Monday, June 10, 2024
DEI, the Loss of Knowledge, and Retrogression
Of late I've been in touch with people in several lines of work who have expressed horror at what is happening in their fields. Among these are instructors at medical schools and military officers. In each case the story they tell is chilling: the imposition of insane woke ideology, demands of conformity to obviously harmful things, quotas for various identities resulting in incompetent people being promoted, and competent people leaving.
The immediate effects are obvious -- medicine and military are life-and-death professions. An incompetent person can get a lot of people hurt or killed. But there's another matter perhaps less obvious. Driving competent people out of a profession results in a loss of knowledge that can't be replaced. Even if DEI programs are suddenly ended after a few years and people entering these professions selected only for merit and competence, there will be a loss of people and knowledge, and training the next generation to previous high pre-DEI standards won't be possible. Knowledge is lost and skills decay. The longer DEI nonsense is pursued, the greater the loss and the worse the problem. It will become increasingly difficult to recover. We will retrogress.
This is akin to a problem economist John Cochrane has identified with so-called degrowth and the environmental anti-technological movement. If such a movement gets its way, it might well lock us into a downward spiral of poverty we cannot escape. Resources have become increasingly abundant because our advances in knowledge and thus technology have allowed us to turn what were once worthless submarginal deposits and stocks into valuable sources. Real prices of resources systematically fall. But these deposits are often not physically accessible with older technology, and should we stop or reverse technological advance, we no longer have the more easily accessed resources of the past, trapping humanity in resource-scarce poverty.
This is remarkably dangerous. Advocates of DEI, degrowth, the war on reliable energy (i.e. nuclear, fossil fuels, and hydro power) are effectively working for the suicide of the West. In every way the "woke" agenda is destructive. It must be reversed at all cost.
