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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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News recently came out that 94% of new jobs went to PoC in the US, thanks to corporate pledges in the wake of the BLM riots.

That sounds very implausible. do you have a cite?

[EDIT] - A quick googling provides this

Or, more precisely, what the pool of new workers minus the pool of departing workers looked like. Net change is what we’re able to see. It’s not that 94% of S&P 100 hires in 2021 were people of color, for example, it’s that when you look at S&P 100 employment totals after a year of arrivals and departures, people of color accounted for 94% of the net increase.

...If I'm understanding this properly, this doesn't seem to support your statement. POC have significantly higher unemployment, and reducing POC unemployment specifically doesn't seem like a bad thing. Unless we assume that the labor market is zero-sum, that POC getting any job at all means a non-POC doesn't get any job at all, it doesn't seem that POC being 94% of the net increase is proof of descrimination.

Not to mention that because of different age distributions, most retirees each year are non-Hispanic whites. The WaPo article also says that 90% of people who entered the workforce in the last year were non-Hispanic whites. So that 94% claim sure seems to be "figures don’t lie, but liars figure."

  1. The question (which I don’t know) is whether the young white population is the same size as the older white population. If so, then you’d expect new hires to roughly equal departures. On the other hand, if the younger population is larger, then you’d be hiring more POC relative to whites.

  2. That per se isn’t a problem if the POC are more qualified compared to whites. However in my experience at a large firm we have relaxed standards for POC hires (and relaxed standards once hired) and we know the traditional tools to determine quality at more entry position are corrupted by college level affirmative action.

The question (which I don’t know) is whether the young white population is the same size as the older white population.

Percentage of white population is decreasing over time, so no, the young white population is smaller.

As long as you're counting by the one drop rule, yes.

I was under the impression that this was the result of US census data, which I'm pretty sure was not compiled via the one drop rule. I'm open to being corrected if that impression is false.

Slightly complicated.

Census is based on self-ID. To the extent that the culture at large uses the one drop rule to define people - which it mostly does, in practice - the census will do the same.

Next layer of complexity is that the census allows you to select as many racial ids as you want, so you can say you are a white black hispanic asian if you want to.

This leads to the situation where people reporting on the census can parse categories in multiple ways, such as 'any white' (white plus other categories) vs. 'white alone' (white and no other categories).

Usually when someone cites a number that shows shrinking white populations, they are citing the 'white alone' number without mentioning that they are doing so to their audience. Which is about 18% lower than the 'any white' number.

The vast majority those people are Hispanics who aren't white and no amount of gaslighting about "White Hispanics" will change that.

I don’t think that’s the right metric. Let’s say there were 100 people and 80 were white and 20 were black. Full employment.

Now there are 120 people and 90 are white and 30 are black. If jobs scale with population, there would still be more total number of white jobs even if the percentage of white jobs decreased.

Looking at the population pyramid of non-hispanic whites in the US, shows the absolute population declining with age. Peak NHW population was 60 in 2020 with a smaller echo at 30 and from the 30 down it's in decline.

Yeah, this statistic is meaningless. You can even quite easily have PoC taking 120% of all new jobs created if you shift the numbers slightly. But that would just reveal its absurdity to everyone, so because this number was in the small band between almost 100% and 100% people decided to run with it.

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