I admit fully I neither looked at the SVB root causes nor commented on it, because I view the abuses there as endemic in the financial system, so I don't feel qualified to comment on that. (also, I am largely a dunce on financial matters beyond the conservative concepts of economics in overviews laid out by the likes of Thomas Sowell)
Your reply made sense. In any criticism, we should wait until all facts are in. I make an exception with regard to speculation on mishap reporting, because humans error is overwhelmingly the root cause of nearly all mishaps in any endeavor where humans are involved in the chain. Speculating on where in that chain human error can occur is normal and necessary. Fixating on where in that chain human error occurs before all information is available is unwise and often, unkind.
With regards to this, in your post, you said: "In sum, I believe what you’re ascribing to DEI and Affirmative Action I ascribe to collectivism..."
On this, I agree, but...it is because I view collectivism, DEI, and Affirmative Action as ALL fundamentally Marxist in nature.
In summary, I view all those as the same thing, and in my mind, it is only the implementation that is a little different. In that light, I don't think we have a significant disagreement on that, although you view DEI and Affirmative Action as "symptoms" and collectivism as the cause, where I group them all together and view them as part and parcel of each other.
My view on this is that DEI/Affirmative Action in the hiring of people in sectors such as entertainment and hospitality is bad, but who really cares about it?
The problem with baking DEI/Affirmative Action in everything at the investment level is that changes the scope, so that Boeing (I choose Boeing only because it is in the news) when hiring people for the engineering design of passenger planes, fully embraces it, resulting in people who are hired because they are female, homosexual, or a minority of some kind.
And, as a result, doors fall off planes, mechanical components fail, or they fall out of the sky because the flight control software is flawed.
When females make up 13%, and black/hispanics each make up 14% of those in Mechanical Engineering, but the focus is on hiring them because of their sex and race instead of their competency, those pushing this are CLEARLY stating that hiring the "correct" percentage of some sort of person with physical characteristics is MORE important than ensuring that a plane full of screaming people doesn't fall out of the sky and kill everyone aboard.
Look at how much has been spent in the last 30-40 years trying to drag women kicking and screaming into STEM fields (like Mechanical Engineering) and STILL women only make up 13% of the workforce in this field.
This should be telling us, loud and clear that it IS NOT because women are being discriminated against, it it is because there are other factors at play in this fake issue of "under-representation) that no amount of money being thrown at it is going to solve.
The effort at running a "High Reliability" organization requires a HUGE amount of discipline, time, and money, and it makes sense in endeavors where failures (such as designing a walkway that collapses and kills hundreds of people) or ensuring that ongoing maintenance efforts in an airline, for example, are funded adequately by the airline, correctly administered by airline administration, scheduled correctly by the departments, performed competently by individual specialists, and verified as safe by trained and experienced inspectors.
As I said in another post, every single one of these aspects, in order to have an airline where planes aren't falling out of the sky, require that every aspect mentioned above is performed in such a way that the attainment of an overall error rate is so low that plane crashes are decadal experiences, not annual ones.
Or monthly ones.
Therefore, the margin for error is so razor thin, that any factor which increases the likelihood of any error at any stage erodes the ability of ANY organization to be a "High Reliability Organization", and over time, it is inevitable that there will be loss of life, property, and money.
DEI and Affirmative Action ENSURE that that margin for error is eroded, and this is a conscious decision. People pushing this have only two reasons for pushing these destructive things: They either want bad things to happen, or they have made the calculation that the bad things that will happen are the price to be paid for the goal of ensuring "representation" in a field or an industry.
I haven't made the leap yet to deliberate and intentional debilitation of quality in order to cause chaos, but it is Marxist in origin, so...I don't rule it out.
Yet.
But I fully believe that people pushing it have made the deliberate calculus that in various fields, addressing "under-representation" is more important than anything else, and I see this as catastrophic. It may not be catastrophic in the hiring of actors to fix "under-representation" in commercials, or reception desk personnel in an office building.
Again, we have about 95% agreement and the 5% isn’t worth a flame war. But I feel compelled to explain that 5%.
under-representation
“Proportional representation” is a forced human construct. It doesn’t exist in nature. Now, humans shouldn’t be ruled by the ways of the cuttlefish or cow or osprey, but it IS helpful to remember that men and women populate in professions or groups differently vs society as a whole.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The “bad” is when the natural proportion is suppressed. The problem is that the natural proportion is unknown to man; only God knows it.
Thus, using your example, women make up about 35% of all STEM practitioners vs 51% of the US. However, 51% isn’t necessarily the natural proportion of women in STEM. We don’t KNOW what is that/God’s proportion, but it’s wrong to presume it’s 51%. Indeed, I would never presume to impose that proportion in the NHL.
Parenthetically, STEM excludes many professions that ARE math-intensive such as economics and econometrics. There are many sharp women in those omitted fields. Ironically, women are under-represented in economics (30% by some measures) but I can sure you, depending upon the sub-field (eg in investment advisory, or risk management) their numbers are way higher. Personally, I believe a lot of this proportionality discussion is made muddy by poor data and people not understanding what they’re measuring. That’s a bigger problem, but also one not worth debating here right now.
Therefore, the margin for error is so razor thin, that any factor which increases the likelihood of any error at any stage erodes the ability of ANY organization to be a "High Reliability Organization", and over time, it is inevitable that there will be loss of life, property, and money. DEI and Affirmative Action ENSURE that that margin for error is eroded, and this is a conscious decision.
Here’s the 5%. The High Reliability Organization (HRO) has all sorts of less-than-optimal practices baked into its quantitative history. Favoritism, nepotism, affinity bias, and yea bigotry and the he-man women haters club are all pooled and included in that success rate.
Now, I’m not arguing that the government has an enumerated Constitutional power to regulate the hiring practices to optimize the HRO. Quite the contrary-Paxton and any leftist AG should back off. MYOB.
What I AM saying is that groupthink can be bad. So is your boss hiring his idiot buddy over promoting you. And so on.
Ingesting a wide range of input on a matter that draws from a diverse and informed pool of opinions and thoughts and experience often buffs out the scratches. Across many years of work in some cool HROs, this has always been my experience.
To be fair, that happened ORGANICALLY.
I will go further. I observed lots of less-than-optimal practices. I’m also privy to the occasion of such practices in some major firms and smaller companies. Those less-than-optimal practices wrecked heretofore HROs at the department and firm level.
Therefore, I’m not so quick to condemn firms that work on diversifying their talent pool.
Now, I’m not that stupid….diversification for the sake of diversification without any intent to optimize shareholder value is a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t matter if the diversity metric is age, race, who you want to kiss and then some, or whatever….you need to optimize.
I could go on, but I think you get my point on the 5%.
It is beyond the scope of our chat to examine the minutiae of where DEI for the sake of diversity uncoupled from shareholder - or taxpayer - value has replaced the fabric of America from a ‘may the best man/woman win.” However, lest you think I’m a DU plant(!), there was a story a few years ago from a leftish not-for-profit that embraced DEI and it lead to infighting, allies becoming targets of ire, departures, and a few implosions. It may collapse under its own weight. The closest I could get was this article. https://www.tlnt.com/articles/the-great-dei-resignation-why-are-so-many-diversity-heads-calling-it-quits.