Month: March 2016

“Sublime Narcissism” – Freddie deBoer

Social Justice: Listen and Believe!

Freddie deBoer spends time on Twitter so you don’t have to, and thinks independently instead of being a herd creature (which doesn’t let you off the hook.) Today in his post The Sublime Narcissism of Getting Offended On Other People’s Behalf he tears into the faddish accusation of cultural appropriation and other efforts to condemn behavior on behalf of someone else who shows no sign of being offended:

A few months back I got into a Twitter argument about the uselessness of complaints about cultural appropriation, in particular a muscular form that takes it as offensive to consume the goods of cultures to which one does not belong — food, clothing, music, and so on. I pointed out the usual problems with this thinking. All culture is hybrid; there is no place where legitimate appreciation ends and shameful appropriation begins; a world without cultural borrowing is a bleak and terrible place; and as I’ve said many times, saying “you should only consume that which comes from your own culture” is functionally identical to the efforts of white supremacists to keep the people pure.

Maybe most importantly, given that cultures are always large, diffuse, and made up of lots of different people, the idea of appropriation has to inevitably posit some ideal member of the group, when in reality all cultures are made up of many people. I had very earnest Twitterers telling me that American Chinese food is appropriation, not seeming to grasp that it was Chinese people who spread their cuisine in the United States, in order to make a living. In much the same way, thought white people doing yoga has been attacked as cultural appropriation, it was in fact a concerted effort by Indian people to spread the practice that has caused it to become an economic juggernaut in the West. Certainly members of those cultures can get mad at the other members of the cultures who spread these things. But they can hardly do so by claiming cultural appropriation on the part of those who they disagree with. Nor can any of us from outside those cultures rightly decide who’s an “authentic” member of the Chinese or Indian culture. But in order to make these complaints, you have to: you are, by definition, asserting a right to define the authentic for a culture you don’t belong to in order to claim that the authentic has been somehow corrupted.

This doesn’t mean that a person who is deeply knowledgeable in a culture other than their own is not allowed to point out deficiencies in how it’s portrayed or used. We’re free to note with amusement how tragically awful Hollywood was at depicting, say, African tribal culture in early movies. But those were not intended to be instruction manuals for diplomats. If all portrayals are to be examined for authenticity, most of our cultural production would fail. Which is beside the point: a story is told for values other than perfect fidelity, and if there’s a good-faith effort not to unfairly demonize another culture, that is better (no matter how flawed) than no attempt to bring in other cultures at all.

Some other recent “appropriation” controversies:

J. K. Rowling’s Pottermore extension of wizarding lore to the New World and Native Americans, attacked for insensitively using Navajo Skinwalker beliefs: Indian Country Today, N. K. Jemesin’s criticisms. Rowling is accused of doing “real harm” by fitting a modified Skinwalker belief into her fictional magical lore — in other words, she has committed heresy — or what would be heresy if she were Navajo. If Skinwalkers were central to her story, there might be some concern, but it’s a colorful detail which no one with any perspective would take seriously. Magic isn’t actually a real thing, and neither are skinwalkers. No one outside Navajo religious practice is required to do deep research to mention it in passing.

Two members of Bowdoin College’s student government to be impeached for holding a party featuring tiny sombrero hats. Realizing how foolish they looked, Bowdoin administrators have since backed down, but the knee-jerk accusations wasted everyone’s time and damage credibility when real issues might need to be addressed. Who would listen to such fools? The birthday party was set up by students, invitations sent out by a student of Colombian descent. Actual Mexicans and Latinos were not offended, any more than they would be by a Taco Bell.

One student of Guatemalan and Costa Rican heritage, freshman Brandon Lopez, pronounced the whole kerfuffle “mind-boggling” and called the disciplinary consequences a “travesty,” especially in light of the dining hall’s Mexican night a week later. (Lopez was invited to the party but could not attend because of baseball practice, he said.)

