can point to and say this thing that happened is so racist it cost the company 30 million dollars don’t do that thing.
I think that is historically how this DEI stuff came into existence but a more recent change/evolution that is happening in progressive spaces is that line staff are the ones demanding a stronger DEI presence within their organizations, even sometimes viewing them as a counterweight to the (traditionally) white leadership teams that otherwise have management control.
I work at a progressive nonprofit that is in the process of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with a newly formed union, and while I don't really want to even anonymously get into much detail, one thing that has stuck out to me in the union's demands is that they are explicitly asking for certain hiring decisions to be taken out of the hands of the management team and into the hands of the DEI team. I'm not entirely sure how to read that in any broader labor analysis, but it certainly strikes me as strange. Maybe the growth of DEI can just be summed up by the fact that both labor and management think they're on their side?
Sometimes it is just a company in a multiethnic, multicultural society trying to provide a basis of common understanding among the people that work at the company. They should try something right? Is the solution to do nothing and hope the invisible hand of (pick your cause or reason for human kindness here) to take the wheel? I've worked in these groups and been to these meetings so I get the frustration people have about them (especially when they are at 4pm on a Friday afternoon) but what's the solution here? Or is this just a general call to consider the purpose of what you are doing before charging in, diversity training documents a'flyin'?
It is not so much that diversity training is bad in and of itself but more that it is bad in that it is a substitute for more substantive action. So one thing you might do if you are Google or Amazon is do targeted hiring from HBCU, coding bootcamps and other places where you can recruit people from diverse backgrounds. But that is harder than just doing some diversity training and continuing to toss any resumes from people who didn't go to Stanford/MIT/etc.
In many of those cases, it's not so much a distraction from more substantive action as it is a consolation prize when substantive action isn't delivering the results people want.
For example, companies like Google and Amazon are in fact doing all of those things you mentioned. Their recruiters are laser-focused on diversity, sometimes to an illegal extent (see Wilberg v. Google). The problem is, they've already tried everything they can think of, and this is what the result looks like. It's not as if there's a pool of unemployed black or Hispanic coders who the tech companies are overlooking, or a stack of resumes they aren't looking at (they interview engineers without prestigious degrees all the time). On the contrary, recruiters are fighting over all the candidates they can find; there just aren't enough to go around.
But activists don't want to hear that it's a "pipeline problem", so they keep looking for ways the company can Do Something, and diversity training gives them a well of potential change that never runs dry. Every grievance from a minority employee can be held up as evidence that corporate culture must be scaring off the candidates, or even scaring students out of learning to code in the first place, so they double down on training to make the culture More Inclusive. And when it inevitably has no effect on the hiring statistics, they see it as evidence that there's still More Work To Be Done.
There are actual things that companies can do to address pipeline problems like invest in work to attract historically marginalized people into the field. Microsoft has given grants to programs that offer free computer coding training to women. They could provide money for HBCUs to provide more scholarships in computer science etc. Saying it a pipeline problem is a diagnosis of a problem not an excuse to do nothing to solve it.
If they wanted to take it to the meta level they could even ask themselves whether they couldn’t get better results by training people from scratch, say right out of high school.
I can imagine the takes if Google made a private, for their own benefit college or coding bootcamp and tried to get highschool students to forsake college for it.
Have an actual lawyer run it. One who has read the actual lawsuit who can say what is and isn’t discrimination. And say so not by their feelings but but by honest to god legal precedent.
Not sure about this. As with use of force / police cases there is a vast territory of bad behavior that is probably not quite bad enough to sustain a verdict, at least in federal employment law. And in most circuits there is a well developed list of appalling behavior that is not quite enough to survive even summary judgment. That same behavior could still be toxic and awful and/or racist in the workplace and make everyone/many people miserable.
At the same time, the answer to the question "Could I be sued for this?" is yes. There is no pre-screen for meritless lawsuits - they may be dismissed early, but almost anyone can file a suit.
There's real value in having material that teaches people about working together across cultural backgrounds and being effective. For instance, my sister has mentioned that corporate culture in America tends to be more top down, while the Netherlands is more consensus-driven. Finding effective solutions to identifying and bridging those gaps is absolutely a good idea. This also goes for learning how to manage employees with very different political beliefs.
The is that this is hard to do well. Sometimes, the problem is just devolution into nonsense and noise (Team Woke hardly has a monopoly on meaningless corporate babble). Other times, you start seeing an ideological mission creep along the lines of "to really embrace diversity, we must remake society" -- especially if a company is using them to brand itself to its employees and the outside world as "progressive".
I guess the best solution is just to have a well-honed BS detector, and look for material that's less abstract, and more focused on concrete approaches. If something would be applicable for a Chinese company working in Kenya, then it's probably worth taking seriously.
A World where no corporation was raciest enough to get sued would be a better world. I am surprised that that the diversity training world is not run by burned out lawyers. People who understand rules can read cases and describe them to others, but can't work 14 hour days. The things that cause a hostile work environment are bad. Things like calendars of hot chicks everyone works on really do create an atmosphere of sexism. Providing free tacos on Cinco De Mayo and free soul food on MLK day seems dumb. But it promotes inclusion. And counts as evidence that the work place is not hostile.
My wife was once a (voluntary) EEO rep in our organization. Her takeaway was that many problems could have been avoided with (a) good manners and (b) fewer conflict-averse bosses.
I like to say that the bar for basic human decency is really low, and yet there are far too many people who fail to clear it.
The issue to me is not that there should be policies that are, to coin a phrase, anti-racisit but that they should be policies that actually combat racism rather that accelerate racial segregation and limit solidarity.
Nate Silver and Ezra had a conversation where Ezra asked how do you build a strong organization? Nate replied just don’t higher ass holes and jerks. Because whatever work they do gets eaten by constantly clearing up office politics issues.
As a manager, I’ve sat through trainings which were basically “here’s ways you could be personally liable if someone sues the company for discrimination,” which were kind of scary, and in trainings that I thought were interesting and tended to focus on diversity of thought. Google also put up a YouTube of one of their diversity seminars maybe 7 years ago, and I thought it was interesting.
I think corporate diversity programs are motivated by a number of different issues. Protecting from lawsuits is probably the main driver of sexual harassment trainings. But I think most racial justice trainings are motivated by companies either getting complaints about their employees lack cultural competency and diverse staffs or organizations getting these objections from donors. In some cases they also seem to be sincerely motivated by stakeholders wanting to be doing the right thing about racial justice because it matches their organizational values or is consistent with their sense of identity. I have been asked by organizations that I work for or participate in to do diversity work for all of these reasons because I have done academic work on racism, have a history of racial justice advocacy which means I seem like have some passing competence and can probably be guilted into doing that work for free. Sometimes the request seems to be in good faith, sometimes less so. I am usually happy to try. However, when I explain that my proposal is not to sit around and talk about Peggy's backpack and the various aspects people seem surprised. When I say the first step would be to do a quantitative audit of how things like hiring decisions, referrals, promotions, admissions, discipline, participation line up with how we would expect them to in a space that was not impacted by racism and the second step would be to do a qualitative audit of how various stakeholders feel about how they are treated they tend to feel like that seems a bit like overkill. When the next step is described as taking every aspect of racial inequality and examining it to see what portion of it might be attributable to explicit racist decision-making, implicit bias is systems, or unaddressed racist patterns, upstream or historical, that have not been adequately corrected for their discomfort grows. When the last step is described as actually taking action like removing problematic decision-makers, changing decision-making systems to reduce potential bias, or taking practice approachs to correcting for historic inequities or upstream problems the shit really starts to hit the fan. That is because what all these groups who want diversity training really have in common is that they all think that they are not racist and that any changes they might need to make are merely small or cosmetic and not systemic. So usually they decide it would be preferable to bring in a consultant to teach a workshop and then never do anything about it other than put up a poster.
Interesting. It's kind of an uncomfortable reality for the left that in law frivolous employment discrimination claims are notoriously common, and there's a chicken-and-egg problem where judges are often hostile to them as a result, and this could help explain some of it.
I suspect that the fact that you don't have a general tort of wrongful dismissal makes this a lot worse.
If white employees had access to a wrongful dismissal claim, then employers wouldn't be able to get away with mistreating them; non-white employees have to rely on discrimination for situations where they aren't being discriminated against, just being treated the same badly as everyone else.
Very sympathetic to the bullshit jobs concept. And it's perhaps helpful to name them: HR, non-P&L owning leadership positions, many/most internal training resources, to name a few.
To the point about why PE can't just buy/fire all of them? Speaking as a person in the space: two reasons. 1) Companies that have these functions are large, and typically above the target size of a PE acquisition. 2) Even if they are in target range, they'd be big enough that the deal would attract negative attention for Blackstone/KKR/whoever (only the biggest firms could make those buys).
These types of jobs are also often perpetuated by taking advantage of America's highly litigious environment. Their only purpose is to fend off frivolous lawsuits. Sounds like rent seeking (bullshit jobs) to me.
Only one leader at Apple owns a P&L and it's Tim Cook, but I don't think all of the other leaders are doing nothing. (Certainly some of them are.) HR provides value by administering your benefits and containing the recruiting team.
The strongest argument for bullshit jobs I can see is arms races, things like medical coders at hospitals and insurance who only exist to fight each other over claims.
I thought Graeber's "bullshit jobs" thesis was actually an even stronger version of "criticize something because you don't have anything useful or positive to say about what should be done".
Haven’t read it...u are saying basically he has no respect for the added value of bureaucratic or consultant types so he weaves an elaborate anti-bureaucratic narrative? In other words he would say the Human Resources department just needs to go?
I think it's partly a substitute for religion. I think I first read that from Max Hussein. It's got original sin (racism) and redemption (being woke)
Also I don't think pointing out sexist things in culture is inherently a case.of not having anything else to say. There is a lot of culture with subtle sexism, racism, xenophobia, etc.
I know of no one in the business world that takes Graber’s ideas seriously. The notion that for-profit businesses, in aggregate, would systematically create useless positions is absurd. (Though such has obviously been happening in academia and the public sector for a long time.)
Yes, economic theory strongly suggests that the private sector can't produce these kinds of jobs... but the evidence is pretty clear that they exist. Graeber's book convinced me that standard economic theory is just wrong, at least in the subfield of labor markets. There seem to be sociological factors so powerful that they overcome economic rationality here.
Managers have their own prerogatives, and can pay people to do useless, ego benefitting things on company money, as shareholders are incapable of monitoring that tightly. However, that does leave opportunities for reform and cutting people - think of the Jack Welch type.
Economic theory suggests no such thing. But it says it cannot be a systemic problem in the private sector and Graber hasn’t come within a mile of showing that it is. The chief criticism I have seen of the book was that it was based on nothing but anecdote and is nothing more novel (or interesting) than warmed-over Marxism.
I used to work at Google and the place is full of useless jobs. They make so much money from their ad business that 50% of the employees do nothing of useful business value and it doesn't matter to them.
I think in a way Google is the new Bell Labs. Bell Labs had a few technological innovations that were so wildly profitable (they invented the frickin’ laser, for Christ sakes) that it was totally fine that much money and effort went into discovering things that had no potential for much profit (e.g., the discovery of microwave background radiation had deeply profound scientific implications, but no commensurate way to monetize it was ever found). Recall that, for instance, that Gmail began life as a personal project with no aim to make any money.
I don't understand this point. For-profit companies, universities, and government departments are all just forms of large organisation. Furthermore, companies are not only driven by profit (they engage in lots of behaviours that do not maximise profits), and seeking profit isn't the only form of fiscal discipline (eg state governments have to balance their books, which is just a different form of financial discipline).
If the phenomenon can exist in a university or a government department - ie, it is a possible phenomenon - then it can exist in a company.
“For-profit companies, universities, and government departments are all just forms of large organisation.”
Business firms are qualitatively different and they *must* produce value or will go bankrupt.
“...profit isn't the only form of fiscal discipline (eg state governments have to balance their books, which is just a different form of financial discipline).”
Governments have no need to spend in a way that produces more value than it takes in taxes. And indeed there are many ways in which they do not. That is an inevitable consequence of being a true monopoly.
Some "successful" governments only need to spend in a way so that voters think they are getting adequate value for the money (thus assuring re-election) , while great governments work to find ways that residents, students, clients are in fact getting more than minimum value.
I worked in local government and I can tell you that an issue of difficulty for staff was trying to balance the quality of life of current residents and companies, with the sometimes conflicting actions (and expenditures) providing for future many may not be interested in.
You’re jumping over the reason for my comment which is your claim that the idea of pointless jobs in a for-profit corporation is “absurd”. My gentle mockery was based on your inability to contemplate even such a minor critique. So the free market becomes more of a religion than a simple tool for organizing an economy— any consideration of a flaw (however trivial) is simply unthinkable. Which is also why “no one in the business world” takes Graeber’s ideas seriously.
I agree regarding systematic creation, but I also think many BS jobs become that way over time (technology, efficiency, etc.) and it is incumbent on the corporation to either morph the job to match needs to skills, or give new skills. But one of the skills employees need is to be keeping skills sharp and watch how their position may be or could be morphing, perhaps even to their greater satisfaction. There is also no doubt that some people are kept in whatever BS jobs because of personal relationships (family, longevity).
I once toured a plant that assembled toner cartridges for office printers. Cases of empty cartridges came in on trucks, giant bags of toner came in on other trucks - both were manufactured overseas.
The plant was highly automated - nearly every step was performed by specialist robots: The filling of the toner, sealing the cartridges, applying labels, boxing the cartridges, putting the boxes into cardboard cases, stacking the cases on pallets, and even moving full pallets to the loading dock. But at the very beginning of the assembly line was the only worker on the line: A woman who took the new, empty cartridges out of a box and placed each into a bracket on the line that transported the cartridges to each successive station on the line. I asked if that first step was impossible to automate. "Oh, no," I was told, "We have the robot to perform that step," but that lady refused to accept the early retirement buyout that the rest of the line workers took and the plant's labor union had ensured she kept her job.
The best part of all far reaching theses of the variety "X is not limited to Y, but also includes Z because X permeates everything" is that they are totally non-refutable, thus incorporating all the features of a good conspiracy theory.
