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Clegg II: Is ?Diversity? Good For Business?

In my immediately preceding post I quoted some remarks Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity will deliver at a conference on racial preference in Los Angeles on January 19. Below I?ll be quoting from some testimony he delivered to the EEOC last February (hence the title: ?Clegg II).

A few days ago the New York Times ran a fawning article about a new book glorifying ?diversity? in business, ?In Professor?s Model, Diversity = Productivity.? The book being pedestalized (a new verb I just invented, meaning ?to place upon a pedestal), The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies (Princeton University Press), is by Scott E. Page, identified as ?a professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan,? and the article consists primarily of an interview with Prof. Page. (I realize this is unfair, but sometimes I get the feeling that if it weren?t for long-time philosophy professor Carl Cohen ? see here, here, and here ? the University of Michigan would have no real diversity at all.)

Prof. Page says all the usual things about diversity, but he also goes a bit beyond the usual in his willingness to say on the record that diversity is often more important than ability:

Q. How do you know you?re right about diversity?

A. One of the things social scientists do is create math models to prove our theories. With Lu Hong ? she?s an economist at Chicago?s Loyola University ? I constructed a formal model that showed mathematically that diversity can trump ability, and also when it does.

Our models were similar to what people are doing to predict the financial markets and voting patterns, and our paper was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.

By that standard, if I may return to my point about how few Carl Cohens there are at Michigan or other elite universities these days, most universities are filled with people who ?think similarly? about affirmative action, and thus its not surprising that so much of their product is so stale.

But I promised you more Roger Clegg, and here he is. His argument ? no surprise, really ? is that the New York Times interview gives a distorted picture of what Prof. Page argues in his book, which Roger, unlike me, has actually read. The following appears on page 3 of his written testimony submitted to the EEOC last February:

There was an article in the Washington Post on January 15, 2007 about a paper by Cedric Herring of the University of Illinois at Chicago, with parts of the article suggesting that greater diversity leads to greater business success. But, in fact, the study really seems to find only that larger companies tend to be more diverse, which is unsurprising.

Likewise, the title of Scott Page?s new book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies might lead one to believe that it proves racial and ethnic diversity is good for business, but in fact its claims are more limited than that. Indeed, much of what Professor Page has to say is similar to part III of my April testimony--specifically, that for many jobs diversity of any sort is irrelevant; that in any event it is what he calls ?cognitive? diversity that ultimately matters, not skin-color diversity per se; and that employers should ?avoid lumping by [racial] identity? and should ?avoid stereotypes? (and, of course, Professor Page does not address the legal prohibition on racial discrimination, even when it is said to be justified by believed ?cognitive? differences).

Full post as published by Discriminations on January 11, 2008 (boomark / email).