I think if you are into CRT you understand disparate impact immediately, because it is the bona fide "proof" of systemic racism. The point is that if you spell this out, common sense people who are not into CRT will fail to see systemic racism in plain vanilla technical questions and instead will start questioning CRT by itself.
It's like Cotton Mather and Increase Mather - founding fathers of Harvard - trying to defend spectral evidence (which they did, by the way).
Griggs has always been one of the most apparently stupid decisions in recent decades to me, so it’s relieving to see Trump taking action against it; however, it’s yet to be seen how effective this executive order or future actions will actually be at snuffing it out for good. Either way, here’s to more common sense progress.
I am familiar with the hiring processes of a large bureaucracy (not in US). I was first hired by the bureaucracy and then worked in interviewing applicants years later.
The opening stage was a psychometric test designed by a third-party firm. It was or less an IQ test but it was taboo to describe it as such. The scores and rankings of the candidates was kept under absurd levels of secrecy. At a stretch, you could find out your own score but it wasn’t terribly meaningful without the scores of others.
Years later, I worked in interviewing candidates kind of on assembly line of seven or eight a day. All of these candidates had passed some threshold in the psychometric tests, but as an interviewer, I was never told where they placed. There was quite a lot of variance within the group. This was proved when I worked later with some of the successful candidates.
I once casually asked the people in charge of the psychometric testing whether they did any back testing to see how well the psychometric test tests predicted on the job performance or career progression rate. I was dismissed with a look of complete horror (they were all ladies) and basically told to stop asking questions.
I tend to believe now that their psychometric tests had a dual purpose . One, they screened out obviously un suitable candidates, remember anyone could apply for one of these jobs. Two, they served as a rather imperfect filtering mechanism. The goal was to hire a few dozen graduates at a time and the organisation only had so much resources.
The results tend to be that a mix of very good, good, and average candidates made it to interview stage. The interview had a bit of a random element as well and my feeling was that the net result was that more average candidates got the job than really should have.
Dr. Gerry Eskin's Quantitative Methods in Marketing Research 302 (or whatever it was) final exam was a good combination of general IQ test and of domain specific skills.
Dr. Eskin was first a Professor of Marketing at the U. of Iowa, then a rich tech founder, then he retired and became a Professor of Art (Ceramics) at the U. of Iowa. I've been privileged to know a fair number of superior individuals, and he was one of the best.
IRI, right? I was part of the P&G milieu, if you will, in Cincinnati in the 90s when they were still using some of those tests. GF, buddies all worked there. They seemed to enjoy chatting about their Myers-Briggs results, how ENTJs were on the Brand track while my shy, mousy GF was in Market Research w/her INTJ (if I recall) results.
It's considered voodoo now, I suppose, but I always felt it gave PG a fighting chance to allocate those "human resources" in areas that made sense. My GF was a great support/data person, best in her "class" at PG, but would have failed as a Brand Manager. Indecisive and afraid of her own shadow. My brand buddies all went on to bigger things after PG, using it as a launching pad to HBS and beyond. All ENTJs, I think. Little "Field Marshals!"
The only thing that would happen if they explained how bad this was for them is that a reader who actually has an open mind would read the explanation and think "hmm, it seems like I've been lied to about race not being real."
No way! The people who read the NYT have already self selected. And dare I say they are smarter than the average bear. Intelligent people tend to be better at justifying their own false beliefs, especially if it is closely linked to their identity and sense of self worth. Maybe a years long campaign would work, but it would need to be constant and then you would need to get permission from an authority figure (say Obama?)
Yes...and those people wouldn't get anything from a longer article. The only person who could isn't going to get anything from it that the NYT would want. Which was my point.
I assume this EO is designed to provoke a lawsuit or ten that will eventually end up at the Supremes before it will really have much effect. Who will dare risk it besides the federal govt, most of which will not want to comply?
One thought that keeps nagging me is what happens to all the people that fail these hiring tests. It’s one thing to want to hire the best, but the rejects have to somewhere? Does that mean the firms who hire the rejects are lesser firms? Or does talent tend to distribute itself over time?
