Are you arguing that all currently protected classes (e.g. race, religion, sex) should be abolished? That would to me be a logically coherent and non-bigoted (well, sort of, at least if the belief that the market can solve this problem and the belief that it is a problem is behind it) view of current policy. One I disagree with, but also one I can respect.
However, that’s not typically what the argument is about. Those who are opposed to this are often not opposed to other (either some or all) protected classes. That, to me, seems like an untenable view. You cannot have religion and sex as a protected class but not sexual orientation.
If I look at the protected classes I see one very obvious and big gap and that’s sexual orientation. It’s unquestionably incredibly bad policy to selectively exclude that (that is, if you are not a bigot).
>Are you arguing that all currently protected classes (e.g. race, religion, sex) should be abolished?
Yes.
Realize that it's a reactionary position to take, but it just seems right. If someone wants to run their business with bigotry, so be it. I won't respect them, but I'd respect their "right" to do so.
I realize that there counter argument is that I've never lived in a time in which such regulation was needed, I never experienced Jim Crow, etc - and of course today Jim Crow still exists, in a way, for homosexuals.
But it just seems like another case of "two wrongs make a right." Forcing others to adhere to our own moral preferences seems fundamentally and deeply flawed. There must be another way.
A "better way?" Oh my. I bet you think there is a TechCrunch style "disruption" to be made here. :)
Forcing others, particularly at the barrel of a gun, as libertarians are fond of saying is what laws are. Perhaps you believe we shouldn't force people away from murdering or robbing others? If restaurants poison the food of customers, the market will work it out? This straw man is no sillier than the idea that preventing discrimination is as reprehensible as the discrimination itself.
You'd be setting up a straw man that presumably you don't want with this caveat. There is already some evidence that sexual orientation is not fully genetic in all cases. The real position, that I take, is who cares if it's genetic. 'Genetcism' has become the modern day naturalism, and like it's fore barer gives no insight to morality.
Indeed. Geneticism dumbs down the discourse to a paternalistic "but they can't help it!".
This is both trivializing and infantilizing. The central premise of geneticism is that these things are wrong, and the only reason we shouldn't discriminate against these people is because they can't help but be wrong.
The argument then becomes that we shouldn't discriminate against people for something they can't change - the chief implication that, if it could be changed, it should.
That whole line of argumentation is horseshit and concedes the most important point of all to the fundamentalists: that one's sexual orientation or gender identity can be morally reprehensible.
> The central premise of geneticism is that these things are wrong.
What? The central premise of geneticism is that genetics underpins the majority of human attributes and behavior. (Note: I do not personally believe this.)
Right, but geneticism is only ever applied to the controversy re: orientation and gender identity in the context of choice. Its importance in this debate is purely to rationalize "wrong" behavior - and thereby cement the belief that it can be wrong.
Notice that arguments that homosexuality is genetic is preceded by arguments that homosexuality is a choice. Instead of defeating the thoroughly shitty notion that homosexuality is inherently wrong, the argument is instead steered towards "yeah, but they can't help it".
Without the choice angle, geneticism would just be a footnote. Whether or not orientation and gender identity are genetic is entirely irrelevant to the morality debate, and its presence in the debate predicates upon the assumption that, if it weren't genetic, the morality of the situation changes.
This stretches beyond the sexuality debate, of course. Whenever the argument is made that we shouldn't discriminate based on things people can't change, the implicit baggage argument is that if we could change those things, we should.
The correct rebuttal is "there's nothing wrong with being gay/bi/black/yellow/red" not "but they didn't choose to be gay/bi/black/yellow/red".
> The central premise of geneticism is that these things are wrong
Then I deny the existence of 'geneticism' as you apparently define it, and say it's a strawman argument against the notion that anything is determined or influenced by genetics.
That's probably an idea that would resonate with lots of people with strong libertarian leanings here on HN and in Silicon Valley. However, like many libertarian positions, it's out of touch with reality. This isn't an issue that the invisible hand is going to fix.
