The writer is in Australia.
Mark Cuban is an American billionaire. He’s worth some six billion U.S. dollars made largely from tech investments (sold before the dotcom bubble burst) and from selling cheap generic prescription drugs. He also appeared for years on the U.S. version of the reality TV show Shark Tank (a.k.a. Dragons’ Den). Oh, and he was the owner of the NBA franchise Dallas Mavericks. I say ‘was’ because just a couple of months ago he sold his controlling interest in that team. (I think that’s in part because the NBA’s TV ratings have plummeted over the past three decades – when Michael Jordan played it could get up to 30 million TV viewers for a top game and now it’s lucky to get four or five million, a loss of five sixths (around 85%) of its U.S. audience. Blame the league’s incredible Left-wing wokeness and a much-deteriorated product since the Bird-Magic 1980s for anyone who knows his or her basketball – including ‘load management’, way too many trifling fouls called but at the same time some key rules not enforced, stars favoured by the refs, no defence played, the list goes on into the sunset. U.S. college basketball is the place to be if you want to watch good basketball, full stop.
But back to Mr. Cuban. Last week he got caught up in a Twitter fight with, amongst others, Elon Musk. At one point Cuban was something of a free-thinker but of late he’s been a keen defender of all the usual progressive-Left shibboleths, not unlike what Australia’s corporate class revealed itself to be during the Voice referendum. Last week it was DEI or ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ policies that Cuban was defending. Cuban wrote on X/Twitter: “Treating people equally does not mean treating them same.” He also wrote that “diversity [helped businesses] by employing people others do not”.
Did you spot the fallacies in these claims? Elon Musk sure did. In a one line put down for the ages Musk replied: “Cool, so when should we expect to see short white/Asian women on the [Dallas] Mavericks [NBA team]?” Remember, that’s the NBA team Cuban owned. And, of course, the NBA is the least ‘inclusive’ employer in the world. Its employees look nothing like the wider American population. Some 90% of the league’s players are black whereas the black share of the overall U.S. population is only about 13%. In fact, the whole U.S. Olympic basketball team, made up of NBA stars, is 100% black. This is as it should be because they’re the best players. It’s simple. Professional sports is a meritocracy; it is not a top-down HR-engineered ‘equality of outcome’ world. (I refer to the competitors not the team executives.) No team owner aims for ‘cosmetic diversity’ in sports. And revealingly, no one on the progressive Left argues for more white basketball players, or even more Asians or Hispanics. You see, sport reveals everything that is fundamentally wrong with DEI; its core undermining of equality and its undercutting the ability to produce the best possible product. This is so obvious in top level U.S. sports, and there is so much at stake monetarily, that no one with skin in the game dabbles in the idiocies of DEI thinking in terms of the team they put on the court. Not even Mark Cuban as an owner of an NBA team. That was the point Elon Musk was making.
Cuban’s tweets amounted to deliberate obfuscation. Of course, if you find a smart, hard-working Vietnamese (or any other) immigrant who outperforms white candidates you should hire him (or her). That, however, is not what DEI demands. No, DEI is premised on ‘equality of outcome’, on getting the same statistical percentages of a group into some highly desirable job X (it’s only ever good jobs or emoluments) as they represent in the wider population. Let me be blunt. ‘Equity’ is the polar opposite of equality of opportunity. Drill down and you see it seeks equality of outcome, full stop. That’s the game all variations of affirmative action are playing. It’s just that DEI is one of the most malign and pernicious variants.
Go back to Cuban’s claim that “treating people equally does not mean treating them the same”. This is classic ‘equity’ thinking. It is premised on the belief that equality is a demand for equal outcomes in some “deliver us the same group percentages here as in the general population” way. In fact, ‘equity’ necessarily presupposes that all differences, everywhere and all the time, are the result of discrimination and nothing else. That’s why it requires treating people unequally based on race and other immutable characteristics. And that’s why Musk also tweeted back to Cuban that “DEI is just another word for racism”.
Musk is surely right about that. One of the most important battles all conservatives (and classical liberals for that matter) have to fight is to eliminate the HR DEI bureaucracies everywhere. We need them gone from the public service, from the big law firms, from the big corporations and from the universities. Take the last of these, which I know only too well. A recent report in the U.S. revealed that at just two major U.S. state universities (Ohio State and the University of Michigan) there were over 100 DEI commissars (my term) employed. And they earned over US$10 million per year cumulatively – at just two of hundreds and hundreds of U.S. universities. Now don’t kid yourself. Our Australian universities are also chock full of these massively overpaid DEI bureaucrats whose core remit is to undermine merit and equality of opportunity. So tell me we don’t have an ideological problem in our unis and that this isn’t a core cause! (The search for cosmetic diversity is also a core cause in the collapse of viewpoint diversity, as an aside.)
Well, at least in a few U.S. States we are now seeing Republican legislators doing something about this. Some are completely defunding the DEI bureaucracies in the state universities. There are moves to stop state governments from contracting with big companies that enforce DEI policies. My Lord, my kingdom for an Australian Liberal Party [the country’s largest centre-Right party] that might actually do any of those things! I’ll be blunt. The first step to reforming our wholly broken universities (those rankings of world universities are a complete joke by the way, as every insider knows) is to completely defund the entire DEI bureaucracies. Because as things stand now, does any reader really believe that in today’s universities a young white male gets equal treatment with non-whites and with women as regards available scholarships, consideration for job openings, for promotions, pick your favourite criterion?
Elon Musk is right. Mark Cuban is wrong. It’s time for our Right-of-centre politicians to grow a spine and do something about this. That’s a wish, not a serious expectation.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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