It just completely fails any kind of measure of scholarship or social science. There’s no hypothesis you can seek evidence for or specific claims that can be refuted.
Having thought about this comment, it seems to me that a phenomenon needs to meet 4 criteria to be possibly considered a manifestation of 'white supremacy':
1 - The phenomenon needs to be real, and involve an actual racial gap in behaviour (so if the white guys in the office would be just as glad to stop wearing ties as the non-white guys, having to wear a tie is not 'white supremacy');
2 - The phenomenon ideally should be at least a bit deliberate, and definitely within human control (so the weather in Jamaica is better than the weather in Scotland, but drizzle isn't 'white supremacy');
3 - There must be measurable effects that either benefit white people (put white people on top) or disadvantage non-white people (keep white people on top). So if the non-white people in an office are just as able to be punctual as white people, and it causes them no extra physical, emotional or financial stress, then an expectation of punctuality is not 'white supremacy'.
And then, more controversially perhaps, 4:
4 - There must be a substantial group of non-white people who are angry at the phenomenon, or perceive it as an injustice. I was thinking about managers playing golf here, which I think fails all the first three criteria. The phenomenon is real (people play golf) and there is a racial difference (white people seem to be more likely to play golf), it is deliberate (people could stop playing golf with clients and colleagues if they wanted), and finally there probably is a racial effect at the very margins because some deals really are done on the golf course. But there are no pressure groups of non-white people calling for the sport to be banned, because it is not perceived as an injustice. So playing golf isn't a form of 'white supremacy' (whereas rules that prevent non-white people from joining golf clubs would be).
This is a problem in certain silos in academia, but because we are not supposed to defecate in each other's silos, I'm left pointing it out but will be silent when you ask me for the the geographic location of these silos. Suffice to say that when some of us feebly mumble something like, "Well, first you have to develop an internally consistent theory and then that theory has to give rise to refutable hypotheses that are then testable with observable data..." the tribes in these silos yell "POPPER!!" and throw un-read copies of Thomas Kuhn at us and run us out of their silos.
Other than this world view being completely reductive, I also find it absolutely infantalizing; "the soft bigotry of low expectations" really comes to mind here.
I'm a non-white man and I've spent my entire career working for large US multinational corporations, and if HR departments tried to make excuses for my performance by insisting that I am simply a victim of white supremacy, not only would I would have accomplished exactly nothing, but I would also feel terribly insulted that I am being held to a lower standard than everyone else.
I honestly think delving into whether X is part of white supremacy is so low yield a debate anyway. If punctuality is somehow more common in rich western civilization and this is dominated by white people and can be considered, if we want to talk about it in the nastiest way to have the least productive conversation, as white supremacy, so what? You are conservation biologists, or accountants or whatever institution is administering this weird ass training. You need to be fairer in who you recruit, who you publish, who you promote. Don’t think for a second that making people waste their time in this training or indoctrination makes up for not doing the other stuff. I think the more we talk about whether or not punctuality is racist the more likely I am to bash my head against the wall and also the less likely we are to do anything substantive about inequality. My question to the person bringing in an Okun based training session would be where does this sort of thing sit in your overall effort to be a fair workplace? If it’s your main program, you probably suck.
True. And also if punctuality and objective measurement and productivity are really the lynchpins of white supremacy, POCs should be able to bring this whole thing down by showing up to work on time, being objectively competent, and embracing productivity! But these concepts aren’t really what hold people back, it’s other stuff, it’s bad schools, it’s allocation of resources, it’s rooting interventions to help people in objective measures to ensure those people are actually helped, and other things that don’t lend themselves to nonscientific lists of just “stuff,” calling that stuff white supremacy, having everyone nod their heads yes, and retire for beverages.
The readership of Slow Boring being what it is, I doubt we’re going gear any full-throated defenses of the idea that effectiveness and efficiency are not only bad but literally white supremacy, so I have a related question for the audience…
Okun’s shtick, shorn of its racial aspects, is familiar to anyone who’s ever attended PTA meeting or been part of a dysfunctional organization: the More Process Is Always Better person. You can easily grind any organization to a halt just by demanding one more meeting, another study group and justifying it as “more Democratic”.
Okun has effecting cloaked the death-by-process approach in the language of fighting white supremacy, but this is a universal danger in any organization (heck, it’s literally what we recommended as a method of sabotage to allied-leaning people in Nazi germany) and what I’m really curious about is: will anyone here admit to having done enough time in _conservative_ organizing and activism to say how it manifests there? Constant demand for more prayer groups and bible study?
Not a lot of experience in conservative activism per se, but certainly in the evangelical church.
Two ways this dynamic expresses itself. One is through a tendency to invoke prayerfulness over any subject. While from a Christian perspective this is exactly right, in practice it can unfortunately manifest as deference to authority, as the pastor/elder is expected to be the expert. In more extreme cases in charismatic churches, those who claim divine revelation regarding a subject can be seen to possess special knowledge regarding it. Exhibit A would be the various "prophecies" regarding Trump's 2020 victory. Rarely does interpretation of scripture (the religious equivalent of appeals to objectivity) withstand "lived experience" in either of these cases, as ambiguities in the text abound.
To my mind, both examples have near equivalents in "woke-ism"/"successor ideology". Appeals to authority are often built on a racial hierarchy. Appeals to divine revelation are inseparable in my perspective from references to "lived experience".
And isn’t that she’s saying extremely racist? It sure sounds like she’s saying perfectionism is white supremacy because black and brown people are sloppy.
I'm new to this stuff and it sounds brutally racist to me. Certainly most effective folks of whatever race and people have NOT followed these principles over the millennia. Pretty sure (to take a random sub-Saharan African example inspired by a comment above) that Shaka, king of the Zulus didn't make progress owing to his love of infinite hug-filled result-free committee meetings.
I think that the key point Matt makes is that there is a noticeable constituency of white left-leaning people in the public and NGO sphere who really strongly prefer this process-heavy style, and they're desperate for validation. Hence the willingness to swallow and then regurgitate this stuff without thinking about it properly.
It's that plus the incredibly sweeping characterization of almost everybody on earth into one big category, as though nonwhite cultures haven't been having debates about how to fairly administer society (alongside everything else) for thousands of years. I think there is a non-racist argument you could make that some specific indigenous society tends to make decisions in a non-hierarchical way that modern office managers could learn from, but deciding that those people, all other extant indigenous societies, US citizens of color, every single person in China, India, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Thailand, etc etc etc, are all the same kind of person, could never adapt to different ways of doing business, and if they personally think they disagree it's just because the white supremacists got to them, is incredibly racist.
Totally agree with you on the "More Process Is Always Better" person just kind of being a phenomenon that exists independent of race. I think that relative to the general population, I am more in that camp than the average white 30-something picked up off the street, but when I spent a lot of time in PTO or local governance meetings a few years back, I found myself having to be the one to push for a decision, ANY decision to be made at some point.
Yeah, you suddenly gave me flashbacks to a local Labour party meeting in Leicester (England) years ago. Endless rounds of needing another vote or to form a sub-group to further study an issue. It seemed like a fairly transparent way for monomanical obsessives to exert control by simply wearing everybodyelse who had other things they needed to get on and do down till they just went along with it. Problem is that it can be quite effective at times.
There will always be these sorts of people, and this sort of politics, across all sorts of ideological spaces. It thrives in more (small-d) democratic spaces in which power and decision making is more distributed or malleable.
That said, conservative organizations tend to be somewhat more comfortable with hierarchy than liberal/progressive ones -- formally and culturally.
That isn't to say that every progressive organization is run by committee and every conservative one invokes divine mandate. But the ability for leadership to simply declare a decision, or to have their requests for input be met with deference, seems pretty normal in most of the spaces I'm thinking of.
(My perspective is mostly from the business world in which hierarchy is pretty normal regardless, but also thinking of the operation of evangelical churches and various Christian/homeschool programs with which I've been affiliated.)
My boss founded my company, and while he comes from a conservative background, really he's strongly libertarian - so the background radiation is extremely anti-process. As we've grown, the process we've invented has almost entirely been to prevent recurrences of screw-ups that affected the business in real ways.
(If you look at conservatives, I think you'd have to carefully split up the libertarians and social conservatives that are mixed together, those lines aren't always super obvious.)
Ugh.. yea. The longer and larger an organization gets, the more baroque the process becomes. It's a ratchet. You can always have more process, never less. Every time there's a sub optimal outcome, or the perception of one, and the process folks throw another layer of process on the pile.
And yes, this just a thing about organizations – nothing to do with race. People have plenty of other justifications.
Your comment made me think of the fact that is a lot of literature about the "span of control" and optimum number of people to form a "successful" committee, company sector, etc. With growth and those factors, more communication (process" is inevitable.
The other thing I would say is that in a small(er) business, consistency is less of an issue, as decisions tend to be made by the same person (so you have one HR manager, and all firing decisions go through them: you need a lot less process to ensure that all your firings are consistent as all you need is for that one person to be consistent with themself).
In a bigger business, you need process so that everyone is consistent with each other.
Another way of putting this is that if there are ten independent restaurants then I can't sue the one I work for saying they are discriminating against me because one of the other ones pays better. But if there are ten branches of the same chain, then I can.
My family isn't super involved in any republican or right wing organizing, but if their recent statements and thinking are any indication, it seems like the conspiracies are gaining an upper hand and dominating more and more of their cognitive processes. There is so much mental energy being spent on discovering secret knowledge that the left and the globalists want to hide from you that they're almost not living in a real world anymore. It's like they live in a simulation. How and if that impacts organizing is unknown to me but it seems like it was good for 2020 turnout.
I guess that's pretty distressing but my prediction is that it probably will be bad or net-neutral for Rs in 2024. Trump's appeals and winks to conspiracy theories helped motivate and generate a new base of voters. But it was also part of what drove college educated voters to the Ds in response.
But that QAnon-section of the base only follow the Rs in 2024 if the next candidate keeps that connection alive, which would also keep educated swing voters voting D.
Dear lord, I remember reading this when it was published, which I'm sure was only last week and not nearly 25 years ago. Pardon me, I need to have a lie-down...
I'll say that I consider process super important, but I also see it as a means of subtle control, as you're suggesting here. A good process can allow for a lot of discussion but still force a timely decision.
Given how credential-obsessed white liberals tend to be, her utter lack of scholarly background is the most bewildering aspect of this process. How precisely were inroads made? By what metric is anyone choosing or evaluating her methods?! Or is that white supremecist thinking?
It strikes me as similar to the whole language movement. The idea behind whole language was that learning to read is just like learning to speak. You don’t specifically teach a child to talk, you just talk to them and to other and they eventually figure it out. Humans are hard wired to do this.
Whole language is the idea that people are hard wired to read. As such, you didn’t have to teach them to read just read to them and have books around and they will figure it out.
This was very popular in graduate schools of education for basically aesthetic reasons. This natural, non structured, non hierarchical process was very appealing to the types of people who run graduate schools of education.
Another factor may be that whole language works fine with gifted children and that phonics is dull. Basically everyone who graduates from college is in the top 1/3 for intellectual potential. Most who set policy are well above that. They probably assume what works for them would work for everyone.
They would see the errors of their ways if they thought about were they have below average potential. I'm a terrible athlete. I have weak strength for my size, slow and poor hand eye coordination. Fitness in the US primarily follows a whole language approach. Even in schools we mainly play games and don't focus on learning the basics of exercise.
A whole language approach for physical fitness was disastrous for me. I graduated high school without even knowing the basic forms for elementary weight training exercises and are cardio consisted of just run hard. By contrast when I hired a personal trainer I learned how to do basic exercises and my fitness improved.
It also reflects a cast of mind most prominently expressed by Kendi - that basically everything is presumed to be the way it is because of white supremacy, and not because, say, a sense of urgency may be important to your mission, or objectivity can be important to making good decisions. In a world where everything must be either “racist” or “antiracist,” the paradigm demands that you label race-indifferent values like objectivity, urgency, as covertly racist.
That's the core of it. This discussion reminds me of all the utopian debates they had in France and Germany after 1968 about worker-run factories and student-run universities.
Just substitute "fascist" for "white supremacist" - grading students is fascist, well-written essays are fascist, punctuality is fascist, promotion based on performance is fascist etc.
(And in case anyone doesn’t know, whole language is neurologically nonsense. Human children are wired to learn spoken language—or sign language—that way, but they don’t automatically learn to associate squiggles on a page with language. It works much better to explicitly teach the letter-sound relationships.)
Exactly! And the idea of whole language is so ideologically appealing it’s still has a shocking number of adherents. This despite being, as you said, complete nonsense.
I saw it said (huge amount of empirical reliability here!) that teachers don't love teaching Phonics, that it's kind of repetitive for them and they'd rather just be reading kids stories, etc. So whole language is an attractive approach for that audience. But again, this is hearsay and I'd be curious to hear if there's any basis to it.
I have heard it also might be because teaching phonics has very little autonomy, which offends a teacher’s sense of being a professional.
But if they were teaching kids to read more effectively, there would be more time for subject-matter teaching and reading books (which I think is important, but will not teach most kids to read).
A lot of ed policy seems to be driven by teachers' anxieties about their status as professionals. As a lawyer whose sister is a teacher, and one interested in pursuing ed policy, I spend a good amount of time on eggshells when discussing our jobs. Teachers really are touchy about education being considered a trade.
I think this makes sense. My late mother was a second grade teacher and she was hugely into whole language, probably for some of these reasons. But she also thought that it was a better system for teaching reading and based her opinions on (at least some) of the research at the time. (She retired about 35 years ago, so I don’t know how she would have developed if she had stayed in the field.)
Publishers love it. Can't forget that. Teachers usually have very little say over their curriculums and have to take what the district gives them. Less true in high school, but you're not doing basic literacy work in high school except in some edge cases.
Having worked in education for a little while now, I universally find my co-workers with non-education degrees far more insightful and competent than the ones who subjected themselves to education programs.
Jewel of my high school was a physics teacher with a physics PhD who simply loved working with and cared about the kids, something u can’t teach in an education program or any other program. Nothing against education programs, just an observation.
