Willing To Be Disturbed
Willing To Be Disturbed
Margaret Wheatley | Fake Resumes Uncover Systemic Racism | Factoids | Elsewhere | Elsewhen
Quote of the Moment
We weren’t trained to admit we don’t know. Most of us were taught to sound certain and confident, to state our opinion as if it were true. We haven’t been rewarded for being confused. Or for asking more questions rather than giving quick answers. We’ve also spent many years listening to others mainly to determine whether we agree with them or not. We don’t have time or interest to sit and listen to those who think differently than we do.
But the world now is quite perplexing. We no longer live in those sweet, slow days when life felt predictable, when we actually knew what to do next. We live in a complex world, we often don’t know what’s going on, and we won’t be able to understand its complexity unless we spend more time in not knowing.
| Margaret Wheatley, Willing to Be Disturbed
Fake Resumes Uncover Systemic Racism
A large-scale and comprehensive research study, investigating hiring practices at 100 of America’s largest companies, showed 'On average… employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5 percent more often than the presumed Black applicants.'
Quotes in this story are taken from Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz’s reporting.
The technique the researchers — Patrick M. Kline, Evan K. Rose, Christopher R. Walters — employed involved fake resumés with names that could be construed to be typically White or Black. For example, Lakisha Alston versus Allison Byler.
The study was the largest of its kind, sending out 80,000 fake resumes. ‘They sent up to 1,000 applications to each company, applying for as many as 125 jobs per company in locations nationwide, to try to uncover patterns in companies’ operations versus isolated instances. Then they tracked whether the employer contacted the applicant within 30 days.’
There were large difference in the actions of the companies, and revealed several key indicators of whether a company is likely to skew their responses to the resumés based on presumed race:
Several industries -- retail and car dealerships -- were the most biased; these companies accounted for one-fifth of those studied. Others were less so. Some companies showed no bias. Note that car dealerships are generally privately owned, family-run organizations.
‘Two companies favored white applicants over Black applicants significantly more than others. They were AutoNation, a used car retailer, which contacted presumed white applicants 43 percent more often, and Genuine Parts Company, which sells auto parts including under the NAPA brand, and called presumed white candidates 33 percent more often.’
‘Companies requiring lots of interaction with customers, like sales and retail, particularly in the auto sector, were most likely to show a preference for applicants presumed to be white. This was true even when applying for positions at those firms that didn’t involve customer interaction, suggesting that discriminatory practices were baked in to corporate culture or H.R. practices, the researchers said.’
‘Still, there were exceptions — some of the companies exhibiting the least bias were retailers, like Lowe’s and Target.’
‘The study may underestimate the rate of discrimination against Black applicants in the labor market as a whole because it tested large companies, which tend to discriminate less.’
‘On average, companies did not treat male and female applicants differently. This aligns with other research showing that gender discrimination against women is rare in entry-level jobs, and starts later in careers. However, when companies did favor men (especially in manufacturing) or women (mostly at apparel stores), the biases were much larger than for race. Builders FirstSource contacted presumed male applicants more than twice as often as female ones. Ascena, which owns brands like Ann Taylor, contacted women 66 percent more than men.’
‘Several common measures — like employing a chief diversity officer, offering diversity training or having a diverse board — were not correlated with decreased discrimination in entry-level hiring, the researchers found.’ I suppose what happens at headquarters doesn’t have much of an impact out in the field.
‘One thing strongly predicted less discrimination: a centralized H.R. operation.’ That confirms what I said: taking away the option for discrimination at the outset of the recruitment process at HQ leads to better outcomes. Of course, what happens later on remains to be seen.
‘Another important factor is diversity among the people hiring’ and ‘Diversifying the pool of people who apply also helps’.
And the kicker: Nobel economics laureate Gary Becker conjectured in 1957 that more profitable, successful companies would be less prone to discrimination. As Devah Pager wrote:
Gary Becker’s (1957) treatise, The Economics of Discrimination, stimulated a long and productive line of work examining the causes and consequences of labor market discrimination. In this work, Becker conceptualizes racial bias as a preference for avoiding contact with members of an outgroup. Employers with this “taste for discrimination” are willing to pay higher wages to members of the ingroup in order to indulge this preference. The long-run implication of this idea, pointed out by Becker and developed further by those who followed, is that the costs of discrimination will ultimately undermine competitiveness.
If an individual has a ‘taste for discrimination,’ [Becker wrote] he must act as if he were willing to pay something either directly or in the form of a reduced income, to be associated with some persons instead of others. When actual discrimination occurs, he must, in fact, either pay or forfeit income for this privilege.
So, being willing to sidestep Black applicants in favor of White ones is itself an anti-competitive practice, and is likely to be indicative of other poor economic choices aside from just being discriminatory.
And, yes, the most profitable companies in the study showed the least discrimination.
Becker was hailed by for Fed chair Milton Friedman as the greatest social scientist who has lived and worked in the second part of the twentieth century.
And companies have still not uniformly learned what Becker’s research revealed. Perhaps this new study will help.
Factoids
In a 2015 survey of college students in 26 different states, undergraduates reported using their digital devices for non-classroom purposes an average of 11.7 times per day in class, accounting for an average of 21% of class time (McCoy, 2016). In a survey conducted by Tindell and Bohlander (2011), 92% of college students reported using their phones to send text messages during class.
| The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning
…
In many places, upgrading power lines with advanced conductors could nearly double the capacity of existing transmission corridors at less than half the cost of building new lines, researchers found. If utilities began deploying advanced conductors on a nationwide scale — replacing thousands of miles of wires — they could add four times as much transmission capacity by 2035 as they are currently on pace to do.
That would allow the use of much more solar and wind power from thousands of projects that have been proposed but can’t move forward because local grids are too clogged to accommodate them.
…
Concentrations of micro-nano plastics found in testing were estimated to be 240,000 particles on average per liter of bottled water, "about 90% of which are nanoplastics," researchers wrote in the paper, after testing three unidentified brands of bottled water.
| ABCNews
Elsewhere
In Comrade Thomas Piketty, Welcome to the Socialist Movement, Eric Blanc reviews Time for Socialism: Dispatches From a World on Fire, 2016–2021 by Thomas Piketty (Yale University Press, 2021).
For years, Thomas Piketty has articulated a cogent critique of 21st-century capitalism. He now appears to be moving beyond just critique to call for a 21st-century socialism:
The past three decades of what he calls “hypercapitalism” pushed him to question accepted truths about the prevailing economic system.
His embrace of socialism reflects his newfound conviction that “one cannot just be ‘against’ capitalism or neoliberalism: one must also and above all be ‘for’ something else, which requires precisely designating the ideal economic system that one wishes to set up.”
Piketty summarizes his case for “a new form of socialism” as one that is “participative and decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, multiracial, and feminist.”
To deepen this power shift, Piketty also proposes that all countries adopt workers’ comanagement, in which elected employee representatives constitute half of the boards of directors in all large enterprises.
“[T]he participatory socialism I’m calling for will not come from the top.”
To win a better world, the compellingly open-minded spirit of Time for Socialism may ultimately prove to be of even greater utility than its specific policy proposals.
This lines up with my pleas for socialist humanism (or humanist socialism) and co-determination.
Elsewhen
In Productivity gurus through time: a match-up, The Economist’s Bartleby columnist compares the perspectives of ‘productivity’ gurus — one of the 2020’s, James Clear, and another of the 1900’s, Arnold Bennett. While strikingly reflective of their times, some parts of their pitches remain quite the same, but fundamentally, the gurus differ [emphasis mine]:
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