If big companies fear disparate impact findings and small garages don't, native talent will go to small garages. But anyway, one reason big companies have been recruiting non-native Indians was because these can be classified as people of color.
This made me chuckle and reminded me of when the whiff (threat?) of DEI came near my team. My boss and I wondered what might happen if the higher ups needed the company to do DEI and what their orders might be as my team had one caucasian (myself) and all the rest asians. We breathed a sigh of relief when the HR DEI meeting's message was "everyone is diverse"
Since the tests are effectively outlawed (as Steve notes, because of the expense and hassle of defending them if you are hauled into court by the Feds) what happens is the same thing that happens with affirmative action in college admissions. The people who would fail the test get hired but then eventually find themselves in a 'make work' job in the firm, and either stick it out for the paycheck or go elsewhere.
I suspect what would happen in a Griggs-less US is that people who consistently were told they failed the qualification exam would either decide to try to find a different kind of work for which they were more suited, or would find a firm that could make use of their level of talent (there's plenty of ham and egg lawyers doing basic wills and contracts, for example). This is consistent with the 'mismatch theory' of college admissions that showed students who attend colleges or universities (I think the specific research was on law schools and the bar exam) with a student body average SAT close to their own generally complete their degree and go on to be successful professionals while affirmative action admits with SATs well below the average for other students either drop out or shift to a less academically challenging major.
If the police are going to be responsive to the problem of criminal violence, their efforts are going to have to reflect the geographic and demographic concentration of that problem. So policing that produces racial disparities in enforcement is not a matter of racism but of demographics."
They'll run guest op-eds (like that one, from Manhattan Institute's very good crime researcher) but I'm not sure if the editorial board is broadly there.
Disparate Impact impacts mostly big corporations and these big corporations have been playing the game since the Supreme Court began to play god in the early 1970s. Small companies don't have to play the games the big corporations have to play. For instance, every Mexican restaurant I've ever eaten in over the last twenty years has had 100 % Mexican staffs. Virtually every Chinese restaurant I've ever eaten in has had all-Chinese staffs except for the occasional Hispanic busboy. When I was foolish enough to have a beer at a local strip club in majority-black Washington DC circa 1990, all the strippers were white. None were ever black.
I used to work at P&G and have always told people/coworkers that the aptitude hiring exam (I took it in the late 2000s) was an IQ test, which without fail would make my coworkers squirm. I had a role where I was able to view hiring exam test scores and minority candidates with lower (but not horrible) aptitude test, personality test, and interview scores (those were the three components of the process) would get offers over higher scoring white candidates. Organizations within the company had diversity targets that I’m fairly confident leadership has pay incentives tied to. So even if you did manage to get hired, the rest of your career you have to fight uphill to not be passed over by a less qualified candidate for a role that you want. At one point I had a white male in a leadership position and nearing retirement tell me to seek employment elsewhere if I desired to climb the corporate ladder due the leadership program also being discriminatory against white males for both entrance and advancement. A good friend and coworker (white male) once shared with me that he was explicitly told by his manager (who lobbied for him but didn’t have final say) that he was being passed over for a promotion and new role he was eminently qualified for because the promotion deciders said the leadership team he would’ve been joining needed more diversity.
This article prompted me to do some looking around and i found that in Fisher v. Procter & Gamble (1976) the company was sued by a black man for discriminatory hiring, promotion and role assignment practices. The district court found P&G was guilty of all 3 under the EEOC but the appellate court reversed the ruling for the hiring portion. While I was employed by them, I did not take a promotion exam or ever hear of anyone taking one, so that’s been axed since then.
I think Steve is right to say since then P&G has likely spent a significant sum validating their entrance exam and working to comply with the EEOC. Despite the discriminatory HR practices when choosing candidates, I’m thankful for their hiring exam and in general for their hiring process, as it did a pretty good job of ensuring I was always working with competent and motivated coworkers.
