I'm sure it'll be obvious what has compelled me to elaborate on what I’ve said in older articles (see my Discrimination tab in the sidebar): that DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) misuse is one of those things where almost everybody knows it is bad and unwelcome, but they tolerate it, because in the broadest sense there is little they can do about it. Let me highlight why DEI misuse is such a net cost to society, starting with the most obvious, but going down to the least obvious.
1) It has a negative effect on everyone who would ordinarily be hired on merit but is not hired due to a DEI hire.
2) Because of number 1, it means lots of skilled, qualified people take longer or find it harder to get jobs suited to their skills, experience and competence.
3) It has a negative effect on everyone who is let go in order to increase DEI hires.
4) It has a negative effect on competent individuals whose traits are often associated with DEI hires (sex, ethnicity, skin colour, etc) but who actually earned their role on merit. They are wrongly suspected of being DEI hires, and it can be hard to shake off that stigma.
5) It harms customers, consumers, students, etc, who receive poorer service because the DEI hire is less qualified, skilled or competent than the person who would have been hired on merit.
6) It creates a feeling of wider resentment in industries and institutions, and likely increases unfair negative discrimination in terms of immutable characteristics (sexism, racism, etc).
7) It creates even further social tension, because the bad actors who try to defend unfair hiring (hiring not on merit to boost minority representation) look to attack those who are justly resistant to it, stoking more hostility and socio-political division.
Now, the reason I said DEI misuse and not just DEI is because I’m not one of those misjudged people who thinks all DEI is a catastrophe. That’s overly simplistic. Here’s what I think the real picture shows. First, to say, I really value meritocracy – that is, hiring people based on merit alone. Meritocracy achieves the highest efficiency in the market because jobs are matched to the applicants most qualified to perform them. The trouble is that as a society we have never made the most of the benefits of meritocracy, because in practice we have always allowed other types of bias to dictate some of our hiring choices – especially affinity bias, network bias, and structural bias. And because merit-only hiring systems would still involve biases towards people with, say, better upbringings, people with better networks of influence, people with better social capital, etc, DEI can really only introduce a new distortion to adjust parts of an old distortion, but where I believe the new distortion is worse overall. Any employment strategy that is quota-driven, unfairly selective or ideological instead of meritocratic makes an already imperfect system worse.
We should all want to live in a society in which
unjust barriers are removed, access is equal, fair and wide, standards are
identical, and the best candidates are hired – but DEI cannot adequately
correct prior biases by merely introducing new ones. It’s rather like how, if a
lake has too many algae (original bias), conservationists try to fix it by
introducing a new species of fish that eats algae. But the fish also eats
native species, disrupts the food chain, and causes ecological imbalance in a
different direction. Like the lake scenario, the attempt to fix the first bias in employment creates a second, more complicated one.
Except I think it’s even more problematic than that, because the first biases weren’t necessarily too dominant, just mildly distortionary. But adding the so-called corrective variable of DEI has introduced new distortions that are likely to make the prior biases even stronger than they were beforehand. So, DEI becomes a negative skew in two distinct ways - both intrinsically (as per my above list of 7) and extrinsically as per the knock-on effect. So, instead of the consequences of my lake analogy, think of it instead in terms of a particle system governed by several interacting fields. One field - let’s say the electromagnetic interaction - is slightly dominant (the original hiring bias). Then we introduce a new compensating field designed to counteract the dominance, but the new field doesn’t simply oppose the original force, it interacts with the entire system in non‑linear ways - like, say, coupling unexpectedly with the weak force, altering vacuum energy, shifting mass terms, that sort of thing.
Consequently, the new field amplifies the original imbalance through feedback loops. Instead of neutralising the dominant force, the compensating field actually destabilises the system, forces additional corrections, and creates even stronger asymmetries. And just as in this illustration the new field magnifies the very imbalance it was meant to fix, DEI similarly introduces new variables that don’t just distort the system - they interact with existing biases in ways that make those biases even stronger.
To that end, in net terms, DEI makes problems it purports to address even more problematic – and just about everyone is made worse off by that. The only people made better off are bad actors in society who look to exploit or personally benefit from the situation at the expense of everyone else, where those costs are spread thinly (a bit like with government tariffs and subsidies).