I'm curious why you think this....if "bigoted" ideas are delusional, shouldn't the fact that we have far more integration and exposure to different sub-cultures in sufficient time eliminate all bigotry, as it will eventually become self-evident that there are in fact no differences between people?
And if not, what might it be about this sub-group of people that will never ever "get it" - what's different about them that they simply can't?
Because people are not rational and may never reach that conclusion themselves?
I like to think that I am rational, but I still double check myself to make sure I'm not being sexist. Occasionally minor sexist behaviour or thinking still creeps in...
Multiple and perverse equilibria can exist--it was the economically rational thing in 1950's South (at least in some models) for people to discriminate. And even if formal discrimination might have disappeared eventually, it's a bit too easy to condemn in retrospect an entire generation of people to continued oppression just to satisfy some ideological gesture.
"if "bigoted" ideas are delusional, shouldn't the fact that we have far more integration and exposure to different sub-cultures in sufficient time eliminate all bigotry"
I'm not sure if delusional is the right term - small minded might fit the bill a little better. So if it's due to mental laziness or an inherent dearth of mental ability, perhaps bigotry is difficult to abate without laws to protect minorities.
Nonetheless you ask a good question - with time and exposure can we eliminate bigotry? I hope so. But it's easy to invent new targets for ridicule: Emos, Hipsters, Rockabillies etc. They're not exactly unprivileged minorities, but it shows how easy it is to disparage someone because of their appearance and cultural differences.
Maybe its because you can't simply trust every citizen to make decisions off of what is obvious and rational. If you actually could trust every individual to make rational decisions and self organize, there would be little need for laws in the first place.
This comment and a few others really surprise. This is such a level of naïveté that is really dumbfounding. I want to attempt to be charitable ...
What evidence do you have that humans would reach this lollipop level of appreciation and understanding, even in geologic time? Genocides occur even today between peoples for reasons that many even educated people have difficulty deciphering. As well, go look at the comments on YouTube and see if humanity is advanced. I mean really ...
Agreed, my tongue was firmly in cheek when I asked that question.
The reason I asked that particular question (and I guess I didn't do a good job of it), and used the word "delusional", is because I personally think there are in many cases vast differences between sub-groups, and these differences are of varying incompatibility. Many of them are imagined (false stereotypes), but many are not, and I also find it naive, this idea that all we have to do is pass some laws to force integration and then suddenly everyone is going to see the hateful errors of their past ways.
As you correctly point out, there is a lot more in history to suggest we cannot "all just get along" than there is to support a unified utopia. Also, in politically correct forums such as these where most participants have a much less diverse background than they'd like to think, there seems to be this pervasive idea that the fault lies all on one side. Listen to some rap music, or go visit one of the more extremist feminist forums, or an atheist forum, where the participants really speak their minds, and you'll see there is plenty of irrational bigoted hatred everywhere, not just from the privileged white male.
To me, the idea that you can solve a problem when you insist on being ignorant of many aspects of it is rather foolish.
> I'm curious why you think this....if "bigoted" ideas are delusional, shouldn't the fact that we have far more integration and exposure to different sub-cultures in sufficient time eliminate all bigotry, as it will eventually become self-evident that there are in fact no differences between people?
"In sufficient time," perhaps. In the meantime, millions of people are marginalized, exploited, abused, and killed. Those are real human beings, not just statistical stairsteps to Utopia, and I'd prefer to let them have freedom and equality now rather than reserving it for their great-great-great-grandchildren.
This isn't an issue that the invisible hand is going to fix.
Then why is the WSJ article titled "Workplace Equality Is Good For Business?" Shouldn't it be titled "Workplace Equality Is Good, But We Need To Force Businesses To Do It By Law"?
This assumes the invisible hand is fully rational and capable of the optimal decision making - at the very least at an aggregate scale.
It is possible for something to be good for business, but for the free market to not choose it. The free market, after all, is simply a collection of human participants, none of whom are perfectly informed nor perfectly rational.
There seems to be a weird belief in some circles that the free market tends to arrive naturally upon a globally optimal solution.
There seems to be a weird belief in some circles that the free market tends to arrive naturally upon a globally optimal solution.