P&G could make the legitimate argument that they need minority employees in certain roles if they're going to develop and market products successfully for those minorities. But they didn't, I suppose because the same is true for the (dwindling) white majority.
Having recently discussed this with liberals of my generation, they agree that it would be wrong to hire a worse candidate on the basis of race. They, as Steve notes, simply don't believe that is what is happening.
An analogy I am considering is that the two groups are like Newtonians vs Special Relativity fans. The Newtonians assume that time and distance are constant while the Einstein fans, bizarrely, claim that the speed of light is somehow the same in all frames of reference, therefore time and distance must change to make up the difference.
The former point of view is more comfortable and comports with human experience and hurts our heads a lot less but the latter keeps building up more and more evidence over time. But to this day you only have to ignore a handful of obscure facts to happily and smugly deny relativity so why not? Who wants to live in a universe with a speed limit and unreliable clocks?
Considering the amount of delusion about race in America's newsrooms, I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of reporters and editors were unaware that we had a doctrine that implicitly admits racial disparities and demands employers cook the books. After all, I see people argue with a straight face that DEI is most definitely not about lowering standards, it's just a method to uncover those diamonds in the rough that our ruthless capitalistic system routinely overlooks, thereby foregoing massive profits and social upside.
Obviously another possible angle is that they are quietly relieved, as it takes away an avenue for disgruntled applicants/employees can use to sue them. So they can still hire whatever diverse mascot they want, but from a legal standpoint there is a lot less jeopardy in canning them if they don't work out, whereas in the past you had better find a way to sideline them but have to keep them on the payroll. I suspect across America, there are a lot of HR managers even at lefty institutions happy they can be more *cough* discriminating in who they extend offers of employment to.
I have been a college professor for about twenty years, and I've always been surprised that more hasn't been made by my 'progressive' colleagues about the 'disparate impact' that the PhD requirement has on the racial makeup of college faculty. It is, of course, likely that people don't care for policies that negatively impact their lives, so progressive faculty can bemoan the fact that P&G, IBM, or Tesla don't have enough blacks, but still rely on the NIMBY argument for professors. And, of course, white professors who complain about the lack of minorities among the faculty can be easily ridiculed by pointing out that they could do their part by resigning and opening spots for minorities (which I have never seen or heard to happen).
During the darkest times of the DEI/Affirmative Action reckoning several years ago, I was in a faculty senate meeting in which the chairman of our physics department explained the lack of black physics faculty by pointing out that there had only been something like five PhDs in physics awarded to blacks in the previous five years (and those people got jobs at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, of course). I think that he was exaggerating for effect, but, still, universities down the food chain from the Ivies cannot find blacks to hire because there aren't any of them that meet the PhD requirement. The last black philosophy professor that we hired turned out to have hidden his previous conviction on a coke dealing charge, which came out when he was arrested for assault at a local bar (as the Donald once said, they're not sending their best).
Power plant operators do not need literacy or mechanical smarts or the conscientiousness to finish high school, all the are doing is running a power plant. What could go wrong.
In contrast, law schools can legitimately screen on LSAT scores and law firms and judges can screen on scores and grades/rank and only from elite law schools, because it is critical that lawyers and judges be smart ... so that they can come up with brilliant rulings like Griggs vs. Duke Power.
There is a reason for the passion and effort--and billion or two words--Jewish "scientists" and propagandists have poured into the whole diversity denial/diversity obfuscation project.
If one accepts human diversity most of the propaganda of the minoritarian project are revealed as the lies, distortions and illogical assertions that they are. The whole thing falls apart
Maybe the NYT' more recent hires don't understand disparate impact, so don't know what might happen if it goes away?
I think if you are into CRT you understand disparate impact immediately, because it is the bona fide "proof" of systemic racism. The point is that if you spell this out, common sense people who are not into CRT will fail to see systemic racism in plain vanilla technical questions and instead will start questioning CRT by itself.
It's like Cotton Mather and Increase Mather - founding fathers of Harvard - trying to defend spectral evidence (which they did, by the way).