Freddy’s point is that this “concern on behalf of others” is itself condescending and betrays a belief that the other cultures are so weak and their adherents so helpless that sensitive progressives must come to their aid and appoint themselves judges of proper behavior toward the “lesser cultures.” And I will add this point about virtue-signalling generally (from a Facebook comment on his post):

It’s condescending to the individuals of the culture involved. It’s also most commonly intended to signal that the offended-on-behalf-of one is not only enlightened, but enlightened in an uncommon way so that those who don’t share their insight can be deprecated. Aimed at nearby tribal enemies. Which is why it doesn’t satisfy to condemn evils of greater magnitude that everyone deplores, like FGM and throwing homosexuals off buildings. “More empathetic and sensitive than thou.” A corollary sin of pride.

Trump World: Looking Backward

Cover: A Canticle for Leibowitz

The children ask how we got here, and I try to explain, though so much has changed that my stories only lead to more questions — “What’s a news network?”, “How did people live without augments?”

We had a Republic, once, and it was wildly successful. That attracted more people from all over the world seeking freedom and work. It was freedom that let new industries grow unchecked by jealous rivals, but over time citizens sought shelter from the rigors of a free market and elected more regulation-prone politicians who tried to soften all the hard edges. Finally we reached a time so advanced that children were supposed to grow up without any challenges, to be deemed special and successful without any accomplishments, and the resulting adults became childlike in wanting to silence any voices that disagreed with them.

The world as a whole had benefitted from the opening of closed Communist countries and free trade, with the costs of transport and communication declining rapidly. The boom in emerging economies lifted billions of people out of grinding poverty, the greatest improvement in world living standards the world had ever seen, and increasing wealth and freedom defused the Malthusian fears of overpopulation and resource depletion of the previous decades. But the competition destroyed the protected world of US unskilled workers, who had gotten used to living well after WWII destroyed most of the manufacturing plants of Europe and Asia.

“The Sound of Silence” was a famous Simon and Garfunkel song, written in the 1960s to protest the conformity of an earlier era — the 1950s — when broad consensus and the limited number of mass media options stifled outlier opinions. Capitalism broke that mold, when “outrageous” ideas and lifestyles could be marketed and make money. Selling rebellion was big business.

The Internet seemed to end the constraints on opinion, but a new sound of silence appeared when its two-way nature allowed crowds to join together to silence expression of ideas they found threatening. People lost their jobs because of one errant tweet, and politicians found it useful to stoke the flames of envy and resentment to gain votes. A new victim cult appeared, seeing racism and sexism in every element of US life, and command of the cult’s lexicon enabled entry to academic and government positions.

The left-behind grew angry, and simmered in disability payments and painkilling drugs while they saw their children discriminated against by the gateway institutions built by their forebears. They had supported the growth of the Federal government through costly wars and the building of a social safety net, only to be left out and denigrated by their ruling class. Federal agencies were taken over by progressives and affirmative-action hires, and wasted time and resources shuffling reports and holding grand meetings to write about working toward solving problems that barely existed while neglecting their core functions. The levels of incompetence tolerated grew and grew, until civil service employees could hold their jobs after being absent for years or being discovered spending most of their time viewing Internet porn. Major new government programs and projects failed and billions of dollars were wasted without consequence, those responsible for the failures being promoted to further damage the private economy by ruling from Washington.

The new media were staffed by college graduates who had been subjected to progressive indoctrination, and rarely questioned what government sources told them. And how could they, since time had been sped up and in the Internet age, stopping to investigate original sources that might disagree would only bury their story in tomorrow’s old news?

Trump appeared after two decades of Washington-centered rule by two factions of the same technocratic party. He gained the support of the dispossessed by voicing their resentments, long suppressed by the bien pensant. His supporters were so tired of being told their feelings were incorrect and didn’t matter that they failed to notice that Trump had no fixed beliefs of his own, other than winning.

And win he did, up against Hillary Clinton, who everyone knew was a habitual liar and corrupt influence-peddler. After she was nearly indicted for her negligent handling of secret information, Trump the bully won the election handily despite the rioting in major cities and the crashing stock market.