Best teacher I ever worked with was an engineer who decided she wanted to spending a few years prior to retirement doing some teaching. First year was hard for her but it's hard for everyone. She really shined, even with some pretty tough students. I think those kids thought more like scientists in ten minutes of her class than in months of their other science classes.
I had a fantastic physics teacher - young French woman halfway through her PhD. She knew how to explain the fundamental ideas. I got 92 percentile on the MCAT physics section- and I’m a confirmed liberal arts type who hates math.
I suspect subject matter experts may be over-represented as either best or worst teachers.
In college I had an econ section taught by somebody who primarily worked as an economist for the State, and he was a nice guy but not at all a good teacher for an intro class.
I had a 22-year-old roommate a decade ago who was required to get a masters in education at Hunter because he had landed a gig as a NYC teaching fellow. He was an Amherst College grad. I remember that one day he woke up at 5 AM to *start* his term paper on which his entire grade for the semester for one of his M.Ed classes was based. That was the level of respect that he had for the education he was getting there. To say it was beneath his contempt and a waste of his time would be correct. I don't think he trusted his instructor to even be able to read English at a 10th grade level.
To clarify: this was for a paper due at 8 AM. Basically, he just had to produce a half dozen pages of written English, I think. I also remember him commenting about how the instructor would read from the assigned textbook and completely misunderstand what she was reading, then completely mis-explain it to the class, and then incorrectly answer completely wrongheaded questions as a result. He just couldn't believe these people could navigate the menu at a restaurant, let alone teach or take graduate courses in anything.
My sister is involved in the ed policy world and I see lots of problems with them
1. There's no evidence they make you better at teaching, but most states pay you more if you go to them
2. Their admissions standards, even at the top top ones, are pathetic compared to other grad schools, so there's a lot of people with meaningless credentials
3. There's a lot of ideological hostility to thorough use of quantitative methods, causal ID, etc. in them, which causes a lot of psuedo-social-science
4. Teachers are often deeply protective of them and see their denigration as part of a devaluing of teaching as a mere trade, unlike the true professions of law and medicine that the graduate schools try to copy
A great topic for another time: Exactly what is a profession, and exactly why does everyone want to be one?" Followed by a training in "Changing your customer into a client."
What kind of future educator gets a graduate degree in education, rather than in an area of subject matter? Is this a degree for school administrators rather than teachers?
At least 50% of teaching programs are structured around theories of pedagogy, that is "how" to teach rather than what to teach. This is arguably an important topic because there is no use in being a subject matter expert if you are unable to effectively convey the information to others.
Seems extremely important. Certainly my experience during the pandemic with our 4 kids is that effective teaching that can drive continuous progress with a variety of learners/learning styles is profoundly difficult. I *understand* arithmetic, grammar (properly) etc etc but that isn't the half of of it.
I dunno about this idea that teachers don't learn much pedagogy in school anyway. When I look at a nearby undergraduate elementary ed program in education and it seems like a lot of pedagogy to me. Out of 14 courses 2 are practicum (student teaching usually combined with a 2x weekly seminar session where student teachers talk about how their pedagogy is going), 8 are literally pedagogy (teaching in the various subject areas, literacy, special education), and the remainder are about educational contexts, diversity, technology, and ed psych. So 10/14 are directly pedagogical courses.
Tech and ed psych seem like they would also have some strong applied aspects that aren't totally independent of teaching. I'd argue that having knowledge of students' backgrounds is also an aid to pedagogy, but for the sake of splitting between pedagogy and non pedagogy we can keep them separate.
Now, these are just the 3rd and 4th year courses required once students are accepted into the education program. Students graduating with this degree must also double major and earn a second subject area degree, as well as satisfy the university's general education requirements.
In a sense, less than half of everything these students do in university overall is pedagogy but more than half of their education program is pedagogy.
I think the concern is much more about graduate coursework rather than undergrad. Undergrad teacher training in the US actually seems to work rather well. People can always nitpick the details of some particular course syllabus as faddish, but that will always be true and the structure is sound. EdD programs, on the other hand...
“ In Connecticut, Maryland, and New York, all teachers must earn either a master's in teaching or master's in education within a specified time frame to maintain teacher licensure. In Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, and Oregon, teachers without master's degrees can renew initial or provisional licenses but don't qualify for the highest-level professional licenses.”
This was also my question. I can't imagine a masters degree in physics or English literature will help me in my position as a third grade teacher much if at all, whereas even a "lower quality" masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction has the opportunity to create leaps and bounds in my subject area expertise.
There's strong evidence that generalist education masters' programs do not make teachers more effective. And there's also strong evidence that classroom experience makes young teachers better, so the masters' programs may actually be counterproductive. North Carolina recently eliminated their pay bump for education MAs because of it.
And often the masters degree need not be related to their subject matter, assuming that there are any. Yet another example of good union bargaining. My favorite bumper sticker at negotiation time: "We teach the children".
Yes, one of my social studies teachers in high school in MN liked to brag that he was the highest-paid teacher in the school because he had the most masters degrees. It sure didn't make him a good teacher though - he was awful.
In the 1980s school boards and state legislatures started pushing back on elementary and secondary schools for giving tenure to teachers based pretty much on longevity. So, schools started new frameworks that had a "grid" that included longevity down one axis and education down another. It was like the GS system. You could get a promotion for both years on the job and graduate degrees. As expected, state universities started adding post-secondary degree programs and the boom in differentiated graduate degrees in colleges of education was born. The Urban Institute found 68 distinct MA degrees in colleges of education in 2017. Think about that? 68 different graduate fields all within one college of education.
Heavily siloed research programs totally separated from the teaching and practicum work that prepare educators and tons of status games. So, not that different from other fields.
I've never heard of Okun, though, so I have no idea how widely her work is being used. In my experience, "Whiteness Studies" is kind of dying out because it's become a whole bunch of guilt-ridden navel gazing self-discovery that doesn't move the ball forward. The CRT folks don't even like the Whiteness Studies folks despite seeming like they should agree.
Well one goal of this post was to give people a sense of how widely her work is being used — not universally, but in quite a lot of places including the New York City public school system.
I think it's a peer group thing - a lot of people are sceptical initially but this is the zeitgeist where they are so they hop on board. They are probably also a little nervous about being racist and don't want to speak up.
I am almost certain she's made inroads because people see her name, make an ironically racist assumption, and then never discover she's white. The ol' triple reverse woke racism switcheroo.
I think the "white supremacy culture" thing is dumb and annoying but I also think that all these efforts at equity have made a lot of people try to be better people. I would much rather we ditch the Okun stuff and stick to being good people who try to address racism but I do want to acknowledge that it's not all bad.
I don’t actually disagree with this. For example, a recent document went around Twitter (maybe Okun inspired? I can’t recall) that said something like objectivity is a white supremecist belief. Prima facie ridiculous, sure. But I’ve also been in many spaces where (often) white men claim the mantle of “objectivity” to pummel their opponents, regardless of how objective they are. Let’s sure as hell push back against those assholes!
I suppose that, in the end, is one of the pernicious aspects of Okun—she’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Her problem (and yours) is largely with fucking assholes, not white supremecists.
Well she does now have a PhD from UNC-Greensboro (although she wrote the white supremacy culture stuff with Kenneth Jones long before that). I think the PhD helps with things now
It probably is. In the vein of Okun and others, and because Matt has posted how Harvard would be much wiser to spend their diversity and inclusion money reaching out to Black kids that are not applying and offer them admissions rather than just doing random diversity training that is thin on substance and thick on annoying most everyone and creating arguments, I think that conservation biologists and school districts who flail and grab at the nearest trendy diversity initiative instead of really getting out there and making their institutions more inclusive and respectful, should consider themselves to be perpetuating white supremacy!
I’m old enough to remember how white American sloppiness was going to be crushed by Japanese perfectionism. I’m glad we white people got our shit together.
Yes the 1970s were a mess in terms work ethic and accountability among many in all segments of society. The military was undisciplined and had very low morale, company management was unaccountable, labor was a mess...it was a truism that you didn't want to buy a car made on Monday or Friday....the people who said that were the folks in the car factories.
Neoliberalism was a reaction to all of this. An imperfect one, but it did create a lot of wealth, compared to where we were headed. A lot more could have been done to help the middle class adjust to the changes. For that you can mostly blame Rs.
Thanks for this piece Matt. I'm a Black Southerner who recently returned to the South after a five-year stint in the Bay Area and I'm a bit terrified that Okun's version of "racial justice" that seems primarily concerned with white people's emotions is going to do real harm to improving Black people's material living conditions. I've seen it crop up at the giant (200,000+) firm where I work where "uncomfortable conversations" take up mental energy that should go towards being as intentional about our talent pipelines and career supports for non-white employees as we are about the core work we do. I've seen it in progressive politics where the love of process actively detracts from making progress on stated goals and has the curious side-effect of empowering the process lovers despite supposedly "flat" org-structures.
I was briefly excited last summer when I thought we might be on the cusp of a third Reconstruction (the second being during the 1960s) but the absorption of a scary amount of white Americans' interest in this topic into unfounded and counter-productive arenas makes the boring work necessary to address continuing racial injustices less likely to be successful.
I feel like there are a lot of people that genuinely want to make life better for Black people and other marginalized groups. Better incomes, better fairness in the workplace, better representation in our culture. I think there’s a lot of people who really are less interested in that who really get “turned on” by calling things white supremacist or racist, rubbing people’s noses in these loosely connected with reality type theories, having tons of arguments on the internet, driving people crazy. I think there’s another group who love to profit off this second group or gain political or institutional power with the support of this second group (who are great at bullying detractors). I think we are at a time when it is important to keep the focus on the first group’s objectives as much as possible and I honestly can’t tell if we are winning at doing that right now. I am interested to see what happens over the next decade or so. Doesn’t help that IMO we have only one party remotely interested for making life better for anyone.
The "defensiveness is a form of white supremacy" is a maddening trap. It's always frustrating when some theory holds that disbelieving the theory is evidence the theory is correct—some people use psychonalytic theory this way—but it's particularly frustrating when applied to white supremacy, because our culture (with reason) treats racism/white supremacy as an egregious personal failing! You can't set a category as dangerous, hateful, and backwards and then expect people not to defend themselves against being put in that category. Of course, people sometimes try to reframe an individual being "racist" or "white supremacist" as being (in a society defined by racism) morally neutral, purely descriptive, but of course in practice it isn't treated that way, including by many of the people attempting this reframing.
My main takeaway from this stuff is that Americans really need to learn more non-US history. No one would believe this nonsense if everyone were familiar with at least some of the intellectual and political histories of China, India, Japan, the Middle East, and the pre-Columbus Americas. The idea that there is "only one right way" to do something, for instance, might be pretty appealing to some Confucians. And "either/or thinking – seeing things in terms of good or bad, right or wrong, black or white" reminds me of the pretty famous passage in Mozi where he denounces warfare as just an accumulation of murders, saying basically "if you saw a huge black spot you wouldn't call it white just because it's huge". I could go on.
Also if you think *American* managers get 'defensive' when you, a subordinate, suggest ideas they don't like, and if you think American whites are hierarchical: just *wait* till you meet managers in East Asia, Southern Europe, India, most of the Middle East and most of Africa! You ain't seen *nothing* yet, Ms Okun!
I confess to having once bought into this line of thinking. Basically if you look around and see white people dominating positions of power, and using that power to maintain their position, it’s a slippery slope to seeing bog standard “how to run an organization efficiently” methods as manifestation of racism. It takes some very hyper-collectivist, biased observation to get there, though. It takes willful dismissal of the actual social benefits of any of those behaviors. It takes ignoring the global ubiquity of those behaviors. It requires seeing the world as revolving around whiteness. In so many words, it requires buying into white supremacy yourself.
I agree with other commenters that this stuff is more harmful than just making organizations inefficient. It is literally creating racism where there wasn’t any. It’s making progressive people of color feel oppressed in their organizations. It’s making anti-racists resentful of “white people.” (People will call Matt racist for posting this because he is white.) and worst of all, it feeds the Tucker Carlsons of the world confirmation that “racism against white people is the real problem.”
My simple guidance for earnest anti-racists is: treat white people like you want them to treat people of color. That includes not making lists of what’s “wrong with their culture” that neither reflect their “culture” nor are wrong.
Thank you for doing this. As someone who watched similar insanity spread on the right for years and figured “it’s harmless” - it’s not.
Once people believe in one set of absurd things, it’s very easy to make them believe others. Especially when you tell them things like “objectivity is white supremacy” or in the case of the right “scientific research is a sinister tool of leftist propaganda.” Don’t ever think “it can’t happen here.”
You might want do drop down to @Doctor Memory's thread below and provide some feedback for: "what I’m really curious about is: will anyone here admit to having done enough time in _conservative_ organizing and activism to say how it manifests there? Constant demand for more prayer groups and bible study?"
I consider myself anti-racist. For instance, in my view, if you don't use race as one of the primary lenses through which to learn American history, you're not learning American history. I strongly believe race is a social invention, and not a biological fact. Where appropriate, I think white people should challenge their peers on the issue of race, although I would trust an individual's judgment on when and where it might work, and when and where it might have the opposite effect. I almost always favor public policy that effectively pushes back the effects of hundreds of years of racism. Finally, in this particular arena, if not "woke" (and I consider the term ridiculously reductive), I would probably fit the category of "anti-anti-woke."
That said, Okun is just playing Calvinball. "If you disagree with me, that's White Supremacy. If you challenge my standing to make a rule that you can't disagree with me, that's also White Supremacy. See how this works?" Worse, her Calvinball involves buying into all the most pernicious stereotypes of African-Americans. Just as much as you, Ms. Okun, black people can write, do math, be on time, respect legitimate authority. I don't see where you get off implying otherwise.
I think there are two strands of anti-racism floating around? My son (who is 6) is signed up for some kind of study with an anti-racism foundation and a research university - and the organization's statements about anti-racism match what you posted.
But then there's reports of interventions where they _segregate kids_ as a way to teach anti-racism, or have other interventions that are not race-blind - the idea is that they aren't racist, they are anti-racist because the are racially selective in the opposite direction of past racism.
This second category has conservative up in arms, and it's not too clear to me how much it actually happens because I only end up hearing about it from conservative culture warriors.