They’re too busy writing about tariffs and other hot button issues.
Trump's tariff policies aren't popular. His anti-disparate impact policies are.
Griggs has always been one of the most apparently stupid decisions in recent decades to me, so it’s relieving to see Trump taking action against it; however, it’s yet to be seen how effective this executive order or future actions will actually be at snuffing it out for good. Either way, here’s to more common sense progress.
Won't Griggs have to be reversed in order for Trump's EO to stand?
I am familiar with the hiring processes of a large bureaucracy (not in US). I was first hired by the bureaucracy and then worked in interviewing applicants years later.
The opening stage was a psychometric test designed by a third-party firm. It was or less an IQ test but it was taboo to describe it as such. The scores and rankings of the candidates was kept under absurd levels of secrecy. At a stretch, you could find out your own score but it wasn’t terribly meaningful without the scores of others.
Years later, I worked in interviewing candidates kind of on assembly line of seven or eight a day. All of these candidates had passed some threshold in the psychometric tests, but as an interviewer, I was never told where they placed. There was quite a lot of variance within the group. This was proved when I worked later with some of the successful candidates.
I once casually asked the people in charge of the psychometric testing whether they did any back testing to see how well the psychometric test tests predicted on the job performance or career progression rate. I was dismissed with a look of complete horror (they were all ladies) and basically told to stop asking questions.
I tend to believe now that their psychometric tests had a dual purpose . One, they screened out obviously un suitable candidates, remember anyone could apply for one of these jobs. Two, they served as a rather imperfect filtering mechanism. The goal was to hire a few dozen graduates at a time and the organisation only had so much resources.
The results tend to be that a mix of very good, good, and average candidates made it to interview stage. The interview had a bit of a random element as well and my feeling was that the net result was that more average candidates got the job than really should have.
Dr. Gerry Eskin's Quantitative Methods in Marketing Research 302 (or whatever it was) final exam was a good combination of general IQ test and of domain specific skills.
Dr. Eskin was first a Professor of Marketing at the U. of Iowa, then a rich tech founder, then he retired and became a Professor of Art (Ceramics) at the U. of Iowa. I've been privileged to know a fair number of superior individuals, and he was one of the best.
IRI, right? I was part of the P&G milieu, if you will, in Cincinnati in the 90s when they were still using some of those tests. GF, buddies all worked there. They seemed to enjoy chatting about their Myers-Briggs results, how ENTJs were on the Brand track while my shy, mousy GF was in Market Research w/her INTJ (if I recall) results.
It's considered voodoo now, I suppose, but I always felt it gave PG a fighting chance to allocate those "human resources" in areas that made sense. My GF was a great support/data person, best in her "class" at PG, but would have failed as a Brand Manager. Indecisive and afraid of her own shadow. My brand buddies all went on to bigger things after PG, using it as a launching pad to HBS and beyond. All ENTJs, I think. Little "Field Marshals!"
Ceramics, one of the few majors that could be art or hard science (pun intended and yes I am ashamed of myself).
The only thing that would happen if they explained how bad this was for them is that a reader who actually has an open mind would read the explanation and think "hmm, it seems like I've been lied to about race not being real."
No way! The people who read the NYT have already self selected. And dare I say they are smarter than the average bear. Intelligent people tend to be better at justifying their own false beliefs, especially if it is closely linked to their identity and sense of self worth. Maybe a years long campaign would work, but it would need to be constant and then you would need to get permission from an authority figure (say Obama?)
Yes...and those people wouldn't get anything from a longer article. The only person who could isn't going to get anything from it that the NYT would want. Which was my point.
I assume this EO is designed to provoke a lawsuit or ten that will eventually end up at the Supremes before it will really have much effect. Who will dare risk it besides the federal govt, most of which will not want to comply?
> Disparate income theory
#FreudianSlip
One thought that keeps nagging me is what happens to all the people that fail these hiring tests. It’s one thing to want to hire the best, but the rejects have to somewhere? Does that mean the firms who hire the rejects are lesser firms? Or does talent tend to distribute itself over time?
