My business for twenty years has been writing scheduling software for construction companies, and I can assure you that wokeness has not moved the needle an inch in that industry. No pronouns in emails, no declarations of inclusiveness on websites, no DEI bureaucracy, no mandatory diversity seminars, no politics at all really. They all talk the same way now as they did when I began. Some of my clients are explicitly Christian, say so on their websites, and give their employees time off for church-sponsored community service.
It helps that most of my clients have annual revenues under $500 million, and are thus not large enough to attract much attention from the EEOC. There are probably other sectors where these things are also true, to which people with normal politics gravitate, but this is the one I know. There may be a certain sample bias in your Explanation #1.
The whole point of the Jim Crow laws was to block the Beckerian market correction of discrimination. Those who, like Jack Phillips the baker, refuse to kowtow to the left are hit with innumerable and unpredictable attacks from the establishleft. The attacks are unpredictable in their vector of attack and in their possible consequences. This is not a business environment; it is a war environment.
Energy and transportation account for more than half of the GDP in the USA, these are working class folks and definitely don't want to sit on Bidans lap.
I am pretty sure #5 is the big winner. Big firms are the ones with large and influential HR departments, and the sort of people who select into HR are the people who care about the sort of stuff HR departments do, which is left wing type stuff. You don't get a lot of welders who hate metal and think people should use more wood to make things for the same reason.
Smaller firms tend to have much less of a built in bias it seems, so tend to swing a bit towards whatever the owner or management think instead of what HR says discrimination law etc. demands.
Related is reason #3, as there is a pretty definite difference between industries, generally between how many college graduates work in the industry and how large the firm size typically is. I was working for a trucking company in late 2020 and 2021, and the whole vaccine thing wasn't even a discussion, because whatever corporate wanted they knew their drivers were going to give them a hard no. The company did have a few idiot HR types, but by in large they were ignored. Likewise all the trades or smaller manufacturing companies I have talked to worked with are relatively right leaning, and many of the larger firms tend to be very right leaning at the plant level and left leaning at the corporate.
It seems the closer you get to turning a wrench or actually making something that has to work the less political discrimination there is, but more self selection for right wing types, whereas the more office type "my key board is my primary tool and if something isn't right I can probably blame someone else" jobs those tend to select for leftists. I suspect the process is that people care less about your politics when things need to happen for real, and engage in political discrimination when actual matters of getting the job done are less important or much harder to measure, and in the current state of the law anti-right discrimination is legal but anti-left is not.
My intuition that may be hard to swallow is that left wing propaganda and aesthetics are more universally popular. It is very attractive regardless of whether it’s true or not. It is even attractive to right wing people.
The reason why the biggest company in the world: Apple’s generic commercials are extremely left coded. Even the broadest brands like coke, nike, and mcdonalds create very left wing commercials. Left wing viewpoints are just much more attractive to everyone.
I would suggest that it's the inherent strength of the products themselves that allow these companies to insult half their customer base and get away with it regardless.
Sure, their ads are annoying and their employees are offensive, but seriously who's going to NOT buy Apple or Coke or McDonald's anymore, just because of that?
These products and empires were built in a more "conventially appealing" time and in traditional methods. It's only now, with their reputations established and their customer bases solidified that their modern leaders have taken an advertising swing in a bias direction. And clearly they all enjoy rubbing the other half's noses in it!
I work in finance in Texas, both standard conservative bastions, though I live in a purplish suburb (usually 60% votes red). In finance I fit in - opinionated but orthogonal to the left-right spectrum, with strong libertarian leanings. Educational levels and political knowledge in my industry are usually top of the pyramid. Where I live in the suburb, however, the right is very vocal and very loud, and influential, even though we are adjacent to a very blue urban center. This extends to businesses, churches, city councils, school boards, etc. It is an educated and wealthy version of right wing. As someone who is not quite so right wing, I often find myself choosing my political words carefully.
I think at least one difference between politics and race / gender is that people fearing political discrimination can avoid it more easily by staying quiet. You bear the costs internally of working in an environment you don't like (or at least I do). If everyone wore badges displaying their views on hot button issues, I suspect there would be (in the short run) more discrimination and more right wing or non-woke firms. In the long run, I like to think that people would adjust the Overton window to the new observed normal of people's views.