Perhaps the terminology for these ideologies and practices are too mixed up and ambiguous now? I agree with virtually everything you wrote (and was not worried about exposing my kid to these kinds of ideas) but consider Okun's ideas to be silly.
I thought one of the values of MY digging into this is that I don't see the left critically looking at the diverse set of ideas that get mashed together and I don't trust conservative media to provide an accurate picture.
I share your concerns and hesitations. I don't really care to participate in the conservative freak out du jour, and I resist spending my time rebutting what, in the aggregate, amounts to a Gish Gallop. On the issue of anti-racism, I certainly don't think the Tucker Carlsons of the world are acting in good faith, and are just trying (as always) to do anything they can to stir the pot. OTOH, I'm forced to admit some of this stuff is pretty bad, and also that it's leaking into mainstream thought somewhat. I'm definitely one of those guys who would've said, "Come on, this is been happening on campuses for at least 50 years. Why freak out now?" But, as it turns out, it seems like it's out there, and needs some push back.
I think the next level response would be that black people writing, doing math, etc. co-opts and subverts white supremacy. In other words, white people should imitate the classical racist stereotypes of black people to promote a brave new world of POC supremacy
At least in the progressive nonprofit work environment there's quite a bit of (understandable) guilt/anxiety about the fact that the organization, which is dedicated to an ostensibly progressive cause, is often extremely white. The reasons for this are entirely predictable: Relative to the level of education required, nonprofit pay isn't great, there are few opportunities for promotion or pay raises, and the jobs are extremely scarce and competitive. So to really make it in nonprofits, you need to have a level of economic security that, in the United States, typically accrues to white people. (As a white person with a postgraduate degree who has worked at nonprofits and grew up in a household with two professional-class parents, I can speak from experience.)
This is an objectively bad outcome and I think nonprofit executives should address it. The problem is that those structural solutions are hard to solve and the answer usually includes some variation of "we need more money." My take is that Okun, DiAngelo, et al. are popular because they are an easy way to make it appear like the organization is "doing something" about its existing racial imbalance without having to commit much in the way of resources.
This is a good point. Another option is the organization can decide to have fewer staff but pay them more. But even after the painful layoffs, that will likely require ongoing uncomfortable organizational changes.
I agree in theory that the work currently being done at progressive nonprofits should be incorporated into institutions that build power, but how do you get from here to there? Some of this work is getting done through progressive orgs, however imperfectly. Its not at all clear to me that much of it will keep going if people in those orgs packed up their stuff and moved into government, which has a bunch of institutional restrictions. And unions in the US are dying, and unless some of the rules around organized labor are changed at the legislative level, I don't think that will change. Political parties are hollowed out, and most of the real action is in the super-PACs and the like, which are supported by a different set of billionaires on both the center-left and right.
Except to pass it, the Senate has to get rid of our limit the filibuster. Manchin and Sinema are hard noes on that. I'm not sure you get 50 Dems even if you do get rid of the filibuster. So the odds are stacked against anything but current trends continuing.
One obvious thing missing here is how these sort of wokeness documents are a massive liability for Democrats and are regularly used on Fox and Facebook to scare low-information viewers about how Dems are coming for you. It’s INCREDIBLY damaging.
It really bothers me how the term "white supremacy" gets used. In normal language it means KKK or Nazis, not describe generalized everyday culture. It's another thing where I feel like highly educated liberals feel the need to use academic terms instead of common language and I find it really condescending.
It's kind of a shell game. When truly odious people like Tucker Carlson say racist stuff they widely get called "racist" and "white supremacist" in all the traditional ways, but then when these same people find themselves recklessly throwing these terms at people and organizations that less obviously deserve it and there's pushback they suddenly switch to the "white supremacy is a widespread phenomenon we should all be using for self-examination" definition.
One of my pet peeves in this country is that people frequently characterize as white supremacist someone who considers Poles and Russians as racially inferior and would like to enslave or exterminate them. :P Not every form of racism is white supremacy. Nazis, for example, should be considered Aryan supremacists or something similar.
Would you like to see these ideas summarized in an infographic? Follow the link below!
Last summer, my lefty friends started circulating this approvingly on social media — this thing that says the scientific method is white culture — I knew something was deeply fucked up about all this. Science is for everyone!
Yes though I want to note this is a somewhat different list by a different author. I didn’t get into her as much because I don’t see her work as much out in the wild.
My favorite part of this is the part that denounces the "white culture" belief that "individuals [are] assumed to be in control of their environment, 'You get what you deserve'", a uniquely western European concept sometimes referred to as [checks notes] "karma"
Yes, the folks who equate structure and whiteness...have they never spent time in Asia? China, Japan, South Korea are all known to me first hand and there is so much structure there. Perfectionism is white? Tell that to the Japanese. Can't comment on south Asia.
This one, like the Okun's stuff actually states as fact all the same bullshit that was used to defend slavery, Jim Crow and other forms of racism and then just pivots to a different end point. Instead of 'white people, uniquely, work hard, can think logically and plan effectively for the future - therefore they have the moral right to tell everyone what to do' it's 'white people, uniquely, work hard, can think logically and plan effectively for the future - therefore that stuff is bad'. Shit, at least the first argument made some kind of sense, if you accept the (screamingly racist) premise. The latter not at all.
- therefore, culture must contribute to systemic racism
- therefore, major attributes of predominant organizational culture are bad
Hiring, developing, and promoting underrepresented groups has been a fairly intractable problem. I've spent the last 10 years in smaller companies where diversity has been very lacking. In general, some white managers I've worked with, and otherwise respect, are oversensitive to minority hires who don't perform. Undermining the idea of performance will only feed their believe that diversity is a worthwhile theoretical goal, but hard to achieve.
Jumping off a comment below, a fun hot take might be to do a "mommy party/daddy party" thing on how, as society polarizes and the two political coalitions sort more and more along gender lines, each side is taking on more of the pathologies that stereotypically correlate with their dominant genders. So conservatives are turning more and more to moronic dominance rituals instead of thinking things through strategically ("I need your help can't tell you what it is you can never ask me about it later and we're gonna hurt some people." "Whose car are we gonna take?") While progressives are becoming more interested in talking relative to acting, as well as becoming overly sensitive to feelings to the exclusion of substantive goals, and fixated on extremely micro-level personality-based factional rivalries. That ought to get people's attention. (Obviously these are stereotypes and I don't actually subscribe to all of this, yada yada.)
I have a slightly reductive view of wokeness/political correctness that I think is worth considering. It's not a complete explanation but I think it might be a partial one.
It strikes me that a significant motivation for wokeness is *not being confident in one's own first-order abilities*. When a college student in a poetry class puts his hand up and says "I think the metaphor in the second stanza is sexist", it's sometimes because the student doesn't have anything interesting to say about meter or imagery or the other things the professor might have hoped to hear about. Critiquing injustice is almost always *easier* than whatever it is a group of people is supposed to be doing at any given time.
I think Matt is right that white leftists are more likely than white conservatives to prefer doing collaborative work in a non-hierarchical way, but that isn't necessarily a problem if they're good at what they're doing. The more serious risk is that woke-ifying all human activities serves the vested interests of people who aren't very good at doing actual things.
I also think David Graeber's theory of "bullshit jobs" is relevant here. A larger and larger share of white-collar professional employment seems to consist of positions that are essentially bureaucratic: people who get paid to monitor and surveil the people doing the first-order work. (Insert gif of guy digging hole with people standing around watching.)
I think Graeber's book is amazingly important and raises serious questions about whether neoclassical economists understand anything at all about how labor markets work. But it's also worth considering whether the "bullshit jobs" phenomenon might be a major cause of workplace wokeness. For whatever reason, the phase of capitalism we're currently in has produced an enormous class of people who don't need to be good at any useful first-order activity, and who have a strong vested interest in developing new reasons for everyone else to be monitored and surveilled.
Oops, somehow I left out the thesis here. My point was that Okun's argument (every aspect of a group activity that's conducive to effectiveness or efficiency is racist) has an especially powerful appeal for people who don't know how to do first-order things and resent seeing other people accomplish anything. *Of course* people who do workplace trainings want to include that idea in the trainings.
You may be overstating the bullshit jobs case. Other people's jobs often seem like bullshit until they leave and you have to do part of it yourself.
And yet you may be understating the issues with wokesim. People don't just use it to seek validation, they often use it as a weapon to accuse others and get ahead in bureaucratic power struggles. To be fair, most of it is just dumb trainings and speechifying, but there is a malign aspect as well.
Okun's book certainly sounds (from Matt's description) like it's oriented at the people who are trying very hard to make sure that nobody can measure whether they're doing any useful work, criticize them if they aren't doing any work, or try to force or incent them to do more useful work, using "racism" as the rhetorical superweapon that it is in certain circles.
(I think the concept of a "rhetorical superweapon" from the rationalism community is a kind of dangerous one, because it feels like it sometimes turns off analysis. But an important one, because there are certainly circles where saying "X is racist" completely shifts the discussion and puts everyone on the defensive, and that's... obviously useful to some people.)
It's a mix of things. There's certainly a more sinister or power-mongering aspect in some cases.
I think reading Graeber's book may have changed the way I think about work in general. As an economics major I was taught that people are employed because the work they do has a marginal value to society that's equal to the salary they earn. Graeber was an anthropologist and clearly had no time for that approach; he thought bullshit jobs existed because people in certain social strata needed an affirmation of their status, and the need produced the jobs whether they had social value or not. Antiracist management consulting starts to look like the newest subsector of a much larger share of the economy that exists because people have a deep need to believe they're doing something useful, not because they are.
You’re saying two things are in opposition, when they’re not. Someone hired to affirm status *is providing a service*, the value of which is *definitionally* what they’re paid. Yes, a lot of it can be explained by the misappropriation of funds (and of course, that’s why universities, being governmental or charitable organizations, are particularly susceptible to it) but I dunno, I think you’re underrating the value gained by some service jobs.
I am so skeptical of the bullshit jobs concept. Like, if most jobs are bullshit then why can’t PE firms buy up companies, fire half the staff, and make profits go up 4x (100 revenue, 90 costs, 2/3 costs labor, so 10->43 profit)? Also, thinking about my job, it’s just so offensive to think the various support from other parts of the business is bullshit - it’s not! Could they be done more efficiently? Probably, but it would be hard work because that work is important.
The book is definitely worth reading. A lot of bullshit jobs as discussed in the book are driven by regulatory or quasi-regulatory requirements, so they can't be eliminated even though they're mostly bullshit. Another big chunk of bullshit jobs are people in important-sounding leadership positions.
Notably, bullshit jobs aren't necessarily jobs that don't produce revenue for the company - they're just jobs that don't make the world a better place. So a PE firm can't crank up profits by ditching all the bullshit jobs. For an insurance company, all the layers of bureaucracy are a feature that helps them minimize claim payouts while still clearly having an "official" process that complies with regulatory requirements. But the jobs are bullshit because all they can do is give stock responses and pass things up the chain.
I've always been at a bit of a loss why regulatory compliance was considered bullshit. Regulations might be bullshit, but legal compliance certainly is not. What else is a profit-seeking business to do?
Well, it's worth noting that the book is actually focused on the psychological impacts of bullshit work on workers. It's not a book full of actionable business advice - it's a book about why so many people seem to be miserable despite very high material standards of living.
The point is that being asked to spend 8+ hours a day on tasks that have no discernible impact is ruinous on mental well-being. Spending your life's work dealing with regulatory compliance issues that you believe in your heart are pointless, all for a company that produces a product you believe is bad, is not a recipe for a fulfilling career.
I suppose my real quibble is with the premise—that "fulfilling" careers are likely or even necessary. Life often sort of sucks, and the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to be fulfilled, regardless. The vast majority of human history is filled with somewhat miserable folks doing thankless tasks that don't fulfill them in order to have food and shelter. That will continue apace.
The capitalistic framing—mind you, I'm not anti-capitalistic—that one's job is one's life is the root issue here. Find fulfillment elsewhere, not in your job.
This is still very much missing the point of the book. The book suggests that we have made a profound mistake and have a deep misunderstanding of what sorts of tasks are miserable.
The usual thought is that menial labor is unfulfilling and miserable, whereas knowledgeable, skilled work is more fulfilling. Bullshit Jobs questions that premise. Manual labor like farming, stocking shelves, or working an assembly line can be difficult and thankless, but at the end of the day it is easy to see how your labor is benefiting society. When your job is to attend meetings and come up with impressive-looking PowerPoint slides, it is difficult to see how your labor is benefiting society.
If this is the case, then as we increasingly automate our economy and more people move into "bullshit" positions, we are not creating a happier, more comfortable world for people to live in - we are creating a nightmare dystopia that saddles huge sections of the middle class with all sorts of new and interesting mental illnesses.
I don't know that I fully agree with the take, and I think too much of it is based on a self-selected bunch of anecdotes rather than clear data. But the thesis is provocative and worthy of consideration, and shouldn't just be written off as whining.
Yeah as someone with some experience compliance work is really really existentially meaningless even when you support the regulatory scheme at issue.
But I mean with the wrong perspective any job could be considered meaningless. I’m a heart surgeon but dammit I’m no better than the average heart surgeon so really I could be replaced by an average heart surgeon and no lives changed I’m a waste I should have done something else. Your mental health may be improved by finding meaning in your work rather than pursuing a much harder task of finding meaningful work(since you’d have to change jobs and then might find that meaningless and then have to change again and make no money as an underwater basket weaver and go back to your meaningless heart surgery like a big failure).
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
I think my main problem with the book is that the regulatory bullshit jobs actually exist to protect against bad faith rentseeking behaviour like frivolous lawsuits and such. Nobody says that being a police officer is a bullshit job because it's more obvious that people will commit crimes in their absence, but it's also true that people will take the piss in the absence of those regulatory functions!
What I find kind of ironic about that though is that there are indubitably people who will *still* cheat the system while those of us who try to follow the rules spend increasing amounts of time on compliance issues. It's a real drag on productivity.
Just to give an example, I'm about to submit a reimbursement request for the third time as each time I'm being asked for more/different evidence that I actually did what I said I did. If I wanted to cheat the system, I could just make something up. Instead, I'm increasingly demoralized by the experience, to the point that if this one doesn't go through, I might just eat the cost.