There is a much more widespread weird belief that governments can do so, even though the track record of governments is worse than the track record of free markets.
Much more widespread? Last I checked nobody is advocating for Soviet-style central planning. In fact by far the most popular notion in the western world is a mostly-free market with some regulation.
Which seems to jive with the notion that neither a monolithically planned, nor entirely laissez-faire system, are likely to produce optimal results.
the most popular notion in the western world is a mostly-free market with some regulation
No, the most popular notion in the western world is a nominal "free market" with massive regulation. For example, here are the rules that a "free market" business in the US has to abide by:
Note that this is a daily journal: in other words, the "current issue" is just the rules that got issued today.
Not to mention that we have central control of the financial system (the Fed and other countries' central banks), education (in the US there is at least some control still at the local level, other developed countries control everything at the state or national level), and trade--here, for example, is the current list of US tariffs:
And the rules that got issued today include several announcements by the Coast Guard about changes to drawbridge schedules, species being delisted from the Endangered Species Act, and announced decisions by the FAA on the airworthiness of various products.
Business is moderately regulated in the US, especially compared to other industrialized societies. The mere existence of a large number of rules doesn't mean that the regulation is onerous.
The mere existence of a large number of rules doesn't mean that the regulation is onerous.
So if you're a small business, it's not "onerous" to have to look through myriads of rules to make sure you aren't violating one? To the extent that these regulations are not "onerous", it's because they're ignored, not because they actually work.
Really? Your argument is from WSJ? That proves that the invisible hand of the market can work this out? I knew libertarianism was sort of naive but surely you jest ... WSJ is hardly known for scientific rigor. I mean this is hard to take seriously. I don't know where to begin.
How good would the article be if we were in a time that people may freely be as racist as they want and there were not any social stigmas in the majority about being racist and such racism was commonplace? You would have widespread discrimination and your silly little wouldn't solve anything about it. For those playing at home, this was the status quo in the US at one point. You may argue, as libertarians may, that this is all perfectly fine and is the "moral" way but as usual, with your view of "freedom" we would not have a world many would want to live in.
No, the article that started this thread was from the WSJ, and I was asking a question about it, not endorsing it. Please read before knee-jerk reacting.
I can't tell you how absurdly naive (or disingenuous) that sounds to people who don't happen to be white, straight males. Entire generations have lived and died while the invisible hand does its work, if in fact that work is to increase inclusion in the first place.
I don't think alexeisadeski3 is saying that the invisible hand will resolve the problem of bigotry in the workplace. Rather, I think his/her argument is that it is imperative that people be allowed to make an offer to one group of people but not another. I disagree with such an argument but I don't see it as naive or disingenuous (although I must admit to being a white, straight male).
There's perhaps a third possibility I can see besides the two I laid out earlier, but it's hardly more flattering. If the idea is to just let bigotry continue, with no expectation that natural forces will resolve it, then that sounds to me like callous disregard for systemic injustice that is both historic and ongoing.
At some point, a person doesn't have to themselves have bigoted beliefs to be a part of a rotten system. Inaction is sufficient. I don't think our concern should be for preserving every last drop of agency of people who have already made it into positions of wealth and influence when we have people at major disadvantage in the workforce for personal characteristics they had little or no agency in determining.
My favorite Kurt Vonnegut book, Mother Night, is about the war crimes trial of a fictional all-star propagandist for the Nazi party. As the book proceeds, you learn that he was probably actually a double agent working for the US while not sincerely trying to be such a great propagandist. Yet he was a great propagandist, and his insincere work was of great service to evil. It brings up the question of whether intention really overrides the appearance and results of your actions.
If a bigot makes a product I want, I have to punish myself in the act of punishing them. If instead they are "punished" for being bigoted (or better, disallowed from acting bigoted), the punishment is no longer mutual. This is proper, since my position of antidiscrimination is not worthy of punishment.
why should we not use the law to prevent abuse of marginalized groups and correct for imbalances of power in the market place? what else is the law for?