If big companies fear disparate impact findings and small garages don't, native talent will go to small garages. But anyway, one reason big companies have been recruiting non-native Indians was because these can be classified as people of color.
This made me chuckle and reminded me of when the whiff (threat?) of DEI came near my team. My boss and I wondered what might happen if the higher ups needed the company to do DEI and what their orders might be as my team had one caucasian (myself) and all the rest asians. We breathed a sigh of relief when the HR DEI meeting's message was "everyone is diverse"
Yep, totally crazy.
Until they get big like in Steve’s former employers case
Since the tests are effectively outlawed (as Steve notes, because of the expense and hassle of defending them if you are hauled into court by the Feds) what happens is the same thing that happens with affirmative action in college admissions. The people who would fail the test get hired but then eventually find themselves in a 'make work' job in the firm, and either stick it out for the paycheck or go elsewhere.
I suspect what would happen in a Griggs-less US is that people who consistently were told they failed the qualification exam would either decide to try to find a different kind of work for which they were more suited, or would find a firm that could make use of their level of talent (there's plenty of ham and egg lawyers doing basic wills and contracts, for example). This is consistent with the 'mismatch theory' of college admissions that showed students who attend colleges or universities (I think the specific research was on law schools and the bar exam) with a student body average SAT close to their own generally complete their degree and go on to be successful professionals while affirmative action admits with SATs well below the average for other students either drop out or shift to a less academically challenging major.
NYT Opinion:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/opinion/crime-police-progressive-policy.html
https://archive.is/rh9Lk
The Left Keeps Getting It Wrong on Crime
"[...]
If the police are going to be responsive to the problem of criminal violence, their efforts are going to have to reflect the geographic and demographic concentration of that problem. So policing that produces racial disparities in enforcement is not a matter of racism but of demographics."
Wow! From the NYT? Have we turned a corner?
They'll run guest op-eds (like that one, from Manhattan Institute's very good crime researcher) but I'm not sure if the editorial board is broadly there.
They’ll just call it trump being racist and the readers will repeat it
Naturally.
Disparate Impact impacts mostly big corporations and these big corporations have been playing the game since the Supreme Court began to play god in the early 1970s. Small companies don't have to play the games the big corporations have to play. For instance, every Mexican restaurant I've ever eaten in over the last twenty years has had 100 % Mexican staffs. Virtually every Chinese restaurant I've ever eaten in has had all-Chinese staffs except for the occasional Hispanic busboy. When I was foolish enough to have a beer at a local strip club in majority-black Washington DC circa 1990, all the strippers were white. None were ever black.
I used to work at P&G and have always told people/coworkers that the aptitude hiring exam (I took it in the late 2000s) was an IQ test, which without fail would make my coworkers squirm. I had a role where I was able to view hiring exam test scores and minority candidates with lower (but not horrible) aptitude test, personality test, and interview scores (those were the three components of the process) would get offers over higher scoring white candidates. Organizations within the company had diversity targets that I’m fairly confident leadership has pay incentives tied to. So even if you did manage to get hired, the rest of your career you have to fight uphill to not be passed over by a less qualified candidate for a role that you want. At one point I had a white male in a leadership position and nearing retirement tell me to seek employment elsewhere if I desired to climb the corporate ladder due the leadership program also being discriminatory against white males for both entrance and advancement. A good friend and coworker (white male) once shared with me that he was explicitly told by his manager (who lobbied for him but didn’t have final say) that he was being passed over for a promotion and new role he was eminently qualified for because the promotion deciders said the leadership team he would’ve been joining needed more diversity.
This article prompted me to do some looking around and i found that in Fisher v. Procter & Gamble (1976) the company was sued by a black man for discriminatory hiring, promotion and role assignment practices. The district court found P&G was guilty of all 3 under the EEOC but the appellate court reversed the ruling for the hiring portion. While I was employed by them, I did not take a promotion exam or ever hear of anyone taking one, so that’s been axed since then.