This isn't just a drag on my productivity, but also that of the 3-4 people in the loop who keep going back and forth on what is or isn't required.
“bullshit jobs aren't necessarily jobs that don't produce revenue for the company - they're just jobs that don't make the world a better place.”
In a business firm the point of increasing revenue is to produce profit.
Yes, but the point is that the profit motive only sometimes aligns with the goal of actually making the world a better place. In at least some cases, the profit motive is compatible with "bullshit jobs."
My personal experience with this is my last job, that was intellectually challenging, but at the end of the day amounted to devising increasingly sophisticated ways to separate people from their money while providing no additional value.
This doesn't actually quite fit the criteria laid out in the book for bullshit jobs, and I do think the book has issues, but I also think that once you read it and really think about what he's saying, you start to see bullshit jobs all over the place. I don't 100% endorse the exact framing of that book, but I think it is an idea worthy of serious thought, and it is incorrect to dismiss a strawman version of the claims he makes.
“...the profit motive only sometimes aligns with the goal of actually making the world a better place.”
Never mind the motive, pay attention to the result. Profit makes the world a better place. (Do I need to point out that I make that statement in the context of a society that ensures rights are respected under their law, protects the commons, etc.? I hope not.)
“...you start to see bullshit jobs all over the place.”
Such as...?
I think that most people here agree, but DG is really trying to explain people reporting a total lack of fulfillment with their job, not a theory of economic inefficiency.
“...DG is really trying to explain people reporting a total lack of fulfillment with their job...”
If that is true than the book is more trite than I had even imagined.
It's actually pretty insightful and does go a long way towards explaining why a lot of people report that their job could disappear and it wouldn't make a difference when asked.
And that focus on profit above all, has, again, contributed to making our country as close to perfect as any country can be.
“Above all” is absurdly incorrect.
Is it? Only recently have corporations started to broaden their mandate beyond maximizing shareholder value. For most of the last 40 years profit above all else has been the stated goal. Which, as many on this thread have pointed out, is no way to run a society. How can we say this? Because in those same 40 years we’ve fallen in just about every quality of life category compared to other industrialized countries.
That basically is what PE firms do though. The classic Bullshit Jobs formulation, however, only has certain classes of these jobs that are unacceptable to being deleted. For instance, it considers a lot of corporate attorneys/IP lawyers to be bullshit, because of the arms-race nature of major corporate law: you only need 20 lawyers on a major case because the other guy has 20 lawyers and the stakes are high. Graeber believes this is duplication. I don't really agree, but there is your answer.
I feel like the organizations most prone to bullshit jobs might be universities. The number of middleman administrators sucking in money from those places is staggering.
Solid take, even if it's not the whole story there are elements that probably are there.
Don't forget that all the workplace diversity stuff exists primarily to protect companies from lawsuits. All the outward facing diversity, black squares on twitter, etc. is all marketing. It's done because the companies understand how to appeal to their customers and drive engagement with their brands. These bullshit jobs provide value even if they do not always directly produce value.
Here's a modification I would make.
Corporations start hiring diversity trainers as a labor law matter to try to insulate themselves from lawsuits. But the people doing that work don't want to think of themselves as participants in a cynical game whose actual purpose is to shield capital from accountability. So it creates a hothouse atmosphere in which loopy ideological ideas can thrive, because you want to come up with a theoretical justification for the work that includes a justificaiton for the work not having any tangible benefits.
I think it's too cynical to say corporate diversity programs are just about avoiding lawsuits. Many are well intentioned and exist because employers actually believe, for good reason, their business will be more successful with a more diverse workforce (more viewpoints and creativity, less groupthink, better able to connect with customers, etc). But like often happens in corporate culture (and elsewhere), when an actually good and nuanced idea is rolled out in a standardized fashion and becomes a consultant cottage industry, it gets jargonized and reduced to something rote that starts to seem like a caricature of itself. In fact, when diversity programs are implemented in such crude fashion, they can actually create legal risk - look at what happened at Coca-Cola, where the general counsel recently got fired for announcing what basically looked like a racial quota for lawyer hiring, and came under fire for allegedly violating federal anti-discrimination laws.
The nice thing about discrimination laws and court cases is there is are actual case you can point to and say this thing that happened is so racist it cost the company 30 million dollars don’t do that thing.
I think that is historically how this DEI stuff came into existence but a more recent change/evolution that is happening in progressive spaces is that line staff are the ones demanding a stronger DEI presence within their organizations, even sometimes viewing them as a counterweight to the (traditionally) white leadership teams that otherwise have management control.
I work at a progressive nonprofit that is in the process of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with a newly formed union, and while I don't really want to even anonymously get into much detail, one thing that has stuck out to me in the union's demands is that they are explicitly asking for certain hiring decisions to be taken out of the hands of the management team and into the hands of the DEI team. I'm not entirely sure how to read that in any broader labor analysis, but it certainly strikes me as strange. Maybe the growth of DEI can just be summed up by the fact that both labor and management think they're on their side?
Sometimes it is just a company in a multiethnic, multicultural society trying to provide a basis of common understanding among the people that work at the company. They should try something right? Is the solution to do nothing and hope the invisible hand of (pick your cause or reason for human kindness here) to take the wheel? I've worked in these groups and been to these meetings so I get the frustration people have about them (especially when they are at 4pm on a Friday afternoon) but what's the solution here? Or is this just a general call to consider the purpose of what you are doing before charging in, diversity training documents a'flyin'?
It is not so much that diversity training is bad in and of itself but more that it is bad in that it is a substitute for more substantive action. So one thing you might do if you are Google or Amazon is do targeted hiring from HBCU, coding bootcamps and other places where you can recruit people from diverse backgrounds. But that is harder than just doing some diversity training and continuing to toss any resumes from people who didn't go to Stanford/MIT/etc.
In many of those cases, it's not so much a distraction from more substantive action as it is a consolation prize when substantive action isn't delivering the results people want.
For example, companies like Google and Amazon are in fact doing all of those things you mentioned. Their recruiters are laser-focused on diversity, sometimes to an illegal extent (see Wilberg v. Google). The problem is, they've already tried everything they can think of, and this is what the result looks like. It's not as if there's a pool of unemployed black or Hispanic coders who the tech companies are overlooking, or a stack of resumes they aren't looking at (they interview engineers without prestigious degrees all the time). On the contrary, recruiters are fighting over all the candidates they can find; there just aren't enough to go around.
But activists don't want to hear that it's a "pipeline problem", so they keep looking for ways the company can Do Something, and diversity training gives them a well of potential change that never runs dry. Every grievance from a minority employee can be held up as evidence that corporate culture must be scaring off the candidates, or even scaring students out of learning to code in the first place, so they double down on training to make the culture More Inclusive. And when it inevitably has no effect on the hiring statistics, they see it as evidence that there's still More Work To Be Done.
There are actual things that companies can do to address pipeline problems like invest in work to attract historically marginalized people into the field. Microsoft has given grants to programs that offer free computer coding training to women. They could provide money for HBCUs to provide more scholarships in computer science etc. Saying it a pipeline problem is a diagnosis of a problem not an excuse to do nothing to solve it.
If they wanted to take it to the meta level they could even ask themselves whether they couldn’t get better results by training people from scratch, say right out of high school.
I can imagine the takes if Google made a private, for their own benefit college or coding bootcamp and tried to get highschool students to forsake college for it.
Have an actual lawyer run it. One who has read the actual lawsuit who can say what is and isn’t discrimination. And say so not by their feelings but but by honest to god legal precedent.
Not sure about this. As with use of force / police cases there is a vast territory of bad behavior that is probably not quite bad enough to sustain a verdict, at least in federal employment law. And in most circuits there is a well developed list of appalling behavior that is not quite enough to survive even summary judgment. That same behavior could still be toxic and awful and/or racist in the workplace and make everyone/many people miserable.
At the same time, the answer to the question "Could I be sued for this?" is yes. There is no pre-screen for meritless lawsuits - they may be dismissed early, but almost anyone can file a suit.
There's real value in having material that teaches people about working together across cultural backgrounds and being effective. For instance, my sister has mentioned that corporate culture in America tends to be more top down, while the Netherlands is more consensus-driven. Finding effective solutions to identifying and bridging those gaps is absolutely a good idea. This also goes for learning how to manage employees with very different political beliefs.
The is that this is hard to do well. Sometimes, the problem is just devolution into nonsense and noise (Team Woke hardly has a monopoly on meaningless corporate babble). Other times, you start seeing an ideological mission creep along the lines of "to really embrace diversity, we must remake society" -- especially if a company is using them to brand itself to its employees and the outside world as "progressive".
I guess the best solution is just to have a well-honed BS detector, and look for material that's less abstract, and more focused on concrete approaches. If something would be applicable for a Chinese company working in Kenya, then it's probably worth taking seriously.
A World where no corporation was raciest enough to get sued would be a better world. I am surprised that that the diversity training world is not run by burned out lawyers. People who understand rules can read cases and describe them to others, but can't work 14 hour days. The things that cause a hostile work environment are bad. Things like calendars of hot chicks everyone works on really do create an atmosphere of sexism. Providing free tacos on Cinco De Mayo and free soul food on MLK day seems dumb. But it promotes inclusion. And counts as evidence that the work place is not hostile.
My wife was once a (voluntary) EEO rep in our organization. Her takeaway was that many problems could have been avoided with (a) good manners and (b) fewer conflict-averse bosses.
Yeah, there's a ton of stuff that just comes down to "don't be an asshole," "respect people regardless of position," or "don't discriminate"
At the same time, it blows my mind that we need this overly complicated framework to get people to take those things seriously.
I like to say that the bar for basic human decency is really low, and yet there are far too many people who fail to clear it.
The issue to me is not that there should be policies that are, to coin a phrase, anti-racisit but that they should be policies that actually combat racism rather that accelerate racial segregation and limit solidarity.
Nate Silver and Ezra had a conversation where Ezra asked how do you build a strong organization? Nate replied just don’t higher ass holes and jerks. Because whatever work they do gets eaten by constantly clearing up office politics issues.
Nate Silver might not be the best person to deliver that message?
The "No Assholes Rule" is a good rule
As a manager, I’ve sat through trainings which were basically “here’s ways you could be personally liable if someone sues the company for discrimination,” which were kind of scary, and in trainings that I thought were interesting and tended to focus on diversity of thought. Google also put up a YouTube of one of their diversity seminars maybe 7 years ago, and I thought it was interesting.
I think corporate diversity programs are motivated by a number of different issues. Protecting from lawsuits is probably the main driver of sexual harassment trainings. But I think most racial justice trainings are motivated by companies either getting complaints about their employees lack cultural competency and diverse staffs or organizations getting these objections from donors. In some cases they also seem to be sincerely motivated by stakeholders wanting to be doing the right thing about racial justice because it matches their organizational values or is consistent with their sense of identity. I have been asked by organizations that I work for or participate in to do diversity work for all of these reasons because I have done academic work on racism, have a history of racial justice advocacy which means I seem like have some passing competence and can probably be guilted into doing that work for free. Sometimes the request seems to be in good faith, sometimes less so. I am usually happy to try. However, when I explain that my proposal is not to sit around and talk about Peggy's backpack and the various aspects people seem surprised. When I say the first step would be to do a quantitative audit of how things like hiring decisions, referrals, promotions, admissions, discipline, participation line up with how we would expect them to in a space that was not impacted by racism and the second step would be to do a qualitative audit of how various stakeholders feel about how they are treated they tend to feel like that seems a bit like overkill. When the next step is described as taking every aspect of racial inequality and examining it to see what portion of it might be attributable to explicit racist decision-making, implicit bias is systems, or unaddressed racist patterns, upstream or historical, that have not been adequately corrected for their discomfort grows. When the last step is described as actually taking action like removing problematic decision-makers, changing decision-making systems to reduce potential bias, or taking practice approachs to correcting for historic inequities or upstream problems the shit really starts to hit the fan. That is because what all these groups who want diversity training really have in common is that they all think that they are not racist and that any changes they might need to make are merely small or cosmetic and not systemic. So usually they decide it would be preferable to bring in a consultant to teach a workshop and then never do anything about it other than put up a poster.
Interesting. It's kind of an uncomfortable reality for the left that in law frivolous employment discrimination claims are notoriously common, and there's a chicken-and-egg problem where judges are often hostile to them as a result, and this could help explain some of it.
I suspect that the fact that you don't have a general tort of wrongful dismissal makes this a lot worse.
If white employees had access to a wrongful dismissal claim, then employers wouldn't be able to get away with mistreating them; non-white employees have to rely on discrimination for situations where they aren't being discriminated against, just being treated the same badly as everyone else.
Very sympathetic to the bullshit jobs concept. And it's perhaps helpful to name them: HR, non-P&L owning leadership positions, many/most internal training resources, to name a few.
To the point about why PE can't just buy/fire all of them? Speaking as a person in the space: two reasons. 1) Companies that have these functions are large, and typically above the target size of a PE acquisition. 2) Even if they are in target range, they'd be big enough that the deal would attract negative attention for Blackstone/KKR/whoever (only the biggest firms could make those buys).
These types of jobs are also often perpetuated by taking advantage of America's highly litigious environment. Their only purpose is to fend off frivolous lawsuits. Sounds like rent seeking (bullshit jobs) to me.
Only one leader at Apple owns a P&L and it's Tim Cook, but I don't think all of the other leaders are doing nothing. (Certainly some of them are.) HR provides value by administering your benefits and containing the recruiting team.
The strongest argument for bullshit jobs I can see is arms races, things like medical coders at hospitals and insurance who only exist to fight each other over claims.
I thought Graeber's "bullshit jobs" thesis was actually an even stronger version of "criticize something because you don't have anything useful or positive to say about what should be done".
Haven’t read it...u are saying basically he has no respect for the added value of bureaucratic or consultant types so he weaves an elaborate anti-bureaucratic narrative? In other words he would say the Human Resources department just needs to go?
I think it's partly a substitute for religion. I think I first read that from Max Hussein. It's got original sin (racism) and redemption (being woke)
Also I don't think pointing out sexist things in culture is inherently a case.of not having anything else to say. There is a lot of culture with subtle sexism, racism, xenophobia, etc.
