Wednesday Morning Rant

No, not the variety that credential worshiping lickspittles like Tom Nichols have lamented, but the real thing. Perhaps his book would have been more accurately titled "The Waning of the Expert Class." The attitude toward - and effect of - public "experts" has shifted markedly since the publication of that book in 2017, which occurred somewhere near the midpoint of the shift. Nichols lamented the apparent distrust and rejection of "expertise" but that's not what he meant. He meant that he was distressed by the distrust and rejection of self-anointed "experts" by the normals.

But why would the normals not? How much patience and credulity do the "experts" expect when they continuously fail? Contemporary public "experts" serve the same purpose that prior generations' public "intellectuals" served. They lie to reinforce the ideological narrative and rest on the same basic argument as always: "listen to me, because I'm smarter than you." Yet, all too often, it turns out that they weren't. They, like their "intellectual" predecessors, are often just cunning liars.

There was a spectacular new example of this from a couple of weeks ago. The Wall Street Journal ran an article about one of the favorite topics of business experts. The article's title doesn't leave much to the imagination: Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. Not So Much. The new "DEI" push - in hiring, in production, in investing, etc. - accelerated rapidly in 2015 when those paragons of business consulting over at McKinsey published their findings regarding "diversity" and profitability. The WSJ dutifully covered it.

As the Journal so bluntly puts it in the new article, the problem is the same as everywhere else in academia: the study was bad and non-reproducible:

Since 2015, the approach has been tested in the fire of the marketplace and failed. Academics have tried to repeat McKinsey's findings and failed, concluding that there is in fact no link between profitability and executive diversity. And the methodology of McKinsey's early studies, which helped create the widespread belief that diversity is good for profits, is being questioned.

Even the correlation is in doubt. Academics can't replicate McKinsey's study precisely, because it keeps secret the names of the companies it used.

But the purpose, of course, was not to tell the truth but to move the goalposts. The McKinsey fabrication study was used to justify various "DEI" and "ESG" investment funds from the likes of Blackrock, and to provide cover for the investment banks to bully businesses into compliance through capital control. Those funds, per the WSJ, lag the market by a staggering 70%. Quite a gap, not that it matters. Profitability was never really the point.

There are only two reasonable conclusions one can draw about McKinsey's study and the subsequent developments throughout the corporate world. The first is that McKinsey was sloppy, unsophisticated and stupid and drew bad conclusions that misidentified causality, and it had the power to promote those conclusions beyond the boundaries of a normal bad study. The second is that McKinsey was lying and produced known-bad work product for the purpose of promoting ideological revolution or simply as a raw power move, with the expectation that their fellow "experts" wouldn't look into it too closely. So, incompetence or malice - or even malicious incompetence. Those are the only reasonable explanations I can come up with.

This is disgustingly typical, and people like Nichols still wonder why normals increasingly reject the expert class.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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