Thoughtful observers saw this as a test of the Founders’ three-branch design. In theory, the checks and balances and separation of powers between the three branches of government would limit the damage he might do. In practice, previous administrations had accreted so much power in the office of President that Trump was able to run roughshod over good government concerns.

Trump terrorized the agencies and the civil service bureaucracy. His bully-boys formed a shadow organization which intimidated any civil servant who dared stand against him — his friends in the Mafia proved useful in extralegal persuasion. If regulations got in Trump’s way, they were rewritten. Favored people and corporations found their way smoothed, while others who failed to support him were blocked and gutted. In that, he was only a few degrees worse than his predecessor, but the collapsing private economy provided no alternative routes for survival. Almost everyone knuckled under to wait for better days.

The doctors grumbled when they were drafted to serve in the new Trump Medical Corps, but after their licenses were pulled when they refused, they fell into line. Trump took over hospital chains by eminent domain and staffed them with uniformed Corps personnel; he had personally overseen the design of the new uniforms, gold braid trim and all. Federal medical costs were cut by 50% as salaries fell and procedures deemed too costly were outlawed. The upper crustaceans, of course, joined new luxury practices and went to private hospitals, as they always had. Medical school enrollments dropped and quality of the applicants fell, as it became clear doctoring would no longer be a high-status occupation. Research on new drugs evaporated when the primary source of drug profits, the US, joined the rest of the world in controlling their prices.

Apple’s new iPhone assembly factory opened in south Texas, and their mostly-immigrant assemblers tried to duplicate the quality of the phones built by contractor facilities in China that had taken decades to develop. The US-assembled phones cost $200 more and failed more often, but Apple made the transition successfully since all of their competitors were similarly hobbled. And by opening their own manufacturing plant, they instantly reached the better employee diversity numbers they had been pretending to strive for for years.

The Chinese and Russians were relieved when Trump was elected — someone they could deal with without any unpredictable concerns with human rights to interfere. Deals were struck and trade managed. For awhile this seemed to work, though the people of Hong Kong and Ukraine felt abandoned as they lost their remaining independence. The EU collapsed in disorder as internal divisions and new migrations overwhelmed their governments.

And so it was that the opportunity society became the are-you-with-Trump society. Bribery came back with a vengeance. Inequality decreased, but only because more people were poor. The world economy had stalled, and grew worse as Trump’s new tariffs and trade barriers decreased world trade. The Chinese people grew restless when their standard of living began to drop, and the Chinese leadership started warring on neighbors to distract their people.

And that’s what I tell the kids. We came here to be safe, to guard our traditions, and to last through these times. The radiation is better now, and our growing huts get more sunlight than in those lean years right after. We have a good stock of electronics, drugs, and solar panels, and our store of knowledge and technology is intact. It’s safe enough to go outside for days at a time, and soon we will be able to travel to meet with others who survive.

We’ve had all the time in the world to teach our children where we went wrong. I’m hopeful that this time they’ll get it right.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

More reading on other topics:

Jane Jacobs’ Monstrous Hybrids: Guardians vs Commerce
The Great Progressive Stagnation vs. Dynamism
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action is Crippling America
Death by HR: The End of Merit in Civil Service
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Public Employee Unions
Death by HR: History and Practice of Affirmative Action and the EEOC
Civil Service: Woodrow Wilson’s Progressive Dream
Bootleggers and Baptists
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Justice Dept. Extortion
Corrupt Feedback Loops, Goldman Sachs: More Justice Dept. Extortion
Death by HR: The Birth and Evolution of the HR Department
Death by HR: The Simple Model of Project Labor
Levellers and Redistributionists: The Feudal Underpinnings of Socialism
Sons of Liberty vs. National Front
Trump World: Looking Backward
Minimum Wage: The Parable of the Ladder
Selective Outrage
Culture Wars: Co-Existence Through Limited Government
Social Justice Warriors, Jihadists, and Neo-Nazis: Constructed Identities
Tuitions Inflated, Product Degraded, Student Debts Unsustainable
The Morality of Glamour