I think Steve is right to say since then P&G has likely spent a significant sum validating their entrance exam and working to comply with the EEOC. Despite the discriminatory HR practices when choosing candidates, I’m thankful for their hiring exam and in general for their hiring process, as it did a pretty good job of ensuring I was always working with competent and motivated coworkers.
P&G could make the legitimate argument that they need minority employees in certain roles if they're going to develop and market products successfully for those minorities. But they didn't, I suppose because the same is true for the (dwindling) white majority.
Having recently discussed this with liberals of my generation, they agree that it would be wrong to hire a worse candidate on the basis of race. They, as Steve notes, simply don't believe that is what is happening.
An analogy I am considering is that the two groups are like Newtonians vs Special Relativity fans. The Newtonians assume that time and distance are constant while the Einstein fans, bizarrely, claim that the speed of light is somehow the same in all frames of reference, therefore time and distance must change to make up the difference.
The former point of view is more comfortable and comports with human experience and hurts our heads a lot less but the latter keeps building up more and more evidence over time. But to this day you only have to ignore a handful of obscure facts to happily and smugly deny relativity so why not? Who wants to live in a universe with a speed limit and unreliable clocks?
Considering the amount of delusion about race in America's newsrooms, I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of reporters and editors were unaware that we had a doctrine that implicitly admits racial disparities and demands employers cook the books. After all, I see people argue with a straight face that DEI is most definitely not about lowering standards, it's just a method to uncover those diamonds in the rough that our ruthless capitalistic system routinely overlooks, thereby foregoing massive profits and social upside.
Obviously another possible angle is that they are quietly relieved, as it takes away an avenue for disgruntled applicants/employees can use to sue them. So they can still hire whatever diverse mascot they want, but from a legal standpoint there is a lot less jeopardy in canning them if they don't work out, whereas in the past you had better find a way to sideline them but have to keep them on the payroll. I suspect across America, there are a lot of HR managers even at lefty institutions happy they can be more *cough* discriminating in who they extend offers of employment to.
I have been a college professor for about twenty years, and I've always been surprised that more hasn't been made by my 'progressive' colleagues about the 'disparate impact' that the PhD requirement has on the racial makeup of college faculty. It is, of course, likely that people don't care for policies that negatively impact their lives, so progressive faculty can bemoan the fact that P&G, IBM, or Tesla don't have enough blacks, but still rely on the NIMBY argument for professors. And, of course, white professors who complain about the lack of minorities among the faculty can be easily ridiculed by pointing out that they could do their part by resigning and opening spots for minorities (which I have never seen or heard to happen).
During the darkest times of the DEI/Affirmative Action reckoning several years ago, I was in a faculty senate meeting in which the chairman of our physics department explained the lack of black physics faculty by pointing out that there had only been something like five PhDs in physics awarded to blacks in the previous five years (and those people got jobs at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, of course). I think that he was exaggerating for effect, but, still, universities down the food chain from the Ivies cannot find blacks to hire because there aren't any of them that meet the PhD requirement. The last black philosophy professor that we hired turned out to have hidden his previous conviction on a coke dealing charge, which came out when he was arrested for assault at a local bar (as the Donald once said, they're not sending their best).
The Supreme Court explained all this:
Power plant operators do not need literacy or mechanical smarts or the conscientiousness to finish high school, all the are doing is running a power plant. What could go wrong.
In contrast, law schools can legitimately screen on LSAT scores and law firms and judges can screen on scores and grades/rank and only from elite law schools, because it is critical that lawyers and judges be smart ... so that they can come up with brilliant rulings like Griggs vs. Duke Power.
There is a reason for the passion and effort--and billion or two words--Jewish "scientists" and propagandists have poured into the whole diversity denial/diversity obfuscation project.
If one accepts human diversity most of the propaganda of the minoritarian project are revealed as the lies, distortions and illogical assertions that they are. The whole thing falls apart