This suggests one cause might be a signalling issue, where it is costly for individuals to display that they are right wing such that other RW colleagues or firms would identify them. This leads to a failure to coordinate (within a workplace or more broadly) because no one wants to send the first signal and so you have a 'prisoners dilemma' style situation where everyone stays quiet.
One possible explanation (that's sort of a merger of #1 and #4 but deserves its own number) is that it's the "woke" corporations that are the profit opportunities. In this explanation, the business mainstream generally leans right (following #4), and so "woke," "fair-trade," "green," etc. firms (and nonprofits) are trying to cater to consumers, workers, and investors who feel discriminated against in the mainstream business world.
1. As others have pointed out, civil rights law is anything but neutral. It creates a great asymmetry of force, such that a right-wing org is in the position of a guerilla force. The potential doesn't exist for a WW1-style build-up along a static line with no-man's land.
2. Conservative ideology is more consistent with family formation, which is to say conservatives have significantly less time for stupid games like boycotts.
I don't know, but I do know that people rationally taking advantage of this hole in the market never seems to happen no matter what side it happens to.
My mom's a remarkable woman who was a feminist a few decades ago and supports men's rights now. When she was growing up her chores were unpaid while her brother got paid for his chores, and when she tried to get a summer job she was plainly told that wasn't a woman's role by everyone she could find. When I went to college because I wasn't even educated enough to get a job putting stickers on bottles in an assembly line with my 12 years of school, and showed her what the professors were saying she agreed that it was bullshit.
(I'm autistic and was only able to get jobs like that after my degree, all hundreds of jobs I applied to either I was declined or was fired after a few days without them telling me why or something, and I would have started my own company but red tape is astronomical and I couldn't even figure out everything I need to do for simpler things; for a while I had no insurance or unemployment benefits because I can't even figure out how to do those correctly. The success sequence was actually out of my reach. I only could do college because my parents were able to help me with the bureaucracy stuff)
#4 is right. Only weirdos care about this stuff. Normie right wingers just roll their eyes and keep working. They don’t care about having their values affirmed or being free to speak their minds at work. They do that online in comment threads.
Why is orange juice kosher? It's because a small but highly motivated segment of the market wants kosher, and the rest are indifferent, and the cost of producing kosher isn’t large enough to segment the market.
The cases mentioned in the post are not directly analogous - right wingers are not indifferent to cancel culture. But I think something similar is going on. The left has found asymmetrical means of punishing firms that displease them. But that just pushes the puzzle back a step - why are they asymmetrical? How did they manage to colonize the media, the universities, and the government?
Broadly, left-wing discourse and cultural norms are dominated by legible values, and right-wing discourse and cultural norms are dominated by non-legible values. Academic writing, versus lived experience, broadly speaking. The larger a firm gets, the more legibility matters.
Additionally, the right puts a much higher value on "women's work" (home and community making) than the left, which puts a much higher value on "men's work" (raw productivity) - the closer a job is to home and community, in the right, basically, the higher status it is. Running a local grocer is higher status, in the right, than running a regional grocery chain, even if the latter may pay more; it is, basically, closer to the home, more firmly unified with it. Providing for your family is the purpose of work in right-wing culture; maximizing your income is not.
I think that's basically it. As soon as you're a firm or organization you'd be looking at in the first place, you're already pretty far outside right-wing cultural norms.
There is a profit opportunity, but it take an entrepeneur. As Schumpeter says, good ideas are lying around all the time (we professors have lots of them), but what is rarest is the man who can single-mindedly implement one of them. What I've thought of, but hve been too academic to do, is to have mutual fund that doesn't invest in companies thta follow the trans agenda. Easy to set up (for someone in the mutual fund business), and low-risk. You're welcome.