On Affirmative Action and Social Policy:

Affirmative Action: Chinese, Indian-Origin Citizens in Malaysia Oppressed
Affirmative Action: Caste Reservation in India
Diversity Hires: Pressure on High Tech<a
Title IX Totalitarianism is Gender-Neutral
Public Schools in Poor Districts: For Control Not Education
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Child Welfare Ideas: Every Child Gets a Government Guardian!
“Income Inequality” Propaganda is Just Disguised Materialism

The greatest hits from SubstrateWars.com (Science Fiction topics):

Fear is the Mindkiller
Mirror Neurons and Irene Gallo
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Selective Outrage
Sons of Liberty vs. National Front
“Tomorrowland”: Tragic Misfire
The Death of “Wired”: Hugo Awards Edition
Hugos, Sad Puppies 3, and Direct Knowledge
Selective Outrage and Angry Tribes
Men of Honor vs Victim Culture
SFF, Hugos, Curating the Best
“Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”
Science Fiction Fandom and SJW warfare

More reading on the military:

US Military: From No Standing Armies to Permanent Global Power
US Military: The Desegration Experience
The VA Scandals: Death by Bureaucracy

Corrupt Feedback Loops: Justice Dept. Extortion

Attorneys General Holder and Lynch

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We’re all familiar with the evil of bribery, in which someone pays a civil servant for favorable handling of a government decision. The briber gains profits that are some multiple of the bribe at the expense of the public; the bribed official’s malfeasance betrays the people who pay his salary.

Since the Code of Hammurabi, government officials have been punished for taking bribes or dealing in property related to their official decisions. In The Republic, Plato suggested government officials live communally without the temptations of private property to insulate their decisions from the temptations of personal gain. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs wrote about systemic corruption when what she called the Guardian Syndrome (appropriate memes for governing and military classes) was corrupted by Commercial Syndrome considerations — and vice-versa. It is corruption if commercial actors use bribes to gain special favors at the expense of competitors and the public, and it is also corruption if government officials use their decisionmaking and spending power to influence private business or voters to give them an advantage over political opponents. Both forms of corruption break down accountability and result in a net loss in fairness and efficiency, leading to less dynamic public and private spheres. And the endpoint of such corruption in a country is stagnation, weakness, and defeat by an external enemy.

Outright bribery is common in developing countries, as the US was before the turn of the century. A less direct form of bribe which is harder to detect is campaign contributions for access and favorable handling, still quite common and legal in the US. The influence is not so much a direct payment for a favorable decision as a tendency to favor the interests of the campaign contributor, putting a thumb on the scales weighing the public interest. The modern version has an officeholder accepting a large number of contributions from both sides of various issues, especially when the officeholder is not a predictable supporter of either side. This bundling of interest-group contributions leaves out citizens who have no trade group or industry representing their interests. This is not ideal, but the commonly-suggested remedy of public campaign financing has the obvious problem of favoring the status quo and whoever decides which candidates deserve public funding. Individual wealthy contributors have provided the seed money for many outsider campaigns for public office, and if private contributions are limited, status quo politicians, with their free access to news media, are much harder to displace.

Another more subtle form of corruption is advertising and PR monies spent by the state at the direction of current officeholders for supposedly public purposes, but which greatly favor their own party or policies. A great recent example of this is the advertising for Obamacare and its insurance exchanges, and the “Navigators” hired to assist applicants in using the unusable Healthcare.gov web site. From the Kaiser survey, “More than 4,400 Assister Programs, employing more than 28,000 full-time-equivalent staff and volunteers, helped an estimated 10.6 million people during the first Open Enrollment period.” Doing the math, this means each navigator served about two people a day, and (especially at first) most of the time spent went to staring at nonfunctional screens and talking about the problems with the system. Navigators were hired with little concern for knowledge or trustworthiness, and information about becoming a navigator was spread via the network of “community activist” organizations that happened to reach out to the same sort of people who serve as political foot soldiers for Democratic campaigns. ACA implementation spent billions of dollars on politically-connected contractors for failed systems and hiring of connected patronage employees. The result was enormous waste and failure of the new systems, but with the politically-desirable side-effect of direct government-funded contact between poor citizens and activists for Democratic causes. This may have backfired since the program failed so obviously, but was motivated by the desire to give poor people a benefit while reminding them personally of the party that got it for them.

