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This ... doesn't really touch on 'whether or not they could do it'.
"not the sole driver" brings to mind 99%, maybe 90%. "Not necessarily the biggest one" immediately brings us below 49.9%. Which?
Actual, real people who are very skilled at, and work very hard at, profit-maximizing - as in, specifically, understanding how the company makes money and making decisions to increase profit. Vaguely recall bezos mentioning how important understanding the details of the financials of your company, and having a good account of everything that happens, is to a successful startup.
Executives often have compensation plans that directly hinge on stock price, though? A common poorly-understood-complaint is "executives have bonuses based on stock price, leading them to optimize for stock price at the expense of social well being / long term growth", which seems to contrast with that.
Less strong than 'total universal law' ... sure, but how much so? Enough to be 'not even the biggest driver'?
But would you have specifically made the cast of a TV-show all white when the market research showed having it be 50% hispanic and 50% black would get the most views because the viewers want diversity? It's very plausible that an exec who deeply believes in 'wokeness' would still not do that, in particular.
We've totally avoided things like 'how common is this', or the specific contingency that could lead here, in favor of broad, general statements that don't connect to much. There's no way to tell from the above that "obviously" the "SJW-aligned execs" (and SJW really isn't the right term here) would push diversity because they believe in it.
(Also, wouldn't the people 'pushing diversity' here be, like, casting directors or writers, who you'd expect to be more 'woke' and be directly involved in this, and have less exposure to stock price or w/e?)
Like, the above style of argument really isn't gonna prove much. The only way to really find out what the causes are of woke casting or woke storytelling is gonna be reading accounts from people involved, whether they're the woke(?) writers/actors/execs themselves - who will often just proudly state that they're hiring more black people because representation is critical for underprivileged black youth or something - or someone who was there and thought it was ridiculous blogging after the fact.
That obviously depends on the circumstances, people involved, etc. What do you expect me to do here, give a rigorous, quantified analysis of a rather qualitative statement?
Some are, but so what? My argument is not that nobody ever tries to maximize profit for the company, but that it is not the sole, or often even main goal of people who make decisions.
Let me quote the next statement that comes after the one you quoted:
Did you miss it, or do you need me to elucidate what I meant here?
Well, let's be specific then. Consider Melonie Parker, Google's Chief Diversity Officer. In what way, do you think, she focuses on the company's bottom line? How exactly do you think her initiatives and decisions can quantifiably lead to differences in profitability? How can the CEO or the board track her performance year over year? Or compare it to her predecessor, Danielle Brown? Clearly, not by tracking the revenues and profit margin of her department. What tools does the board have available to measure her impact on quarterly earnings with any reasonable degree of confidence? The answer is, really, none. It's all gut feeling.
Do you have any real first hand experience working in a large corporation? Do your meetings and decisions always focus on bottom line first and foremost? This has very much not been my experience.
I actually find this suggestion pretty funny -- it really tells more about you than you think. This is a real failure to understand the other side, it's like Christians who think that the atheists oppose prayer in school because they secretly worship Satan.
To the point, no, if I had my way, ensuring specific skin color standards among the cast would not be my priority. I find the race-based casting practices grating not because I have some kind of aesthetic preference for white-skinned actors, but rather because it is often done deliberately to not cast white-skinned actors. This is similar to why progressive would complain about an all-white cast (including all extras) of a Hollywood movie set in modern day America, but do not mind an all-white movie produced by Czechs, set in Czechia: the former can only be done to make a particular point, whereas the latter is just normal.
You're talking as if "market research" was activity akin to determining tensile strength of a steel alloy, for the purposes of minimizing amount of material used given the desired load bearing capacity. The truth of the matter is that you can make "market research" say anything you want (in fact, this is the main purpose for the existence of consulting firms like Deloitte: to get the "independent experts" to say that the company needs to do what the execs wanted to do anyway), and if the movie flops, you can always blame something else, because there's always more than one cause of a flop anyway. It's not like government regulator of movie industry will start an independent committee to study the cause of the flop, and will unearth the shoddy report made by paid-off consultant. Again, all of this is obvious to people who actually have corporate experience.
This is just an isolated demand of rigor. What do you expect me to do, get quantitative data on what happens in closed meeting rooms?
But see, I'm not actually trying to prove much, only that the focus on the financial bottom line is not the sole driving force of corporate decision making.
But it just seems like a motte and bailey - yeah, that's obviously true. That's the motte. The bailey is "the execs probably did this because of progressivism / sjw and not the bottom line".
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I need to correct you on one point:
Progressives definitely hate the all Czech cast in Czech media, if they notice that;
The progressive influence on these regards is, apart from the UK, very weak, but they sometimes make the point that they really do not like the native cast.
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