My business for twenty years has been writing scheduling software for construction companies, and I can assure you that wokeness has not moved the needle an inch in that industry. No pronouns in emails, no declarations of inclusiveness on websites, no DEI bureaucracy, no mandatory diversity seminars, no politics at all really. They all talk the same way now as they did when I began. Some of my clients are explicitly Christian, say so on their websites, and give their employees time off for church-sponsored community service.
It helps that most of my clients have annual revenues under $500 million, and are thus not large enough to attract much attention from the EEOC. There are probably other sectors where these things are also true, to which people with normal politics gravitate, but this is the one I know. There may be a certain sample bias in your Explanation #1.
> There aren’t enough monarchist barbers to economically justify a monarchist barbershop.
Le salon de coiffure ,c'est moi!
-Lou
The whole point of the Jim Crow laws was to block the Beckerian market correction of discrimination. Those who, like Jack Phillips the baker, refuse to kowtow to the left are hit with innumerable and unpredictable attacks from the establishleft. The attacks are unpredictable in their vector of attack and in their possible consequences. This is not a business environment; it is a war environment.
Energy and transportation account for more than half of the GDP in the USA, these are working class folks and definitely don't want to sit on Bidans lap.
I am pretty sure #5 is the big winner. Big firms are the ones with large and influential HR departments, and the sort of people who select into HR are the people who care about the sort of stuff HR departments do, which is left wing type stuff. You don't get a lot of welders who hate metal and think people should use more wood to make things for the same reason.
Smaller firms tend to have much less of a built in bias it seems, so tend to swing a bit towards whatever the owner or management think instead of what HR says discrimination law etc. demands.
Related is reason #3, as there is a pretty definite difference between industries, generally between how many college graduates work in the industry and how large the firm size typically is. I was working for a trucking company in late 2020 and 2021, and the whole vaccine thing wasn't even a discussion, because whatever corporate wanted they knew their drivers were going to give them a hard no. The company did have a few idiot HR types, but by in large they were ignored. Likewise all the trades or smaller manufacturing companies I have talked to worked with are relatively right leaning, and many of the larger firms tend to be very right leaning at the plant level and left leaning at the corporate.
It seems the closer you get to turning a wrench or actually making something that has to work the less political discrimination there is, but more self selection for right wing types, whereas the more office type "my key board is my primary tool and if something isn't right I can probably blame someone else" jobs those tend to select for leftists. I suspect the process is that people care less about your politics when things need to happen for real, and engage in political discrimination when actual matters of getting the job done are less important or much harder to measure, and in the current state of the law anti-right discrimination is legal but anti-left is not.
My intuition that may be hard to swallow is that left wing propaganda and aesthetics are more universally popular. It is very attractive regardless of whether it’s true or not. It is even attractive to right wing people.
The reason why the biggest company in the world: Apple’s generic commercials are extremely left coded. Even the broadest brands like coke, nike, and mcdonalds create very left wing commercials. Left wing viewpoints are just much more attractive to everyone.
I would suggest that it's the inherent strength of the products themselves that allow these companies to insult half their customer base and get away with it regardless.
Sure, their ads are annoying and their employees are offensive, but seriously who's going to NOT buy Apple or Coke or McDonald's anymore, just because of that?
These products and empires were built in a more "conventially appealing" time and in traditional methods. It's only now, with their reputations established and their customer bases solidified that their modern leaders have taken an advertising swing in a bias direction. And clearly they all enjoy rubbing the other half's noses in it!
I work in finance in Texas, both standard conservative bastions, though I live in a purplish suburb (usually 60% votes red). In finance I fit in - opinionated but orthogonal to the left-right spectrum, with strong libertarian leanings. Educational levels and political knowledge in my industry are usually top of the pyramid. Where I live in the suburb, however, the right is very vocal and very loud, and influential, even though we are adjacent to a very blue urban center. This extends to businesses, churches, city councils, school boards, etc. It is an educated and wealthy version of right wing. As someone who is not quite so right wing, I often find myself choosing my political words carefully.
The details on hypothesis number 5: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
I presume Hanania was thinking of this essay when he wrote his piece in 2021.