To give you a level playing field on which to out-compete companies that won't hire qualified employees who happen to belong to certain groups. The proper way to correct "imbalances of power in the market place" is to use the market place to correct them--in other words, to use the market place as it is intended to be used.
A rather fragile business plan, perhaps not in 2013 USA, but certainly elsewhere in the world and historically. The libertarian argument always seems to assume rational actors playing in ideal conditions. In other words, a situation unlikely to ever arise on its own...
Oh stop it. It wasn't your precious market that ended segregation or created an environment where people felt safe from lynchings. Lets just get back to reality for a minute.
Actually, I would argue that it is not governance that has achieved the vastly improved social acceptance of the LBGT community, it is simply society gradually changing its mind, through education and simply greater exposure, without being forced.
It seems to me you would suggest acceptance cannot be achieved without government intervention, but from where I sit that is exactly what is happening - it just takes time.
It wasn't your precious market that ended segregation or created an environment where people felt safe from lynchings.
Neither did the government passing laws. What ended these things, to the extent that they are ended (try looking up the figures for racially motivated violence in inner cities sometime), was changes in people's attitudes. And those changes are mainly due to compulsory public education plus generational turnover: the old bigots died and their children were indoctrinated with a different mindset.
In addition to djur's correct observation, there is also the observation that government policies supporting segregation came after people's private desire to segregate, not before; in fact, the government policies came into being in large measure because of people's private desire to segregate.
Not at all what I was implying. Not everything is so black and white, yeesh. It's getting so a guy can't pontificate without having a bunch of pre-conceived positions applied to him before even getting the chance to... oh wait, this is the internet.
The correct answer of course is: it takes one. If a light bulb burnt out, an Objectivist would simply take a new one (from inventory, because they planned for equipment failure) and replace it. What they wouldn't do is suggest it is the responsibility of someone else, ie: "the market".
That seemed to be exactly what pdonis was suggesting when I replied, though: that we don't need to fight against racism and bigotry, because The Market would fix them if we just let it be.
There are certainly reasonable Objectivists like the one you describe, but they don't include anyone who thinks that all humanity's ills will magically vanish if we just let The Market do whatever it wants. That's why I specifically said Randian Objectivists; Ayn Rand's hypocrisy exemplifies that particular subset of Objectivists.
we don't need to fight against racism and bigotry, because The Market would fix them if we just let it be.
That's not what I said. I said that the way you fight against racism and bigotry is by using market power: as a customer, you refuse to do business with companies that are racist and bigoted, and as an employee, you refuse to work for them. Or, as an entrepreneur, you start a company that is not racist and bigoted, and out-compete the racist and bigoted companies.
And how do you do all those things, when you're operating in a society where bigotry is the standard? Where refusing to do business with bigots means you can't do business at all?
How is your hypothetical world better than one with civil rights legislation?
If bigotry is the standard in the society you're in, so that refusing to do business with bigots means not doing business at all, your best bet is to move to another society, because you and others like you who are not bigots are obviously hopelessly outnumbered. Are you saying that was the case in the US in the 1950's and 1960's when the civil rights movement was at its height? If so, how did the movement get so much popular support?
It seems to me that the actual facts, when the civil rights movement was at its height, were that there was a minority that wanted bigotry to be the standard, and a majority who did not. In my hypothetical world, that majority would have used its market power to make the bigots unable to do business; the only role the government would have had to play would have been to make sure the bigots could not use government power to prop up their businesses.
How would such a hypothetical world be better than the one we have? Need you ask? All the effort we spend today on diversity training, enforcing EEO laws, etc., etc., would be spent on productive effort instead.
what if i told you employment discrimination is not about "a level playing field for competition", but rather "equal rights for all"? this is not a market or economics issue, this is a human rights issue.
and by "correct imbalances of power in the marketplace" i specifically meant "correct for the allowance of human rights abuses by the marketplace because market forces ill-equipped to root them out". the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy means that the free market will never be the right tool for human rights cases (among many others).
the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy
Which, in the age of the Internet, is easy. The problem is not knowledge: the problem is acting on that knowledge.