*Maz Hussain
I know of no one in the business world that takes Graber’s ideas seriously. The notion that for-profit businesses, in aggregate, would systematically create useless positions is absurd. (Though such has obviously been happening in academia and the public sector for a long time.)
Yes, economic theory strongly suggests that the private sector can't produce these kinds of jobs... but the evidence is pretty clear that they exist. Graeber's book convinced me that standard economic theory is just wrong, at least in the subfield of labor markets. There seem to be sociological factors so powerful that they overcome economic rationality here.
Managers have their own prerogatives, and can pay people to do useless, ego benefitting things on company money, as shareholders are incapable of monitoring that tightly. However, that does leave opportunities for reform and cutting people - think of the Jack Welch type.
Economic theory suggests no such thing. But it says it cannot be a systemic problem in the private sector and Graber hasn’t come within a mile of showing that it is. The chief criticism I have seen of the book was that it was based on nothing but anecdote and is nothing more novel (or interesting) than warmed-over Marxism.
I used to work at Google and the place is full of useless jobs. They make so much money from their ad business that 50% of the employees do nothing of useful business value and it doesn't matter to them.
I think in a way Google is the new Bell Labs. Bell Labs had a few technological innovations that were so wildly profitable (they invented the frickin’ laser, for Christ sakes) that it was totally fine that much money and effort went into discovering things that had no potential for much profit (e.g., the discovery of microwave background radiation had deeply profound scientific implications, but no commensurate way to monetize it was ever found). Recall that, for instance, that Gmail began life as a personal project with no aim to make any money.
I don't understand this point. For-profit companies, universities, and government departments are all just forms of large organisation. Furthermore, companies are not only driven by profit (they engage in lots of behaviours that do not maximise profits), and seeking profit isn't the only form of fiscal discipline (eg state governments have to balance their books, which is just a different form of financial discipline).
If the phenomenon can exist in a university or a government department - ie, it is a possible phenomenon - then it can exist in a company.
“For-profit companies, universities, and government departments are all just forms of large organisation.”
Business firms are qualitatively different and they *must* produce value or will go bankrupt.
“...profit isn't the only form of fiscal discipline (eg state governments have to balance their books, which is just a different form of financial discipline).”
Governments have no need to spend in a way that produces more value than it takes in taxes. And indeed there are many ways in which they do not. That is an inevitable consequence of being a true monopoly.
Some "successful" governments only need to spend in a way so that voters think they are getting adequate value for the money (thus assuring re-election) , while great governments work to find ways that residents, students, clients are in fact getting more than minimum value.
I worked in local government and I can tell you that an issue of difficulty for staff was trying to balance the quality of life of current residents and companies, with the sometimes conflicting actions (and expenditures) providing for future many may not be interested in.
Yes, because the Holy Free Market never makes a mistake, that's why our country is so perfect.
The free market is not perfect, just far better than any alternatives that have been tried.
You’re jumping over the reason for my comment which is your claim that the idea of pointless jobs in a for-profit corporation is “absurd”. My gentle mockery was based on your inability to contemplate even such a minor critique. So the free market becomes more of a religion than a simple tool for organizing an economy— any consideration of a flaw (however trivial) is simply unthinkable. Which is also why “no one in the business world” takes Graeber’s ideas seriously.
“...your claim that the idea of pointless jobs in a for-profit corporation is ‘absurd.’”
I made no such broad claim.
I agree regarding systematic creation, but I also think many BS jobs become that way over time (technology, efficiency, etc.) and it is incumbent on the corporation to either morph the job to match needs to skills, or give new skills. But one of the skills employees need is to be keeping skills sharp and watch how their position may be or could be morphing, perhaps even to their greater satisfaction. There is also no doubt that some people are kept in whatever BS jobs because of personal relationships (family, longevity).
I once toured a plant that assembled toner cartridges for office printers. Cases of empty cartridges came in on trucks, giant bags of toner came in on other trucks - both were manufactured overseas.
The plant was highly automated - nearly every step was performed by specialist robots: The filling of the toner, sealing the cartridges, applying labels, boxing the cartridges, putting the boxes into cardboard cases, stacking the cases on pallets, and even moving full pallets to the loading dock. But at the very beginning of the assembly line was the only worker on the line: A woman who took the new, empty cartridges out of a box and placed each into a bracket on the line that transported the cartridges to each successive station on the line. I asked if that first step was impossible to automate. "Oh, no," I was told, "We have the robot to perform that step," but that lady refused to accept the early retirement buyout that the rest of the line workers took and the plant's labor union had ensured she kept her job.
The best part of all far reaching theses of the variety "X is not limited to Y, but also includes Z because X permeates everything" is that they are totally non-refutable, thus incorporating all the features of a good conspiracy theory.
It just completely fails any kind of measure of scholarship or social science. There’s no hypothesis you can seek evidence for or specific claims that can be refuted.
Which is why it’s clearly a religion
Having thought about this comment, it seems to me that a phenomenon needs to meet 4 criteria to be possibly considered a manifestation of 'white supremacy':
1 - The phenomenon needs to be real, and involve an actual racial gap in behaviour (so if the white guys in the office would be just as glad to stop wearing ties as the non-white guys, having to wear a tie is not 'white supremacy');
2 - The phenomenon ideally should be at least a bit deliberate, and definitely within human control (so the weather in Jamaica is better than the weather in Scotland, but drizzle isn't 'white supremacy');
3 - There must be measurable effects that either benefit white people (put white people on top) or disadvantage non-white people (keep white people on top). So if the non-white people in an office are just as able to be punctual as white people, and it causes them no extra physical, emotional or financial stress, then an expectation of punctuality is not 'white supremacy'.
And then, more controversially perhaps, 4:
4 - There must be a substantial group of non-white people who are angry at the phenomenon, or perceive it as an injustice. I was thinking about managers playing golf here, which I think fails all the first three criteria. The phenomenon is real (people play golf) and there is a racial difference (white people seem to be more likely to play golf), it is deliberate (people could stop playing golf with clients and colleagues if they wanted), and finally there probably is a racial effect at the very margins because some deals really are done on the golf course. But there are no pressure groups of non-white people calling for the sport to be banned, because it is not perceived as an injustice. So playing golf isn't a form of 'white supremacy' (whereas rules that prevent non-white people from joining golf clubs would be).
This is a problem in certain silos in academia, but because we are not supposed to defecate in each other's silos, I'm left pointing it out but will be silent when you ask me for the the geographic location of these silos. Suffice to say that when some of us feebly mumble something like, "Well, first you have to develop an internally consistent theory and then that theory has to give rise to refutable hypotheses that are then testable with observable data..." the tribes in these silos yell "POPPER!!" and throw un-read copies of Thomas Kuhn at us and run us out of their silos.
Other than this world view being completely reductive, I also find it absolutely infantalizing; "the soft bigotry of low expectations" really comes to mind here.
I'm a non-white man and I've spent my entire career working for large US multinational corporations, and if HR departments tried to make excuses for my performance by insisting that I am simply a victim of white supremacy, not only would I would have accomplished exactly nothing, but I would also feel terribly insulted that I am being held to a lower standard than everyone else.
Replace "white supremacy" with "satanism" basically and you can get the same sense of moral outrage.
And look -- racism, like demons, are real and terrible!
But satanist panic is not effective demonology, nor is this claptrap effective anti-racism.
I honestly think delving into whether X is part of white supremacy is so low yield a debate anyway. If punctuality is somehow more common in rich western civilization and this is dominated by white people and can be considered, if we want to talk about it in the nastiest way to have the least productive conversation, as white supremacy, so what? You are conservation biologists, or accountants or whatever institution is administering this weird ass training. You need to be fairer in who you recruit, who you publish, who you promote. Don’t think for a second that making people waste their time in this training or indoctrination makes up for not doing the other stuff. I think the more we talk about whether or not punctuality is racist the more likely I am to bash my head against the wall and also the less likely we are to do anything substantive about inequality. My question to the person bringing in an Okun based training session would be where does this sort of thing sit in your overall effort to be a fair workplace? If it’s your main program, you probably suck.
True. And also if punctuality and objective measurement and productivity are really the lynchpins of white supremacy, POCs should be able to bring this whole thing down by showing up to work on time, being objectively competent, and embracing productivity! But these concepts aren’t really what hold people back, it’s other stuff, it’s bad schools, it’s allocation of resources, it’s rooting interventions to help people in objective measures to ensure those people are actually helped, and other things that don’t lend themselves to nonscientific lists of just “stuff,” calling that stuff white supremacy, having everyone nod their heads yes, and retire for beverages.
The readership of Slow Boring being what it is, I doubt we’re going gear any full-throated defenses of the idea that effectiveness and efficiency are not only bad but literally white supremacy, so I have a related question for the audience…
Okun’s shtick, shorn of its racial aspects, is familiar to anyone who’s ever attended PTA meeting or been part of a dysfunctional organization: the More Process Is Always Better person. You can easily grind any organization to a halt just by demanding one more meeting, another study group and justifying it as “more Democratic”.
Okun has effecting cloaked the death-by-process approach in the language of fighting white supremacy, but this is a universal danger in any organization (heck, it’s literally what we recommended as a method of sabotage to allied-leaning people in Nazi germany) and what I’m really curious about is: will anyone here admit to having done enough time in _conservative_ organizing and activism to say how it manifests there? Constant demand for more prayer groups and bible study?
Not a lot of experience in conservative activism per se, but certainly in the evangelical church.
Two ways this dynamic expresses itself. One is through a tendency to invoke prayerfulness over any subject. While from a Christian perspective this is exactly right, in practice it can unfortunately manifest as deference to authority, as the pastor/elder is expected to be the expert. In more extreme cases in charismatic churches, those who claim divine revelation regarding a subject can be seen to possess special knowledge regarding it. Exhibit A would be the various "prophecies" regarding Trump's 2020 victory. Rarely does interpretation of scripture (the religious equivalent of appeals to objectivity) withstand "lived experience" in either of these cases, as ambiguities in the text abound.
To my mind, both examples have near equivalents in "woke-ism"/"successor ideology". Appeals to authority are often built on a racial hierarchy. Appeals to divine revelation are inseparable in my perspective from references to "lived experience".
And isn’t that she’s saying extremely racist? It sure sounds like she’s saying perfectionism is white supremacy because black and brown people are sloppy.
I'm new to this stuff and it sounds brutally racist to me. Certainly most effective folks of whatever race and people have NOT followed these principles over the millennia. Pretty sure (to take a random sub-Saharan African example inspired by a comment above) that Shaka, king of the Zulus didn't make progress owing to his love of infinite hug-filled result-free committee meetings.
I think that the key point Matt makes is that there is a noticeable constituency of white left-leaning people in the public and NGO sphere who really strongly prefer this process-heavy style, and they're desperate for validation. Hence the willingness to swallow and then regurgitate this stuff without thinking about it properly.
Yes but she's also saying sloppiness is good, and so therefore it would be even more racist to say that black and brown people *aren't* sloppy.
It's that plus the incredibly sweeping characterization of almost everybody on earth into one big category, as though nonwhite cultures haven't been having debates about how to fairly administer society (alongside everything else) for thousands of years. I think there is a non-racist argument you could make that some specific indigenous society tends to make decisions in a non-hierarchical way that modern office managers could learn from, but deciding that those people, all other extant indigenous societies, US citizens of color, every single person in China, India, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Thailand, etc etc etc, are all the same kind of person, could never adapt to different ways of doing business, and if they personally think they disagree it's just because the white supremacists got to them, is incredibly racist.
Totally agree with you on the "More Process Is Always Better" person just kind of being a phenomenon that exists independent of race. I think that relative to the general population, I am more in that camp than the average white 30-something picked up off the street, but when I spent a lot of time in PTO or local governance meetings a few years back, I found myself having to be the one to push for a decision, ANY decision to be made at some point.
Yeah, you suddenly gave me flashbacks to a local Labour party meeting in Leicester (England) years ago. Endless rounds of needing another vote or to form a sub-group to further study an issue. It seemed like a fairly transparent way for monomanical obsessives to exert control by simply wearing everybodyelse who had other things they needed to get on and do down till they just went along with it. Problem is that it can be quite effective at times.
Yes and no.
There will always be these sorts of people, and this sort of politics, across all sorts of ideological spaces. It thrives in more (small-d) democratic spaces in which power and decision making is more distributed or malleable.
That said, conservative organizations tend to be somewhat more comfortable with hierarchy than liberal/progressive ones -- formally and culturally.
That isn't to say that every progressive organization is run by committee and every conservative one invokes divine mandate. But the ability for leadership to simply declare a decision, or to have their requests for input be met with deference, seems pretty normal in most of the spaces I'm thinking of.
(My perspective is mostly from the business world in which hierarchy is pretty normal regardless, but also thinking of the operation of evangelical churches and various Christian/homeschool programs with which I've been affiliated.)
My boss founded my company, and while he comes from a conservative background, really he's strongly libertarian - so the background radiation is extremely anti-process. As we've grown, the process we've invented has almost entirely been to prevent recurrences of screw-ups that affected the business in real ways.
(If you look at conservatives, I think you'd have to carefully split up the libertarians and social conservatives that are mixed together, those lines aren't always super obvious.)
Ugh.. yea. The longer and larger an organization gets, the more baroque the process becomes. It's a ratchet. You can always have more process, never less. Every time there's a sub optimal outcome, or the perception of one, and the process folks throw another layer of process on the pile.
And yes, this just a thing about organizations – nothing to do with race. People have plenty of other justifications.
Your comment made me think of the fact that is a lot of literature about the "span of control" and optimum number of people to form a "successful" committee, company sector, etc. With growth and those factors, more communication (process" is inevitable.
The other thing I would say is that in a small(er) business, consistency is less of an issue, as decisions tend to be made by the same person (so you have one HR manager, and all firing decisions go through them: you need a lot less process to ensure that all your firings are consistent as all you need is for that one person to be consistent with themself).
In a bigger business, you need process so that everyone is consistent with each other.
Another way of putting this is that if there are ten independent restaurants then I can't sue the one I work for saying they are discriminating against me because one of the other ones pays better. But if there are ten branches of the same chain, then I can.
