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.

Diversity (University Style) Defined

As the Supreme Court is about to hear a case from the University of Texas on the permissibility of basing admissions to universities on race, we will hear a lot of talk about a supposed need for diversity. In the context of affirmative action at colleges and universities, the term “diversity” is used with a particular meaning. It does not  refer to the desirable goal of creating a community of active discourse and widely diverse opinions where students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints  and theories, but rather to something quite different. Diversity is to plain, direct, race-quota based patronage as creation science is to plain, old fashioned  creationism,  that is a fundamentally intellectually dishonest fallback and expedient developed for public consumption after the actual belief becomes untenable.

A Diversity Puzzle

It is an article of faith among the politically correct that ethnic stereotypes  - the humorless and  hardworking Germans, the voluble French, the reserved and  reliable English, the canny and thrifty Scots and Jews, the excitable Italians, the stolid Scandinavians, the laid back and procrastinating Hispanics, the dedicated and hardworking Japanese and Chinese, and so on - are barbarous relics without a shred of validity. Among the same people it is an article of faith that a student body or workforce comprised of people from many various ethnic groups gains strength from the different viewpoints and ways of thinking and behaving that people from different ethnic groups bring to the mix solely by virtue of belonging to those groups. It would be interesting (and probably fun) to see how a diversity peddler who was put on the spot would reconcile those two beliefs.