Right wingers constantly push the myth that anything does not work correctly in USA is the result of companies and government being forced to hire women and minorities instead of competent, experience managers — who happen to be white males. Ian Welsh explains the real problem is the deindustrialization and financialization of the USA economy the past half century.
The Competency Crisis Is Not About DEI
Ian Welsh, January 15, 2025
That DEI (women and brown people) are responsible is a constant right wing cry.
The competency crisis is a result of an economy where making money without making a product is easier than making something. We prioritized financial profits—multi generational rises in asset prices that were faster than inflation. Housing went up. Stocks went up. Private equity earned money buy buying companies, larding them up with debt, and running them into the ground. Profits were juiced by moving production offshore and engaging in regulatory and labor arbitrage.
The best profit came from playing financial games and rentierism. You didn’t have to make anything or delivery anything, you just had to find a way to squeeze money out of something by making it go up faster than inflation, or by destroying something which was already built, taking all the future value now and giving it to yourself….
Everyone wanted to make money without having to create to get it. Mostly they either wanted to get unearned money from appreciation, to destroy what others had built, or to capture a market in an oligopoly or monopoly so they could juice prices.
Meanwhile, the manufacturing floor moved to China and elsewhere. The people who knew how to make things retired, moved to other jobs, retired and eventually died.
We can’t build most things because we haven’t prioritized building things, or getting better at building things since the 70s. The eighties are where predatory capitalism took hold, and since then the whole game has been rentierism, unearned gains, predation and arbitrage….
“The eighties are where predatory capitalism took hold….” Yep, it was called Reaganomics. Almost all the trend lines of economic and technological progress begin to decline after Reagen became president in instituted Milton Friedman’s and von Hayek’s and von Mises’ neoliberalism of “greater economic freedom” from government oversight. Ronald Reagan should be remembered as the worst president ever.
