DEI and The Explosion of Trends Despite People Hating Them

True story, back in the 1970’s a guy Richard Dennis made a fortune trading commodities. He did it buying commodities when the price was already way up, when it made no sense to anybody why the price should be so high. I use this as a metaphor for something that happens not because people think it should happen, but despite people thinking it shouldn’t happen. There are forces or factors which are so strong that they cause things to happen which people don’t like, but they are in denial and can’t stop.

Primitive trade happened when people living on islands had boats that were good enough to trade, but not quite good enough to invade. So suppose a guy on an island made a knife or some jewelry. And instead of giving it to someone else on the island, he gave it to a stranger in exchange for something. Supposedly there were people on the island or in the tribe who did not like this. But trade made civilizations so much richer, that trading became popular regardless of whether people liked it or not.

It’s the same thing with capitalism. People hate businessmen having private property and making decisions what to produce and how much to charge for it, without being controlled by the local majority and regardless of what voters might prefer the businessman should do. But despite everybody hating capitalism, distributed decision making feeds so many people and pays for so much military equipment, that nations with economic systems their own citizens dislike ended up ruling the world. Consuming people like cancer.

There are two things that make no sense to a lot of people, guys dressing up as girls, and DEI. I understand DEI to be “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives where universities or businesses include less-qualified participants of one race over more qualified participants of another race, with the reason given that they are being generous to the downtrodden or something. Guys dressing up as girls seems as ridiculous to me as Richard Dennis seemed, when he bought commodities at the highest price ever.

From my vantage point as an engineer, DEI was clearly a money-making scheme. It was nothing more than encouraging people willing to work for lower wages to compete for my job. When I worked at GE Transportation, they had posters promoting events to get girls into “STEM” fields. This was presented as like wanting to empower girls. But to me it was simple, the company could make more money if they found girls willing to work 30% cheaper than the current employees, even if they were 20% less productive.

DEI is just a way for manufacturers to look for abundant alternate non-traditional inputs that are available at lower cost. Like making houses out of plastic rather than lumber. There was a viral video where they asked some young professional people to guess each other’s IQ scores. There was a brown girl with like a masters degree who worked in engineering for a drug company. They all thought she was a smarter person, but it turned out she was the dumbest. The DEI system made her productive at a huge profit.

DEI takes abundant inputs of people who would otherwise be engaged in dumb crap like writing poetry or recording bad rap songs. And it makes them way more productive. You may not like that your company hires someone from Vietnam who does terrible work compared to you. And like every socially popular trend that everyone imitates, it will be done to excess. After some point some guy who thinks the trick is to hire the most backward foreign people, will end up taking a loss. Richard Dennis went broke.

We get to the question: Is guys dressing up as girls a way to create worker ants, like getting girls to have careers not families? Historically people were like other animals that can make more offspring than the land can support. So they traded young lives for land, by engaging in war. Now we have angry young men who are not happy with the life available to them. Suppose ants were first evolving to have worker ants. Would ant civilizations who suppressed this as distasteful be displaced by those that accepted it?