Boeing and Diversity

 

Many years ago an old boss of mine told me that the trouble with performance measures was that people meet them. That comment came to mind when I read about Boeing’s latest failures with the 737 – this time a section of the fuselage falling off in flight. Boeing along with many other corporations has for years been active in affirmative action - now usually called ESG or simply diversity - hiring, promotion, and selection of subcontractors based on race, sex, ethnic group, and/or supposed gender. It recently added it formally to the criteria for judging and rewarding the performance of its executives and managers.

Some conservatives have said that that might have been at least a partial cause of the years of failures. Leftists have countered that such suggestions reveal a bigoted belief that black people and members of other favored groups are less competent that white and Asian men. In that they are wrong. Something like the reverse is true, with leftists showing a systematic belief in such inferiority. If they believed that black people and others they favor were equally competent, they would be fine with basing things on quality, ability, and merit, as are the conservatives. That they are not shows they do not.

The conservatives are right on the obvious fact that one cannot maximize two unconnected variables (here quality and “diversity”) simultaneously except by coincidence. I would be hard to know whether they are right in tying that to Boeing’s failures. They surely are right on a more general point. Most of us would rather have the designers, manufacturers, and pilots of the planes we fly be selected to be the most competent that can be found rather than the most diverse looking.