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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Anyone upset about the impacts of DEI on competence should also be upset about this.

Why? Most countries have enough talented people among their citizens to keep the lights on without relying on immigration. The impact of rejecting skilled immigration is nowhere near the same as that of implementing DEI.

There are important things that are much more difficult than just keeping the lights on. For example, there are extremely high skill-ceiling jobs where extreme competence leads to dramatically greater positive impact---the 100x programmer, entrepreneurs, academic research, etc. The top performers are so rare in these fields that no country has enough; every country could benefit by getting more.

If you want to live in a country that just focuses on maintaining its current standard of living without improving, developing new technology, creating anything great at all, then sure. You can just accept all the extreme suffering that happens even among the rich in developed countries.

The impact of rejecting skilled immigration is nowhere near the same as that of implementing DEI

Finally, how are you making this comparison? Here's a great article on the impact of skilled immigration in the US. You can even see here the impact from rejecting just one single person . There's nothing caused by DEI even close to matching this.