For example, Apple has been criticized for employing sweatshop labor in places like China. (Notice that Mr. Cook conveniently does not mention that in his paean to workplace equality.) If you don't think that's a good thing, will you refuse to buy Apple products? Judging by market share, most people's answer appears to be "no".
The market place cannot stop pollution, because the damage done by pollution is very often too large for the polluting company to ever pay to fix, assuming the company even still exists when the damage is found. If the company is long gone, there's nobody on the hook and the damage can't be fixed without using laws and taxes to do so.
And that's assuming we magically know who did the damage in the first place, and that it's something other than 'everyone'.
As yuhong pointed out, pollution is not really comparable to discrimination; but I still think it's worth asking the question: who allowed the pollution to take place in the first place? The "market place"? Or some government that nudge, nudge, wink, wink, allowed the polluter to pollute?
In your view, there should be no need to nudge or wink. Let market have as it will.
You are misrepresenting my view. The reason for the nudge nudge wink wink is that the government, in allowing polluters to pollute, is acting against the interests of the people it's supposed to represent: it is allowing something that the people, if they were able to make the decision on their own in a free market, would not allow.
In other words, in an actual free market, a potential polluter would not be able to get any special favors from the government: they would have to get explicit permission from every person who would be affected. That's how a free market works: you want to build a factory that puts toxic chemicals in my groundwater? Sorry, no sale.
So in your view a free market has perfect actors with perfect information
Where did I say that? You don't need perfect information; you just need the freedom to act on whatever information you have, combined with your judgment about what's important.
none of them think "climate change" is a hoax?
A free market also means we all get to exercise our own judgment, instead of having the government exercise judgment for us.
You mean the period when rich people whose companies failed in free market competition bought favors from the government? Including not having to control their pollution?
Every business requires public resources to maintain. The police, to guard their warehouses? The trained fire department, to reduce their insurance rates to something manageable? The roads and water and power infrastructure? They didn't build that. The amount of taxes they paid didn't fund even a hundredth of what that cost.
So why should my taxes go to help fund their bigotry?
Seems more like "two rights make a right" - companies benefit from public institutions and in return companies do not discriminate. Both of these things are beneficial to everyone. Only in libertarian ideology are either of these things considered as wronging people, and only for ideological reasons that have no foundation in the real world (nebulous appeals to abstract principles).
Do you think that discrimination against blacks and women was good for business? I submit that it was not, but companies did it anyway, because they were not rational. I'm not sure we should expect them to be now.
I also submit that if you think discriminating against blacks and women was good for business (a defensible claim), then you probably ought to be disagreeing with Tim Cook about whether sexual-orientation-based discrimination is good for businesses [1]. In my view, that would make the case for anti-discrimination legislation stronger, not weaker, because if both prevailing biases and good business sense favors discrimination, then we really need to act.[2]
[1] Perhaps you could believe the former but not the latter. They seem pretty parallel to me though, so I'd be curious what you thought the differences were.
[2] You could disagree with this too and simply be a lassez-faire fundamentalist, but that would render your original question kind of pointless.
All I'm saying is his logic isn't, well, logical. On the one hand he says Apple's policy has been great for business, which would imply other companies should be adopting these kinds of policies without any kind of prodding from the government.
And yet he supports a law to force everyone to adopt those policies. It's like he doesn't actually believe "workplace equality" is good for business and would like to use the government to level the playing field he tilted against himself. If he really believed the policy was good for the bottom line, from a financial perspective he'd be overjoyed to compete against companies that don't have a similar policy.
Well, this is just nonsense. All this jibber jabber about being non-discriminatory is good for business falls flat when discrimination becomes good for business, which s not difficult to imagine.
Let's take an example. Southern Baptists, or any group you like, want to grow their numbers. Lets say they succeed and gain a majority of followers in the US. All of a sudden it can be a boost to business to comport with whatever discriminatory practices are popular with the majority. The invisible hand moveth.
Let's assume that a) he thinks companies will continue to be systematically discriminatory despite their best interests and b) he cares less about the competitive advantages of Apple and more about the overall health of the economy. He could care about that personally or on behalf of Apple, which also benefits from a larger, faster-growing economy in which to sell its goods. Does that help?