I think at least one difference between politics and race / gender is that people fearing political discrimination can avoid it more easily by staying quiet. You bear the costs internally of working in an environment you don't like (or at least I do). If everyone wore badges displaying their views on hot button issues, I suspect there would be (in the short run) more discrimination and more right wing or non-woke firms. In the long run, I like to think that people would adjust the Overton window to the new observed normal of people's views.
This suggests one cause might be a signalling issue, where it is costly for individuals to display that they are right wing such that other RW colleagues or firms would identify them. This leads to a failure to coordinate (within a workplace or more broadly) because no one wants to send the first signal and so you have a 'prisoners dilemma' style situation where everyone stays quiet.
One possible explanation (that's sort of a merger of #1 and #4 but deserves its own number) is that it's the "woke" corporations that are the profit opportunities. In this explanation, the business mainstream generally leans right (following #4), and so "woke," "fair-trade," "green," etc. firms (and nonprofits) are trying to cater to consumers, workers, and investors who feel discriminated against in the mainstream business world.
1. As others have pointed out, civil rights law is anything but neutral. It creates a great asymmetry of force, such that a right-wing org is in the position of a guerilla force. The potential doesn't exist for a WW1-style build-up along a static line with no-man's land.
2. Conservative ideology is more consistent with family formation, which is to say conservatives have significantly less time for stupid games like boycotts.
I don't know, but I do know that people rationally taking advantage of this hole in the market never seems to happen no matter what side it happens to.
My mom's a remarkable woman who was a feminist a few decades ago and supports men's rights now. When she was growing up her chores were unpaid while her brother got paid for his chores, and when she tried to get a summer job she was plainly told that wasn't a woman's role by everyone she could find. When I went to college because I wasn't even educated enough to get a job putting stickers on bottles in an assembly line with my 12 years of school, and showed her what the professors were saying she agreed that it was bullshit.
(I'm autistic and was only able to get jobs like that after my degree, all hundreds of jobs I applied to either I was declined or was fired after a few days without them telling me why or something, and I would have started my own company but red tape is astronomical and I couldn't even figure out everything I need to do for simpler things; for a while I had no insurance or unemployment benefits because I can't even figure out how to do those correctly. The success sequence was actually out of my reach. I only could do college because my parents were able to help me with the bureaucracy stuff)
#4 is right. Only weirdos care about this stuff. Normie right wingers just roll their eyes and keep working. They don’t care about having their values affirmed or being free to speak their minds at work. They do that online in comment threads.
Why is orange juice kosher? It's because a small but highly motivated segment of the market wants kosher, and the rest are indifferent, and the cost of producing kosher isn’t large enough to segment the market.
The cases mentioned in the post are not directly analogous - right wingers are not indifferent to cancel culture. But I think something similar is going on. The left has found asymmetrical means of punishing firms that displease them. But that just pushes the puzzle back a step - why are they asymmetrical? How did they manage to colonize the media, the universities, and the government?
I actually just wrote a post touching on this.
Broadly, left-wing discourse and cultural norms are dominated by legible values, and right-wing discourse and cultural norms are dominated by non-legible values. Academic writing, versus lived experience, broadly speaking. The larger a firm gets, the more legibility matters.
Additionally, the right puts a much higher value on "women's work" (home and community making) than the left, which puts a much higher value on "men's work" (raw productivity) - the closer a job is to home and community, in the right, basically, the higher status it is. Running a local grocer is higher status, in the right, than running a regional grocery chain, even if the latter may pay more; it is, basically, closer to the home, more firmly unified with it. Providing for your family is the purpose of work in right-wing culture; maximizing your income is not.
I think that's basically it. As soon as you're a firm or organization you'd be looking at in the first place, you're already pretty far outside right-wing cultural norms.
There is a profit opportunity, but it take an entrepeneur. As Schumpeter says, good ideas are lying around all the time (we professors have lots of them), but what is rarest is the man who can single-mindedly implement one of them. What I've thought of, but hve been too academic to do, is to have mutual fund that doesn't invest in companies thta follow the trans agenda. Easy to set up (for someone in the mutual fund business), and low-risk. You're welcome.
What do you think will happen with Trans agenda?
20 % of population will not become trans agenda
No company follows trans agenda