My family isn't super involved in any republican or right wing organizing, but if their recent statements and thinking are any indication, it seems like the conspiracies are gaining an upper hand and dominating more and more of their cognitive processes. There is so much mental energy being spent on discovering secret knowledge that the left and the globalists want to hide from you that they're almost not living in a real world anymore. It's like they live in a simulation. How and if that impacts organizing is unknown to me but it seems like it was good for 2020 turnout.
I guess that's pretty distressing but my prediction is that it probably will be bad or net-neutral for Rs in 2024. Trump's appeals and winks to conspiracy theories helped motivate and generate a new base of voters. But it was also part of what drove college educated voters to the Ds in response.
But that QAnon-section of the base only follow the Rs in 2024 if the next candidate keeps that connection alive, which would also keep educated swing voters voting D.
Yup. It’s not new. Check out this classic from 1997: https://www.salon.com/1997/01/13/women_7/
Dear lord, I remember reading this when it was published, which I'm sure was only last week and not nearly 25 years ago. Pardon me, I need to have a lie-down...
I'll say that I consider process super important, but I also see it as a means of subtle control, as you're suggesting here. A good process can allow for a lot of discussion but still force a timely decision.
Oh for sure -- process is really important! There's a whole field of study about how to run organizations effectively!
But like most powerful tools, it can be wielded for evil as well as for good.
Lordy, autocorrect. “I doubt we’re going to get”. “Okun has effectively”. Sheesh.
Given how credential-obsessed white liberals tend to be, her utter lack of scholarly background is the most bewildering aspect of this process. How precisely were inroads made? By what metric is anyone choosing or evaluating her methods?! Or is that white supremecist thinking?
I have big questions about what exactly is going on in graduate schools of education where all kinds of nonsense gets shopped around
It strikes me as similar to the whole language movement. The idea behind whole language was that learning to read is just like learning to speak. You don’t specifically teach a child to talk, you just talk to them and to other and they eventually figure it out. Humans are hard wired to do this.
Whole language is the idea that people are hard wired to read. As such, you didn’t have to teach them to read just read to them and have books around and they will figure it out.
This was very popular in graduate schools of education for basically aesthetic reasons. This natural, non structured, non hierarchical process was very appealing to the types of people who run graduate schools of education.
Yes, exactly — it's identity politics for leftists who hate rigid structure.
Another factor may be that whole language works fine with gifted children and that phonics is dull. Basically everyone who graduates from college is in the top 1/3 for intellectual potential. Most who set policy are well above that. They probably assume what works for them would work for everyone.
They would see the errors of their ways if they thought about were they have below average potential. I'm a terrible athlete. I have weak strength for my size, slow and poor hand eye coordination. Fitness in the US primarily follows a whole language approach. Even in schools we mainly play games and don't focus on learning the basics of exercise.
A whole language approach for physical fitness was disastrous for me. I graduated high school without even knowing the basic forms for elementary weight training exercises and are cardio consisted of just run hard. By contrast when I hired a personal trainer I learned how to do basic exercises and my fitness improved.
It also reflects a cast of mind most prominently expressed by Kendi - that basically everything is presumed to be the way it is because of white supremacy, and not because, say, a sense of urgency may be important to your mission, or objectivity can be important to making good decisions. In a world where everything must be either “racist” or “antiracist,” the paradigm demands that you label race-indifferent values like objectivity, urgency, as covertly racist.
That's the core of it. This discussion reminds me of all the utopian debates they had in France and Germany after 1968 about worker-run factories and student-run universities.
Just substitute "fascist" for "white supremacist" - grading students is fascist, well-written essays are fascist, punctuality is fascist, promotion based on performance is fascist etc.
(And in case anyone doesn’t know, whole language is neurologically nonsense. Human children are wired to learn spoken language—or sign language—that way, but they don’t automatically learn to associate squiggles on a page with language. It works much better to explicitly teach the letter-sound relationships.)
Exactly! And the idea of whole language is so ideologically appealing it’s still has a shocking number of adherents. This despite being, as you said, complete nonsense.
I saw it said (huge amount of empirical reliability here!) that teachers don't love teaching Phonics, that it's kind of repetitive for them and they'd rather just be reading kids stories, etc. So whole language is an attractive approach for that audience. But again, this is hearsay and I'd be curious to hear if there's any basis to it.
I have heard it also might be because teaching phonics has very little autonomy, which offends a teacher’s sense of being a professional.
But if they were teaching kids to read more effectively, there would be more time for subject-matter teaching and reading books (which I think is important, but will not teach most kids to read).
A lot of ed policy seems to be driven by teachers' anxieties about their status as professionals. As a lawyer whose sister is a teacher, and one interested in pursuing ed policy, I spend a good amount of time on eggshells when discussing our jobs. Teachers really are touchy about education being considered a trade.
I think this makes sense. My late mother was a second grade teacher and she was hugely into whole language, probably for some of these reasons. But she also thought that it was a better system for teaching reading and based her opinions on (at least some) of the research at the time. (She retired about 35 years ago, so I don’t know how she would have developed if she had stayed in the field.)
Publishers love it. Can't forget that. Teachers usually have very little say over their curriculums and have to take what the district gives them. Less true in high school, but you're not doing basic literacy work in high school except in some edge cases.
Having worked in education for a little while now, I universally find my co-workers with non-education degrees far more insightful and competent than the ones who subjected themselves to education programs.
As far as I can recall, all my best teachers had specific subject matter training.
Jewel of my high school was a physics teacher with a physics PhD who simply loved working with and cared about the kids, something u can’t teach in an education program or any other program. Nothing against education programs, just an observation.
Best teacher I ever worked with was an engineer who decided she wanted to spending a few years prior to retirement doing some teaching. First year was hard for her but it's hard for everyone. She really shined, even with some pretty tough students. I think those kids thought more like scientists in ten minutes of her class than in months of their other science classes.
I had a fantastic physics teacher - young French woman halfway through her PhD. She knew how to explain the fundamental ideas. I got 92 percentile on the MCAT physics section- and I’m a confirmed liberal arts type who hates math.
I suspect subject matter experts may be over-represented as either best or worst teachers.
In college I had an econ section taught by somebody who primarily worked as an economist for the State, and he was a nice guy but not at all a good teacher for an intro class.
I had a 22-year-old roommate a decade ago who was required to get a masters in education at Hunter because he had landed a gig as a NYC teaching fellow. He was an Amherst College grad. I remember that one day he woke up at 5 AM to *start* his term paper on which his entire grade for the semester for one of his M.Ed classes was based. That was the level of respect that he had for the education he was getting there. To say it was beneath his contempt and a waste of his time would be correct. I don't think he trusted his instructor to even be able to read English at a 10th grade level.
To clarify: this was for a paper due at 8 AM. Basically, he just had to produce a half dozen pages of written English, I think. I also remember him commenting about how the instructor would read from the assigned textbook and completely misunderstand what she was reading, then completely mis-explain it to the class, and then incorrectly answer completely wrongheaded questions as a result. He just couldn't believe these people could navigate the menu at a restaurant, let alone teach or take graduate courses in anything.
Well, I sympathize.
Lotta trick questions on those menus.
My sister is involved in the ed policy world and I see lots of problems with them
1. There's no evidence they make you better at teaching, but most states pay you more if you go to them
2. Their admissions standards, even at the top top ones, are pathetic compared to other grad schools, so there's a lot of people with meaningless credentials
3. There's a lot of ideological hostility to thorough use of quantitative methods, causal ID, etc. in them, which causes a lot of psuedo-social-science
4. Teachers are often deeply protective of them and see their denigration as part of a devaluing of teaching as a mere trade, unlike the true professions of law and medicine that the graduate schools try to copy
A great topic for another time: Exactly what is a profession, and exactly why does everyone want to be one?" Followed by a training in "Changing your customer into a client."
This is so scary.
What kind of future educator gets a graduate degree in education, rather than in an area of subject matter? Is this a degree for school administrators rather than teachers?
At least 50% of teaching programs are structured around theories of pedagogy, that is "how" to teach rather than what to teach. This is arguably an important topic because there is no use in being a subject matter expert if you are unable to effectively convey the information to others.
Seems extremely important. Certainly my experience during the pandemic with our 4 kids is that effective teaching that can drive continuous progress with a variety of learners/learning styles is profoundly difficult. I *understand* arithmetic, grammar (properly) etc etc but that isn't the half of of it.
The whole word/phonics debate is a pedagogy one for example, something that a comp lit major would not have obvious insight in.
I dunno about this idea that teachers don't learn much pedagogy in school anyway. When I look at a nearby undergraduate elementary ed program in education and it seems like a lot of pedagogy to me. Out of 14 courses 2 are practicum (student teaching usually combined with a 2x weekly seminar session where student teachers talk about how their pedagogy is going), 8 are literally pedagogy (teaching in the various subject areas, literacy, special education), and the remainder are about educational contexts, diversity, technology, and ed psych. So 10/14 are directly pedagogical courses.
Tech and ed psych seem like they would also have some strong applied aspects that aren't totally independent of teaching. I'd argue that having knowledge of students' backgrounds is also an aid to pedagogy, but for the sake of splitting between pedagogy and non pedagogy we can keep them separate.
Now, these are just the 3rd and 4th year courses required once students are accepted into the education program. Students graduating with this degree must also double major and earn a second subject area degree, as well as satisfy the university's general education requirements.
In a sense, less than half of everything these students do in university overall is pedagogy but more than half of their education program is pedagogy.
I think the concern is much more about graduate coursework rather than undergrad. Undergrad teacher training in the US actually seems to work rather well. People can always nitpick the details of some particular course syllabus as faddish, but that will always be true and the structure is sound. EdD programs, on the other hand...
Yeah, I think this is true. Typically EdD and PhD students are teaching pedagogy courses rather than taking them.
It's true, it's just that much of what ed schools teach isn't pedagogy.
“ In Connecticut, Maryland, and New York, all teachers must earn either a master's in teaching or master's in education within a specified time frame to maintain teacher licensure. In Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, and Oregon, teachers without master's degrees can renew initial or provisional licenses but don't qualify for the highest-level professional licenses.”
Which subject area should elementary school teachers earn their masters degrees in?
Elementary school teachers don’t need a master’s degree in anything.
This was also my question. I can't imagine a masters degree in physics or English literature will help me in my position as a third grade teacher much if at all, whereas even a "lower quality" masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction has the opportunity to create leaps and bounds in my subject area expertise.
There's strong evidence that generalist education masters' programs do not make teachers more effective. And there's also strong evidence that classroom experience makes young teachers better, so the masters' programs may actually be counterproductive. North Carolina recently eliminated their pay bump for education MAs because of it.
And often the masters degree need not be related to their subject matter, assuming that there are any. Yet another example of good union bargaining. My favorite bumper sticker at negotiation time: "We teach the children".
Yes, one of my social studies teachers in high school in MN liked to brag that he was the highest-paid teacher in the school because he had the most masters degrees. It sure didn't make him a good teacher though - he was awful.
Yet another example of why "more education" is not the answer to all of society's problems and, in fact, can actually create them.
In the 1980s school boards and state legislatures started pushing back on elementary and secondary schools for giving tenure to teachers based pretty much on longevity. So, schools started new frameworks that had a "grid" that included longevity down one axis and education down another. It was like the GS system. You could get a promotion for both years on the job and graduate degrees. As expected, state universities started adding post-secondary degree programs and the boom in differentiated graduate degrees in colleges of education was born. The Urban Institute found 68 distinct MA degrees in colleges of education in 2017. Think about that? 68 different graduate fields all within one college of education.
I mean "one college of education" in the college/global sense (not in the just Cal State Hayward sense)
Heavily siloed research programs totally separated from the teaching and practicum work that prepare educators and tons of status games. So, not that different from other fields.
I've never heard of Okun, though, so I have no idea how widely her work is being used. In my experience, "Whiteness Studies" is kind of dying out because it's become a whole bunch of guilt-ridden navel gazing self-discovery that doesn't move the ball forward. The CRT folks don't even like the Whiteness Studies folks despite seeming like they should agree.
Well one goal of this post was to give people a sense of how widely her work is being used — not universally, but in quite a lot of places including the New York City public school system.
I should add: there's a reason all education policy is driven by economists!
I think it's a peer group thing - a lot of people are sceptical initially but this is the zeitgeist where they are so they hop on board. They are probably also a little nervous about being racist and don't want to speak up.
Matt, I'll link you this again: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41820214
I am almost certain she's made inroads because people see her name, make an ironically racist assumption, and then never discover she's white. The ol' triple reverse woke racism switcheroo.
I think the "white supremacy culture" thing is dumb and annoying but I also think that all these efforts at equity have made a lot of people try to be better people. I would much rather we ditch the Okun stuff and stick to being good people who try to address racism but I do want to acknowledge that it's not all bad.
I don’t actually disagree with this. For example, a recent document went around Twitter (maybe Okun inspired? I can’t recall) that said something like objectivity is a white supremecist belief. Prima facie ridiculous, sure. But I’ve also been in many spaces where (often) white men claim the mantle of “objectivity” to pummel their opponents, regardless of how objective they are. Let’s sure as hell push back against those assholes!
I suppose that, in the end, is one of the pernicious aspects of Okun—she’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Her problem (and yours) is largely with fucking assholes, not white supremecists.
Almost any tactic can be picked up and used ‘in support of’ white supremacy. That doesn’t make all tactics inherently supportive of white supremacy.
Precisely my point.
Well she does now have a PhD from UNC-Greensboro (although she wrote the white supremacy culture stuff with Kenneth Jones long before that). I think the PhD helps with things now
It probably is. In the vein of Okun and others, and because Matt has posted how Harvard would be much wiser to spend their diversity and inclusion money reaching out to Black kids that are not applying and offer them admissions rather than just doing random diversity training that is thin on substance and thick on annoying most everyone and creating arguments, I think that conservation biologists and school districts who flail and grab at the nearest trendy diversity initiative instead of really getting out there and making their institutions more inclusive and respectful, should consider themselves to be perpetuating white supremacy!
I’m old enough to remember how white American sloppiness was going to be crushed by Japanese perfectionism. I’m glad we white people got our shit together.