Because spending for Federal PR offices and advertising is buried as multiple items in each agency’s budget, it is hard to track. The GAO is launching an investigation to try to trace it, with obvious external advertising contracts adding up to $4.7 billion in 2009-2013 fiscal years:

The 2014 CRS report found it difficult to determine details on federal agencies’ advertising spending. There is no governmentwide reporting standard, CRS said, nor is there a common definition of what constitutes advertising. Additionally, agencies have “great discretion” to budget their in-house PR. Agencies are prohibited from spending money on “publicity or propaganda” not specifically authorized by Congress, but CRS found the lack of a firm definition of advertising has led to “few governmentwide restrictions” on the practice.

Government-funded PR offices send out press releases which end up as stories in the media, which typically don’t question the content — a “government source” is seen as credible. This allows slanted views of science, economics, and political issues to be presented as neutral fact with apparent consensus support — a typical press release from a government agency can result in dozens or hundreds of stories repeating the same information, and most media outlets won’t seek out any opposing viewpoints.

This means the party holding the executive branch can try to mold the views of the citizenry using propaganda funded by the citizens’ own tax money. When the executive branch is held by progressives who reinforce the generally government-favoring slant of the federal civil service employees, the depth of the disinformation provided increases. This is systemic corruption, and creates a powerful positive feedback loop toward larger government and shrinking private freedoms. Progressive politicians believe this is all to the good — because they know what is best for everyone and most citizens choose wrongly unless guided by the state and its social-working employees, it is totally legitimate for the state to enlighten its voters by programming their malleable minds with the correct ideas so that they will vote for the correct politicians, who happen to be them.

Overlawyered reports on a WSJ story (behind a paywall, unfortunately) discussing the fate of the $110 billion in fines paid by mortgage banks to settle with the Justice Dept.:

Following the 2008 crash, government enforcement action extracted $110 billion from lenders and other players over a variety of alleged sins relating to the rise and collapse of the mortgage bubble. Where did it go? Governments held on to a lot of it, a lot went to the government-sponsored Fannie and Freddie mortgage enterprises, favored “housing-related community groups” got some, some went to homeowners with mortgage struggles or to new low-interest loans. In New York, money is going to rebuild the Tappan Zee bridge and “the annual state fair is using bank-settlement money to build a new horse barn and stables.” But no one has kept track of where a lot of the money went, there being no overall effort to account for it.

Kimberly Strassel in the WSJ of 12/3/2015 commented on the phenomenon of fines extracted by Justice Dept. threats going to groups supporting the Democratic party:

Republicans talk often about using the “power of the purse” to rein in a lawless Obama administration. If they mean it, they ought to use their year-end spending bill to stop a textbook case of outrageous executive overreach.

This scandal comes courtesy of the Justice Department, which for 16 months has engaged in a scheme to undermine Congress’s spending authority by independently transferring dollars to President Obama’s political allies. The department is in the process of funneling more than half-a-billion dollars to liberal activist groups, at least some of which will actively support Democrats in the coming election.

It works likes this: The Justice Department prosecutes cases against supposed corporate bad actors. Those companies agree to settlements that include financial penalties. Then Justice mandates that at least some of that penalty money be paid in the form of “donations” to nonprofits that supposedly aid consumers and bolster neighborhoods.

The Justice Department maintains a list of government-approved nonprofit beneficiaries. And surprise, surprise: Many of them are liberal activist groups. The National Council of La Raza. The National Urban League. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition. NeighborWorks America (which awards grants to left-leaning community organization groups, and has been compared with Acorn).