People on the left can't seem to make up their minds about corporations. On the one hand corporations are amoral profit machines, completely without qualm or consideration for the human element. On the other, they don't care about profit. It just does't work for me as a logical framework.
The most likely explanation here, IMO, is Apple's policy actually hurts the bottom line a tiny bit, but the PR value outweighs the problems. But note if this is the case the law he's pushing will be a net (small) negative for other companies.
No, it doesn't help, because it's probably unreasonable to believe that Apple would recoup enough of those gains to counteract the losses they suffer from losing their competitive advantage.
It's like telling US Sugar that it'd be a net gain for them to lose their tariff protections.
That some global optimizations with direct negative effects on a particular business outweigh their downstream positives for that business doesn't mean they all do. Perhaps this is more like Wal-Mart lobbying for higher minimum wage so that its customers have more money [1].
Walmart was paying above minimum wage when they lobbied for that change. They were in favor of the wage rise because it would harm their competitors - and give them positive PR as most of their critics were unaware that Walmart paid above minimum wage.
The CEO certainly says he pays more than minimum wage (when the statement was clarified, it turns out it doesn't include part time labor or contract labor, so it's not clear how true that actually is). But why would he pay more than his competitors? (I can find no evidence that it does and a fair amount of evidence that it doesn't.) And paying above minimum wage does not remove the labor market pressure that comes from increasing it.
All that aside, you may be right that it was a chiefly PR stunt and perhaps Walmart is in fact a poor example.
I'd venture that most well run and dominant companies pay more than their competitors. This is likely (speculation ahead) because these companies know that they must obtain and retain higher quality employees than do their competition.
Even for Walmart, their employees are the most important asset. From top to bottom. People like you and me (I'm assuming you've never worked there - I haven't) aren't aware, but supposedly Walmart really does treat their workers well. All in relative terms of course... And based upon pure hearsay of course.
Finally, regarding whether or not it was a publicity stunt: Maybe I'm jaded, but I consider everything that a corporate employee says publicly and in official capacity to be a publicity stunt, almost by definition.
Discrimination imposes an extra cost on the discriminator. In a free market, firms that engage in irrational discrimination will be driven out of business. This is a central thesis of "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman.
It took the government to intervene into a very long running and prosperous "free market" to bring an end to discrimination, and nobody was making a economic case for it.
There was no such "free market" before the Federal government intervened; there was an entrenched system of state and local governments not providing a level playing field. IMO the biggest mistake the civil rights movement made was to ask the Federal government for affirmative action, instead of asking it to guarantee a level playing field, so that minority-owned businesses could simply out-compete businesses run by bigots.
Why do you assume that minority-owned or nondiscriminating businesses would run discriminating businesses out of the market? You're assuming, at the very least, that the competitive benefit of nondiscrimination exceeds the barriers to entry in the market.
The barriers I'm referring to aren't Jim Crow but instead the standard barriers to entry: required initial capital, brand recognition, the economies of scale and existing position of the firm currently in the market, etc.
I am suggesting that when entering the market is already difficult (which is true of many American industries where discrimination might be a problem), a new firm being nondiscriminatory is unlikely to be a sufficient competitive advantage to displace existing firms.
It is possible for nondiscrimination to be beneficial for already existing firms but not an immediate, substantial, and sure-fire competitive advantage.
How did the already existing firms get into the market and achieve their existing positions? Free market competition, or government regulations that gave them preferential treatment?
With a level playing field, I don't think entry into the market is as difficult as you claim for many areas of businesses. The discrimination that the civil rights movement protested against wasn't discrimination about who could build new semiconductor chip fabs: it was about who could ride at the front of the bus, or who could stay at which hotels. In a free market these would be easy businesses to get into; the main barriers to entry are government regulations.
Companies usually have to grow to a particular size before they're able to negotiate preferential treatment. Even so, I don't believe most industries are less competitive because of regulatory capture. Purely competitive markets are a mathematical abstraction.
