Dr Oliver Hartwich: Embed, align, continue, refresh

The cover of MBIE’s new Workforce Diversity Action Plan shows nine staff holding signs reading “I belong” in several languages. Inside, it declares itself “People-centred | Performance-driven | Evidence-informed”.

Treasury’s plan appeared a few weeks after MBIE’s. Both are organised around the same three focus areas. Both culminate in the same heading “Apply the merit principle comprehensively”.

Dr James Allan: What’s So Great About Diversity?

‘Diversity is our strength.’ One hears this, or myriad variants of the same idea, unrelentingly. Certainly I work in an Australian university where the extent of higher-ups pushing this notion does indeed qualify as unrelenting, even matching totalitarian state levels of propaganda. But even outside the hallowed halls of impartial, politically balanced academia (did I write that with a straight face?) the mantra or cliché that diversity somehow delivers a stronger balance sheet or a more cohesive society or just better outcomes is pervasive in today’s democracies that have committed themselves to multiculturalism and to the various neo-Marxist versions of feminism. Sure, those spouting these ‘diversity is a panacea’ nostrums never cash out the claim. They never tell us precisely how ‘diversity’ is making society better or wealthier or more unified. We are all just supposed to take it on faith, as it were. We’re just to believe the bureaucratic, political and various professional bodies’ elites who push this line, and believe it simply because they are the ones telling us it’s so.

Darren Gee: A Golden Age for American Meritocracy

The inauguration of the 47th President of the United States was a moment that occupied the wild fantasies of millions of Trump supporters since November 2020, when Joe Biden was declared victorious and Trump’s political fortunes had seemingly run dry. All would testify to the surreal spectacle of when fantasy became reality this week, as Donald J. Trump was received by the current President, his Vice President, three former Presidents, the Supreme Court Justices and four of the five wealthiest people on Earth, and took the oath to return to the Presidency.

Richard Epstein: The Diversity Fundamentalists

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is the new catchphrase of today’s elite businesses and universities. Those institutions assume D&I is both a means—to excellence—and an end in itself, making them more closely resemble the larger world of which they are a part. So understood, companies from Facebook to Apple to Goldman Sachs, and academic establishments from UC Berkeley to Harvard to Yale, have found their new holy grail. 

Their commitment to D&I is all too often treated as a self-evident truth that none should be allowed to question in public discourse. But this new consensus for D&I, if left unchallenged, has an unintended consequence: unthinking intellectual rigidity, a malaise that all successful institutions must guard against.

Richard Epstein: The Diversity Fundamentalists

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is the new catchphrase of today’s elite businesses and universities. Those institutions assume D&I is both a means—to excellence—and an end in itself, making them more closely resemble the larger world of which they are a part. So understood, companies from Facebook to Apple to Goldman Sachs, and academic establishments from UC Berkeley to Harvard to Yale, have found their new holy grail. Their commitment to D&I is all too often treated as a self-evident truth that none should be allowed to question in public discourse. But this new consensus for D&I, if left unchallenged, has an unintended consequence: unthinking intellectual rigidity, a malaise that all successful institutions must guard against.

 The first difficulty with D&I is that it says very little about whom to admit and whom to exclude. Scarcity of places is a major constraint, so any institution committed to D&I has to decide whom to exclude from its community. Ironically, these institutions depend for their success on the institution of private property, which gives them the breathing room on which their cooperative activities rest.