This strategy kicked off with the $13 billion J.P. Morgan settlement in late 2013, though in that case the bank was simply offered credit for donations to nonprofits. That changed with the Citigroup and Bank of America settlements, which outright required $150 million in donations. The BofA agreement contains a provision that potentially tees up nonprofit groups for another $490 million. Several smaller settlements follow the same mold.

To further induce companies to go the donation route, Justice considers these handouts to be worth “double credit” against penalty obligations. So while direct forms of victim relief are still counted dollar-for-dollar, a $500,000 donation by BofA to La Raza takes at least $1 million off the company’s bill.

The purpose of financial penalties is to punish, and to provide restitution to real victims. The Justice Department would make the case that this money is flowing to groups that aid the targets of supposed banking abuse, such as homeowners. But that assumes the work these groups do is targeted at actual victims—which it isn’t. It assumes that the work these groups do in housing is nonpartisan—which it isn’t. And it ignores that money is fungible. Every dollar banks donate to the housing arms of the Urban League or La Raza is a dollar those groups can free up to wage an assault on voter ID laws, or to help out Democrats.

This kind of enforced donation to “public service” organizations that just happen to support the ruling party’s goals is correctly discouraged by Justice Dept. guidelines as possibly creating the perception of a conflict of interest. Not only does this improperly divert money which should have been returned to the customers of the banks, it appears to encourage the Justice Dept. to spend effort on industry-wide feints at prosecution of private companies regardless of actual guilt who are thereby extorted into paying huge fines. The businesses find it cheaper to pay the extortion money, and actual justice in the form of discovery and public knowledge of any provable violations of the law that may have occurred is never achieved. The public interest was not served and there is no accountability for any of the bad actors: those inside the banks, in the ratings agencies, or in the government regulatory agencies themselves. Unresolved, there is no clarity on what reforms might help avoid recurrence. And the President builds a bigger propaganda machine to mislead the voters and retain power for his party.

Tl;dr version: The banks were rescued (whether they needed it or not) and then propped up to earn big profits by Fed actions loaning them money at close to zero rates. The DoJ takes a cut from the banks and distributes the booty to favored groups and everyone goes back to business as usual. No banker suffers. My view is that the failures were systemic and no criminal activity could ever be found… the proper punishment should have been some bankruptcies. But that route had “insufficient opportunities for graft.”

More reading on other topics:

On Affirmative Action and Social Policy:

The greatest hits from SubstrateWars.com (Science Fiction topics):

More reading on the military:

US Military: From No Standing Armies to Permanent Global Power
US Military: The Desegration Experience
The VA Scandals: Death by Bureaucracy

Death by HR: The Birth and Evolution of the HR Department

Death by HR

A hundred years ago, employment and recruiting were handled by individual managers—both private-sector workers and government employees were recruited, and served at the pleasure of those managers above them. Arbitrary, abusive, or corrupt practices were common, and managers were relatively free to use their position to benefit themselves or indulge their prejudices at the expense of the enterprise.

Industrial and labor relations as a field got its start around 1900. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) explored what he termed “scientific management,” which others later referred to “Taylorism.” He strove to improve economic efficiency in manufacturing jobs by breaking down manufacturing processes into discrete steps, timing them and splitting them up in an assembly line to quantify and speed up each worker’s part of the process. This is the doctrine that gave us “mindless” factory work—the same small step done over and over by one worker, then the work moving on to the next worker for an additional step, before finally arriving completed at the end of the line, as perfected by Henry Ford in the assembly line for the Model T. The assembly line relied on the availability of standardized parts, and standardized the labor steps to assemble them so that no overall skill was required and employees could also be viewed as largely interchangeable cogs.