Yes the 1970s were a mess in terms work ethic and accountability among many in all segments of society. The military was undisciplined and had very low morale, company management was unaccountable, labor was a mess...it was a truism that you didn't want to buy a car made on Monday or Friday....the people who said that were the folks in the car factories.
Neoliberalism was a reaction to all of this. An imperfect one, but it did create a lot of wealth, compared to where we were headed. A lot more could have been done to help the middle class adjust to the changes. For that you can mostly blame Rs.
Thanks for this piece Matt. I'm a Black Southerner who recently returned to the South after a five-year stint in the Bay Area and I'm a bit terrified that Okun's version of "racial justice" that seems primarily concerned with white people's emotions is going to do real harm to improving Black people's material living conditions. I've seen it crop up at the giant (200,000+) firm where I work where "uncomfortable conversations" take up mental energy that should go towards being as intentional about our talent pipelines and career supports for non-white employees as we are about the core work we do. I've seen it in progressive politics where the love of process actively detracts from making progress on stated goals and has the curious side-effect of empowering the process lovers despite supposedly "flat" org-structures.
I was briefly excited last summer when I thought we might be on the cusp of a third Reconstruction (the second being during the 1960s) but the absorption of a scary amount of white Americans' interest in this topic into unfounded and counter-productive arenas makes the boring work necessary to address continuing racial injustices less likely to be successful.
I feel like there are a lot of people that genuinely want to make life better for Black people and other marginalized groups. Better incomes, better fairness in the workplace, better representation in our culture. I think there’s a lot of people who really are less interested in that who really get “turned on” by calling things white supremacist or racist, rubbing people’s noses in these loosely connected with reality type theories, having tons of arguments on the internet, driving people crazy. I think there’s another group who love to profit off this second group or gain political or institutional power with the support of this second group (who are great at bullying detractors). I think we are at a time when it is important to keep the focus on the first group’s objectives as much as possible and I honestly can’t tell if we are winning at doing that right now. I am interested to see what happens over the next decade or so. Doesn’t help that IMO we have only one party remotely interested for making life better for anyone.
The "defensiveness is a form of white supremacy" is a maddening trap. It's always frustrating when some theory holds that disbelieving the theory is evidence the theory is correct—some people use psychonalytic theory this way—but it's particularly frustrating when applied to white supremacy, because our culture (with reason) treats racism/white supremacy as an egregious personal failing! You can't set a category as dangerous, hateful, and backwards and then expect people not to defend themselves against being put in that category. Of course, people sometimes try to reframe an individual being "racist" or "white supremacist" as being (in a society defined by racism) morally neutral, purely descriptive, but of course in practice it isn't treated that way, including by many of the people attempting this reframing.
Kafkatrapping: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122
My main takeaway from this stuff is that Americans really need to learn more non-US history. No one would believe this nonsense if everyone were familiar with at least some of the intellectual and political histories of China, India, Japan, the Middle East, and the pre-Columbus Americas. The idea that there is "only one right way" to do something, for instance, might be pretty appealing to some Confucians. And "either/or thinking – seeing things in terms of good or bad, right or wrong, black or white" reminds me of the pretty famous passage in Mozi where he denounces warfare as just an accumulation of murders, saying basically "if you saw a huge black spot you wouldn't call it white just because it's huge". I could go on.
This reminds me of the response to "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus".
Also if you think *American* managers get 'defensive' when you, a subordinate, suggest ideas they don't like, and if you think American whites are hierarchical: just *wait* till you meet managers in East Asia, Southern Europe, India, most of the Middle East and most of Africa! You ain't seen *nothing* yet, Ms Okun!
I confess to having once bought into this line of thinking. Basically if you look around and see white people dominating positions of power, and using that power to maintain their position, it’s a slippery slope to seeing bog standard “how to run an organization efficiently” methods as manifestation of racism. It takes some very hyper-collectivist, biased observation to get there, though. It takes willful dismissal of the actual social benefits of any of those behaviors. It takes ignoring the global ubiquity of those behaviors. It requires seeing the world as revolving around whiteness. In so many words, it requires buying into white supremacy yourself.
I agree with other commenters that this stuff is more harmful than just making organizations inefficient. It is literally creating racism where there wasn’t any. It’s making progressive people of color feel oppressed in their organizations. It’s making anti-racists resentful of “white people.” (People will call Matt racist for posting this because he is white.) and worst of all, it feeds the Tucker Carlsons of the world confirmation that “racism against white people is the real problem.”
My simple guidance for earnest anti-racists is: treat white people like you want them to treat people of color. That includes not making lists of what’s “wrong with their culture” that neither reflect their “culture” nor are wrong.
Kudos for acknowledging that. When did you realize the problems of this lines of thinking? What prompted you to see it as an error?
Way too much to capture in a comment :) https://postwoke.substack.com/p/waking-up-from-woke
Thank you for doing this. As someone who watched similar insanity spread on the right for years and figured “it’s harmless” - it’s not.
Once people believe in one set of absurd things, it’s very easy to make them believe others. Especially when you tell them things like “objectivity is white supremacy” or in the case of the right “scientific research is a sinister tool of leftist propaganda.” Don’t ever think “it can’t happen here.”
You might want do drop down to @Doctor Memory's thread below and provide some feedback for: "what I’m really curious about is: will anyone here admit to having done enough time in _conservative_ organizing and activism to say how it manifests there? Constant demand for more prayer groups and bible study?"
When being radical about helping minorities is more important than actually helping minorities then you are lost.
This is a line I'm going to remember.
I consider myself anti-racist. For instance, in my view, if you don't use race as one of the primary lenses through which to learn American history, you're not learning American history. I strongly believe race is a social invention, and not a biological fact. Where appropriate, I think white people should challenge their peers on the issue of race, although I would trust an individual's judgment on when and where it might work, and when and where it might have the opposite effect. I almost always favor public policy that effectively pushes back the effects of hundreds of years of racism. Finally, in this particular arena, if not "woke" (and I consider the term ridiculously reductive), I would probably fit the category of "anti-anti-woke."
That said, Okun is just playing Calvinball. "If you disagree with me, that's White Supremacy. If you challenge my standing to make a rule that you can't disagree with me, that's also White Supremacy. See how this works?" Worse, her Calvinball involves buying into all the most pernicious stereotypes of African-Americans. Just as much as you, Ms. Okun, black people can write, do math, be on time, respect legitimate authority. I don't see where you get off implying otherwise.
I think there are two strands of anti-racism floating around? My son (who is 6) is signed up for some kind of study with an anti-racism foundation and a research university - and the organization's statements about anti-racism match what you posted.
But then there's reports of interventions where they _segregate kids_ as a way to teach anti-racism, or have other interventions that are not race-blind - the idea is that they aren't racist, they are anti-racist because the are racially selective in the opposite direction of past racism.
This second category has conservative up in arms, and it's not too clear to me how much it actually happens because I only end up hearing about it from conservative culture warriors.
Perhaps the terminology for these ideologies and practices are too mixed up and ambiguous now? I agree with virtually everything you wrote (and was not worried about exposing my kid to these kinds of ideas) but consider Okun's ideas to be silly.
I thought one of the values of MY digging into this is that I don't see the left critically looking at the diverse set of ideas that get mashed together and I don't trust conservative media to provide an accurate picture.
I share your concerns and hesitations. I don't really care to participate in the conservative freak out du jour, and I resist spending my time rebutting what, in the aggregate, amounts to a Gish Gallop. On the issue of anti-racism, I certainly don't think the Tucker Carlsons of the world are acting in good faith, and are just trying (as always) to do anything they can to stir the pot. OTOH, I'm forced to admit some of this stuff is pretty bad, and also that it's leaking into mainstream thought somewhat. I'm definitely one of those guys who would've said, "Come on, this is been happening on campuses for at least 50 years. Why freak out now?" But, as it turns out, it seems like it's out there, and needs some push back.
Does that make you anti-anti-anti-racist? Anti-anti-anti-anti-egalitarian?
Lol! Might need some mathematical notation for all this.
I think the next level response would be that black people writing, doing math, etc. co-opts and subverts white supremacy. In other words, white people should imitate the classical racist stereotypes of black people to promote a brave new world of POC supremacy
At least in the progressive nonprofit work environment there's quite a bit of (understandable) guilt/anxiety about the fact that the organization, which is dedicated to an ostensibly progressive cause, is often extremely white. The reasons for this are entirely predictable: Relative to the level of education required, nonprofit pay isn't great, there are few opportunities for promotion or pay raises, and the jobs are extremely scarce and competitive. So to really make it in nonprofits, you need to have a level of economic security that, in the United States, typically accrues to white people. (As a white person with a postgraduate degree who has worked at nonprofits and grew up in a household with two professional-class parents, I can speak from experience.)
This is an objectively bad outcome and I think nonprofit executives should address it. The problem is that those structural solutions are hard to solve and the answer usually includes some variation of "we need more money." My take is that Okun, DiAngelo, et al. are popular because they are an easy way to make it appear like the organization is "doing something" about its existing racial imbalance without having to commit much in the way of resources.
This is a good point. Another option is the organization can decide to have fewer staff but pay them more. But even after the painful layoffs, that will likely require ongoing uncomfortable organizational changes.
Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable conclusion to draw--there's a reason I don't work at a nonprofit anymore.
I agree in theory that the work currently being done at progressive nonprofits should be incorporated into institutions that build power, but how do you get from here to there? Some of this work is getting done through progressive orgs, however imperfectly. Its not at all clear to me that much of it will keep going if people in those orgs packed up their stuff and moved into government, which has a bunch of institutional restrictions. And unions in the US are dying, and unless some of the rules around organized labor are changed at the legislative level, I don't think that will change. Political parties are hollowed out, and most of the real action is in the super-PACs and the like, which are supported by a different set of billionaires on both the center-left and right.
Except to pass it, the Senate has to get rid of our limit the filibuster. Manchin and Sinema are hard noes on that. I'm not sure you get 50 Dems even if you do get rid of the filibuster. So the odds are stacked against anything but current trends continuing.
One obvious thing missing here is how these sort of wokeness documents are a massive liability for Democrats and are regularly used on Fox and Facebook to scare low-information viewers about how Dems are coming for you. It’s INCREDIBLY damaging.
100%
It really bothers me how the term "white supremacy" gets used. In normal language it means KKK or Nazis, not describe generalized everyday culture. It's another thing where I feel like highly educated liberals feel the need to use academic terms instead of common language and I find it really condescending.
It's kind of a shell game. When truly odious people like Tucker Carlson say racist stuff they widely get called "racist" and "white supremacist" in all the traditional ways, but then when these same people find themselves recklessly throwing these terms at people and organizations that less obviously deserve it and there's pushback they suddenly switch to the "white supremacy is a widespread phenomenon we should all be using for self-examination" definition.
One of my pet peeves in this country is that people frequently characterize as white supremacist someone who considers Poles and Russians as racially inferior and would like to enslave or exterminate them. :P Not every form of racism is white supremacy. Nazis, for example, should be considered Aryan supremacists or something similar.
To be clear, I am a liberal with a degree....but it still bugs the hell out of me
Would you like to see these ideas summarized in an infographic? Follow the link below!
Last summer, my lefty friends started circulating this approvingly on social media — this thing that says the scientific method is white culture — I knew something was deeply fucked up about all this. Science is for everyone!
https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333
Yes though I want to note this is a somewhat different list by a different author. I didn’t get into her as much because I don’t see her work as much out in the wild.
My favorite part of this is the part that denounces the "white culture" belief that "individuals [are] assumed to be in control of their environment, 'You get what you deserve'", a uniquely western European concept sometimes referred to as [checks notes] "karma"
Yes, the folks who equate structure and whiteness...have they never spent time in Asia? China, Japan, South Korea are all known to me first hand and there is so much structure there. Perfectionism is white? Tell that to the Japanese. Can't comment on south Asia.
This one, like the Okun's stuff actually states as fact all the same bullshit that was used to defend slavery, Jim Crow and other forms of racism and then just pivots to a different end point. Instead of 'white people, uniquely, work hard, can think logically and plan effectively for the future - therefore they have the moral right to tell everyone what to do' it's 'white people, uniquely, work hard, can think logically and plan effectively for the future - therefore that stuff is bad'. Shit, at least the first argument made some kind of sense, if you accept the (screamingly racist) premise. The latter not at all.
The argument seems to derive from this logic:
- systemic racism exists in organizations
- therefore, culture must contribute to systemic racism
- therefore, major attributes of predominant organizational culture are bad
Hiring, developing, and promoting underrepresented groups has been a fairly intractable problem. I've spent the last 10 years in smaller companies where diversity has been very lacking. In general, some white managers I've worked with, and otherwise respect, are oversensitive to minority hires who don't perform. Undermining the idea of performance will only feed their believe that diversity is a worthwhile theoretical goal, but hard to achieve.
Before The Gist was cancelled (for reasons related to this topic), Mike Pesca did a great episode on the Smithsonian flyer that hits a lot of the notes Matt covers in this post. Worth a listen. https://slate.com/podcasts/the-gist/2020/07/third-wave-anti-racism-and-the-smithsonian
Jumping off a comment below, a fun hot take might be to do a "mommy party/daddy party" thing on how, as society polarizes and the two political coalitions sort more and more along gender lines, each side is taking on more of the pathologies that stereotypically correlate with their dominant genders. So conservatives are turning more and more to moronic dominance rituals instead of thinking things through strategically ("I need your help can't tell you what it is you can never ask me about it later and we're gonna hurt some people." "Whose car are we gonna take?") While progressives are becoming more interested in talking relative to acting, as well as becoming overly sensitive to feelings to the exclusion of substantive goals, and fixated on extremely micro-level personality-based factional rivalries. That ought to get people's attention. (Obviously these are stereotypes and I don't actually subscribe to all of this, yada yada.)
This is really funny but also very, very problematic. You are cancelled.
Darnit! Will buy three Kendi books today as penance.
Liked for the reference to The Town
Was not random: The GOP House leaders actually played this clip to their caucus members in a strategy meeting! lol https://www.politico.com/blogs/click/2011/07/affleck-suddenly-involved-in-the-debt-debates-037827
That is ... something