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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I agree about eliminating these bureaucracies but the malaise would still be there. It is an inherent fault in the western mythos – this search for greater and greater transcendence which ultimately resolves itself into absurdity. How do you put a stop to that? I would wager that no one has an answer.
Malaise is part of being human. It will never go away. All we can do is fight for what we believe is right. Things go in cycles between tyranny and freedom, reason and lunacy. Things have been worse than they are now, and things have also been better than they are now.
That’s true. Life if it is meaningful at all will always contain struggle.
War puts a stop to it.
Let’s consider the lily!
I really, REALLY am sick to death of hearing about this DEI nonsense, because, as mentioned in the article, it can’t possibly apply to the realm of professional sports. I don’t know about now, but when I used to watch swimming, that was always 100% white competitors. So is swimming racist? Sprinters have always been primarily black, so is sprinting racist against whites, because where’s the ”diversity”? Then there’s all the team sports such as football. Look at national squads such as the French side, primarily made up of players with migrant backgrounds. So that’s not very ”inclusive” is it?
Just like any regular job, all positions should be filled by applicants that are the best for that role, based on ability alone. And I’m really not getting how stating that is in any way controversial. All DEI needs to be abolished, end of.
Indeed, but the issue is this – people love sport but they know it ultimately is not that important in the Game of Life. If you look at the Game of Life – building civilisations and the things that go with it – you get a different set of people achieving things. That upsets people.
It isn’t difficult to understand this particular agenda. Essentially they have robbed more and more and reduced the population step by step that the only way they can try to appeal to anyone is to put themselves across as the most inclusive people possible. This is a corporate agenda it isn’t even difficult to understand. I don’t know why so many people struggle with it. Even if you have never worked for a corporation we live in such a corporatized world that surely the monstrosity of their value system is there to see for anyone who cares to see it.
I heard an interview with Marlene Dietrich and she talked about the development of the personality. How we in northern european countries shared the ethos of cold baths and not taking yourself too seriously. These days plunging your five year old into a cold bath would be considered child abuse. But it shouldn’t be because assuming he survives it then it will put hairs on his chest. He knows that every Sunday before school the only thing he has to look forward to is an ice cold bath in the middle of winter.
Just look at the young lads these days they have a peculiar morphology. They have very big feet and can be qite tall but they have no shoulders. There is a floppiness and softness about them like they need to go through the nasty grinder. I am not into pain but without it you become a monster.
This world of ease and jobs sitting at desks and the sense that this will continue for much longer – this is utter denial of the reality to come. And so given our cossetted reality how do you move into the reality to come. It will happen and it will be like meditation in that it will expel extraneous thought. You will live in the time of the horror to come and you will make some effort. It is a pity that in England that so many people got poisoned against each other it really din’t have to happen that way.
Sorry, my eyes glazed over after the first paragraph!
“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.”
Surprised the author didn’t see fit to mention the US Supreme Court ruling last July, which declared that race-based affirmative action programmes in US colleges fall foul of the US constitution.
Mark Cuban is announcing to Democrats “I’m available” for when Biden drops out of the race for President. I suspect part of the reason he sold his stake in the NBA team was to avoid conflicts of interest as a candidate. Yes, of course loss of value had a part of his decision, but he’s a long-term thinker.
I don’t think I have ever seen women mending roads or collecting the bins, and men are pretty rare in primary schools. I remember as a governor of my kids’ primary trying to recruit a male teacher who was rejected by the {female) head because he would not fit in in the staff room.
DEI is a manifestation of the fiction that “all races are equal in every respect” when we know full well that they aren’t.
DEI in reality & in application requires Discrimination, Exclusion & Inequality whatever sophistry you use to qualify it.
The DEI bureaucracy will fight to keep their jobs.
It will be very dfficult to get rid of them but it must be done.