Taylorism in Dilbert — Scott Adams

As organizations grew and labor laws and unions as countervailing forces became important, companies developed personnel departments specializing in recruiting new employees and deciding pay and benefits questions. The “human resources management” field grew up as a specialization of the knowledge required to manage large numbers of employees under the many new legal and political constraints, and protection of the company or organization from lawsuits, union troubles, or government punishment became critical. The abbreviation HR for Human Resources was the new name for the Personnel Department on steroids, responsible for keeping lower-level managers out of trouble when making hiring, firing, and pay decisions. While team managers still had considerable input in deciding who to hire and fire and how much to pay them, they were required to work within guidelines provided by law, regulations, and an increasingly remote HR department. The immediate concerns of managers about team fit and competence were then subject to new constraints of state and federal regulation, and in unionized and civil service workplaces, overriding hiring managers’ prejudices but also overriding their local knowledge.

There had always been good and bad employers, and depending on the competitive environment and level of skill (and difficulty of replacing) of a class of employees, they could be either well-treated and secure, or poorly-treated and arbitrarily harassed and fired for reasons we would now consider improper, like race or sex. Recourse was reputational—in a many-employer city, larger employers who treated workers poorly would discover only desperate or naive people would apply for their jobs. Newcomers would take jobs with bad employers but then transition to better ones as they gained experience, if business was growing.

The new framework of unions, labor laws, and internal HR worked to establish a minimum standard for worker treatment. Bigoted or abusive managers could find their own jobs endangered as bad behavior was brought to the attention of upper management and resulted in negative consequences for the organization. But it also drove obviously improper behavior and motivations for hiring and firing decisions underground—a sophisticated bigot or sexual harasser in a hiring manager’s role could still get away with hidden discrimination.

It can be hard to determine how much credit to assign new labor laws and unions for the improvement in labor conditions in the era from 1900 to the 1970s, when today’s HR came into prominence. As in most social movements, the laws and organizations evolved together, and enlightened businesses were often reforming their own behavior in advance of the law and union pressure, recognizing that a stable and happy labor force made them more profitable and productive. As a recent example, private companies led the way to providing partner benefits for gay employees, far in advance of any legal requirements to do so. By the time of the Supreme Court’s ruling establishing same-sex marriage as a civil right throughout the country (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015), most major corporations provided such benefits.

Today the legal landscape for employers is so complex and regulations so easy to violate unknowingly that even the smallest companies have an HR department or outsource the function to a specialized contractor (though there are exceptions, and a recent movement toward eliminating them.) The HR department is tasked with reducing the risk to the organization of leaving hiring, firing, and compensation policies in the hands of local managers, and as a risk-avoiding function they typically are overly cautious and reliant on metrics like credentials, performance evaluations, and written applications to make decisions. Since HR is not intimately familiar with the makeup of specific teams and the complex skills required for maximum effectiveness in some positions, prescreened applicant pools provided by HR will typically have some excellent potential employees disqualified by their crude filters, and overall organizational goals like presenting good diversity numbers for regulators may lead to neglect of local goals like hiring the best performer for a particular position.

HR departments are intended to project corporate goals into team personnel decisions, but are more usefully viewed as internalized guards against hazards to the enterprise from lawsuits and regulatory punishments. Big corporations now spend heavily on lobbying, political contributions, and legal assistance, but most HR spending is also “protection money,” a cost of doing business in a highly-regulated environment. And upper-level management attention to HR functions tends to be an afterthought, with many HR departments staffed by people unfamiliar with the company’s business and with little incentive to increase productivity. When ass-covering is your primary activity, product or service innovation and quality have a lower priority. HR functionaries are roughly analogous to the commissars or political officers of Communist regimes, a separate hierarchy of spies to report on and control internal units. The interests of managers and HR can diverge drastically, with HR coming to be viewed as the enemy within, to be avoided and routed around. One high-tech team manager wrote, “How can you tell HR is lying? Their lips are moving.”

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

More reading on other topics:

On Affirmative Action and Social Policy:

The greatest hits from SubstrateWars.com (Science Fiction topics):

More reading on the military:

US Military: From No Standing Armies to Permanent Global Power
US Military: The Desegration Experience
The VA Scandals: Death by Bureaucracy

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

Month: March 2016

Trump World: Looking Backward

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Corrupt Feedback Loops: Justice Dept. Extortion

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Death by HR: The Birth and Evolution of the HR Department

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