The ENDA isn't about accommodation discrimination (buses, hotels, etc.), though, it's about employment discrimination. Discriminating against potential customers is obviously bad business, and the competitive benefit for not discriminating might be decisive. Even so, government action was effective in almost entirely eliminating that form of discrimination (to the extent that when it occurs, it's seen as a throwback and an outrage).
The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation. The initial capital outlay is substantial, and established firms would be likely to have lucrative exclusive contracts with businesses. Potential riders would take a long time to trust a new bus service, and it would have to operate at a considerable loss for quite some time to build up a reputation.
government action was effective in almost entirely eliminating that form of discrimination
After government action had enabled it in the first place. Jim Crow laws didn't just prevent blacks from riding at the front of the bus: it prevented blacks from starting their own bus companies.
The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation.
If all the bus services in town discriminate against blacks by making them ride at the back of the bus, but there's no government regulation, a new bus service, even if it's just a single bus, that does not impose that restriction has an immediate customer base: all the blacks that don't want to ride at the back of the bus. (We're assuming that this is a substantial number, which seems historically accurate.) Similar remarks apply to any other product or service where discrimination exists. I find it extremely implausible that, in the absence of government regulation, there would not have been many, many entrepreneurs willing to take advantage of such opportunities, or people to fund them.
You're assuming, at the very least, that the competitive benefit of nondiscrimination exceeds the barriers to entry in the market.
Tim Cook was making the same assumption in the article when he said that workplace equality is good for business.
Also, the "barriers to entry" came from those state and local government regulations I referred to; asking the Federal government to provide a level playing field would have meant asking the Federal government to force state and local governments to remove those barriers to entry.
If you really believe this, then your response should not be to ask the government to pass laws forcing such companies to be "rational". Your response should be to start a "rational" company that out-competes them, by hiring all the talented people that can't get jobs at the bigoted company, and thereby drive the bigoted company out of business.
Tech is full of companies that basically do what Tim Cook and Apple wants everyone else to do. Yet we still have a problem. And no amount of publicity blasting discrimination in any form seems to make a difference - sometimes it even does worse by calling all the trolls and bigots to attack the victim(s) involved. So no, that doesn't really work, does it now.
I find it depressing that I have to bundle this industry into the same basket as other companies and industries that other women complain about on the female-dominated forums I frequent. Meritocracy? hahahahahahahaha
no amount of publicity blasting discrimination in any form seems to make a difference
Have you considered not doing business with companies whose hiring or employment practices you don't like? Or forming your own company to out-compete them?
Again, do you actually believe that the widespread discrimination against pre-civil rights blacks was rational behavior? If not, why did it persist for so long? Where were all of those entrepreneurs fixing the system through competitive advantage?
I think the answer here is that the advantages it confers aren't sufficient to allow an upstart to overcome its disadvantage--namely, market position. Having more rational hiring practices is not a trump card. Lots of poorly run companies beat well-run ones all the time, but it doesn't mean they wouldn't be more successful as better-run companies.
I'll also note that there are a number of confounding factors that make non-discrimination more attractive when enforced corrosively. For example, let's say you're an industry with widespread discrimination against gay people. Gay people leave the industry, and are thus not readily available to those willing to hire them. And perhaps they're typically less experienced because of that discrimination, so that makes it less useful to hire them. A sort of tragedy of the commons in the labor market. It's still irrational to discriminate, just less so, and perhaps the disadvantages of doing so fit under the noise floor. But with legislation, the feedback loop works the other way, and it makes a lot more sense to hire from this now larger and more experienced labor pool. Could increase the overall output a lot more than having one company float to the top through marginally better hiring.
>Again, do you actually believe that the widespread discrimination against pre-civil rights blacks was rational behavior?
It absolutely was, because at that time in much of the country if you hired a black guy all his coworkers would refuse to work with him. White people would refuse to patronize your business.
because oftentimes you need external pressure to force the issue. to some employers, they don't even care if it's potentially better for business, they're "not gonna hire a bunch of fags".
additionally, the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy means that the free market is ill-equipped to encourage good employment behavior.
