“DIVERSITY” IS OUR WEAKNESS



The shibboleth that “diversity is our strength” is one of the worst canards of our time. There is a great deal of empirical data indicating that in general, cultural diversity is a weakness, not a strength. Culturally diverse societies (which can mean ethnically diverse, but doesn’t have to) are generally lower-trust societies, which inhibits economic growth. Western Europe is living proof of that proposition.

But there is another way in which “diversity” in the DEI sense–i.e., the jerry-rigged quotas resulting from an obsession with race, sex, and sexual orientation–is bad. Maximum effectiveness, in terms of economic efficiency, combat readiness, or pretty much anything you want to measure, is achieved through a focus on merit. If you hire and promote the most meritorious, you will have the best company, the best military, and the best country. If you deviate from that ideal, you will lose ground.

That should be obvious, and it is supported empirically by the recently-released 2026 Economic Report of the President. Our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity sum it up:

The new 2026 Economic Report of the President confirms what we’ve been saying for five years in our report card on ESG: these programs reduce corporate returns to shareholders. Specifically, they find that when the diversity fad gained momentum in the late 2010s, the impact on productivity became “negative and statistically significant in most years.”

The conclusion: “industries that pursued DEI heavily…were about 2.7 percent less productive than those which did not…In the aggregate, the cost of mismanagement was roughly $94 billion annually by 2023ESG/DEI programs make America poorer. And they are a violation of the fiduciary duty of corporate boards to their shareholders.

Emphasis added. That last is a significant point. On what basis can a corporate management justify not hiring and promoting the most qualified people? The answer must be, we were forced to do it by the government or by the threat of a left-wing boycott. If those outside pressures are stripped away, DEI discrimination would seem to be a plain violation of management’s duty to its shareholders to improve efficiency, competitiveness, and profit. Any corporate management that has pursued the DEI fad should seriously consider its potential liability to shareholders.

A final point: If “diversity” were construed in a way that would have been comprehensible to, for example, Frederic Douglass or Booker T. Washington, i.e. as an absence of discrimination that would empower companies to hire and promote the most qualified and effective people, regardless of race, etc., that would indeed have produced a work force that is diverse in various ways, and that would have been maximally efficient and effective. That is the conservative ideal of non-discrimination. Sadly, in today’s world, that ideal has been traduced so that “diversity” now means discrimination of various kinds. We can only hope that DEI is speedily being committed to the trash dump of history.Y