Tim's argument is really more from the perspective of human rights than economic justification. The link to economic activity is only that, "we undermine people's potential and deny ourselves and our society the full benefits of those individuals' talents." The cost of this is distributed and small (to the company), and therefore he is not making the argument that companies that do not discriminate will out-compete companies that do. He is making the more subtle argument that increased human flourishing and creativity that result from antidiscrimination laws are good for business. The title is misleading and the argument is muddled - advocates of Tim's position would do well to avoid this line of argumentation and make the stronger point:
Antidiscrimination laws advance human flourishing and cause our society to be more just. Therefore they are worth having.
Tim Cook's point carries over to customers as well. For me, knowing a company is taking a progressive stance on human and civil rights goes a long way towards how I view them.
But if that's the goal, why does the piece end by asking the government to pass anti-discrimination laws? What does that have to do with positive PR for Cook and Apple? As someone else pointed out upthread, if Cook really believes what he's saying, the last thing he should want is for the government to force his competitors to do what's good for their business; he should be happy to let them go out of business, leaving more customers for him.
Just because something is good for business doesn't mean that not doing it will cause a company to go out of business. It surprises me how often this argument is trotted out as a matter of fact as opposed to a theoretical outcome of perfect competition.
Just because something is good for business doesn't mean that not doing it will cause a company to go out of business.
Maybe not (at least not immediately), but if something is "good for business", it must confer some competitive benefit. Otherwise what does "good for business" mean, exactly? And the competitive benefit is really enough to ground the question I was asking.
"Good for business" is a broad term and (in this case) a political one. It's going to be more true for bigger companies than smaller ones (because bigger companies will be hiring more often for a broader set of positions) and for long-lived companies than fresh startups (because over time, your chance of either making or missing at least one really good hire increases). But if it's generally beneficial to some companies and not detrimental to others, it's "good for business".
Business is a pillar of the civic religion of America, and Americans like the idea of things that are good for people also being Good for Business. Civic-minded businessmen have been touting the positive effects of social progress on Business for decades. Galbraith addresses the phenomenon at length in _The New Industrial State_.
Cook isn't trying to make a persuasive factual argument, he's making an endorsement, the power of which comes from his role at a major American firm. I have no doubt that he personally believes that workplace equality is beneficial to business. The argument against assumes that he's a bloodless psychopath who is willing to condone discrimination as long as it improves his bottom line.
In other words, Cook gives no reason for believing that the government should pass laws requiring workplace equality; he just "endorses" such laws. Why should I care?
If you're a white heterosexual male with no disabilities you don't care. carry on, business as usual. If you're not white, or not straight, or not male, or if you have some kind of disability, or etc etc you care because you don't want some fucking arsehole denying you a job purely because of that difference.
Perhaps you misunderstood my question. I wasn't asking why I should care about workplace equality; I was asking why I should care that Tim Cook "endorses" having the government pass laws to enforce workplace equality, in view of the fact that he just got through arguing that it's in the best interest of businesses to uphold workplace equality anyway.
That said, I'm not sure I understand your position; are you saying you want the government to force the arsehole to give you a job? Do you really want to work for that kind of arsehole? Wouldn't you be better off getting a job from someone like Tim Cook, who doesn't need to government to force him to uphold workplace equality?
While it would be a safe stance for Starbucks to publicly take, it is less so for Apple which has a much more diverse customer base. It would be better for Apple's business to not take a position in these issues.
Good for Cook. With this piece he is taking a step towards synchronizing his public/personal. Not easy to do. But good he's making steps in that direction.
As a conservative who hides his political beliefs in the tech sector, while my coworkers freely swap progressive political articles over the company's email lists, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Cook.
If the government prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of religion, then why not also political beliefs? There is little difference between the two.
I agree. Sexual orientation, however, rises above political belief and religion as a matter of personal identity. In other words, it should be clear that discrimination for reasons of gender, race, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, and genetic information should be illegal. If you're going to move above that and ban other forms of discrimination, religion and politics are a natural extension.
Let the bigots expose themselves and be punished or not.