From Richard Hanania’s Substack:
Why the Technocapital Machine is Stronger than DEI
Affirmative action won’t cause planes to fall out of the skyRICHARD HANANIA
JAN 15, 2024
There has recently been a freakout on the right about DEI in the airline industry. The narrative goes that planes will soon be falling out of the sky due to attempts to diversify the workforces among pilots and air traffic controllers. Steve Sailer has written about this,…It took Anatoly Karlin to inject a bit of sense into the discussion, pointing out that flying is safer than ever.
Huh? I began my Taki’s column “DIE in the Air”:
As I may have mentioned now and then, there’s much wrong about the 2020s, but it’s also worth mentioning something right: We’re living in the golden age of airliner safety. The last fatal crash of a commercial flight of an American airline was way back in 2009.
Back to Hanania:
I think this discourse demonstrates the limits of anti-wokeness. It goes against my interest to say this, as it may make you less likely to buy my book on the topic, but I think that conservatives in many ways exaggerate the impact of race and gender issues, which leads them to focus too much on DEI and ignore topics that are potentially much more important.
I don’t doubt that American institutions are pushing for less competent people to get jobs they don’t otherwise deserve in important fields, and that this has costs. Nonetheless, there is still little evidence that the world is falling apart, and equity initiatives are far from the only ways in which our society deviates from sound policy based in meritocratic principles. One would think that if you predict that planes will fall out of the sky soon due to DEI, and it doesn’t happen, you would step back and wonder what is lacking in your model of the world.
But, in general, American institutions didn’t extend much affirmative action to airline pilots until very recently. After the 2009 crash, for example, Congress voted in a requirement that to be hired as an airline pilot, you must first have 1,500 hours of flying experience to get hired, which restricted pilot candidates largely to military pilots (who tend to be white men), or guys who love flying so much they are private plane flight instructors (who tend to be white men), or scions whose dads’ own private planes (who tend to be white). That’s massive disparate impact, but Congress didn’t care: they fly a lot and they don’t want to die.
It was only during the current Racial Reckoning post George Floyd that airlines began aggressively talking up plans to cut down on the number of Evil White Men in their cockpits, such as United’s April 6, 2021 announcement:
Generally speaking, elites take a lot of plane trips. So even at revolutionary sub-Saharan countries' national airlines, they seldom yanked the stick from the hands of white pilots for political principles.
And, besides, real soon now, robots will do all the flying, so pilots are just going to be totally symbolic, right? And what's more important than symbolism?
— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) April 7, 2021
The End of the All-Male, All-White Cockpit
Airlines are struggling to find enough pilots and to diversify a profession that has been very resistant to change.
Zakiya Percy, left, an instructor at the Lt. Col. Luke Weathers Jr. Flight Academy in Olive Branch, Miss., running through a preflight check with a student. Credit…Andrea Morales for The New York Times
By Niraj Chokshi
April 23, 2022
So, it’s hardly surprising the recent mania for DEI in the Sky hasn’t led to DIE in the Sky.
Yet.
Hanania goes on:
Markets Keep Planes in the Sky
When Karlin argues the “technocapital machine is stronger than DEI,” he gets at the idea that people who spend too much time focused on wokeness tend to drastically underrate Western institutions. The main reason that planes don’t crash as much as they used to is because, as trite as this sounds, airlines have very strong incentives not to kill their customers and crews. They have much more information about their employees and what is good or bad for their business than anyone else does watching from the outside, and it is in their best interest to get airline safety right. Markets drive people to give their money to the companies that best balance safety and convenience, along with whatever else customers value, and employers work hard to avoid hiring individuals who can’t satisfactorily do their jobs.
Indeed, in general, companies in the air travel business have incentives to avoid crashes.
On the other hand, consider the (metaphorical) Crash of 2008. Angelo Mozilo had financial incentives to not run his Countrywide mortgage lending giant into the ground. But it turned out that the theory of Mozilo and George W. Bush that Mexican-Americans were just as reliable as Italian-Americans at repaying loans didn’t pan out, so the stockholders were wiped out. C’est la vie.
An interesting aspect of the situation is that as overall airliner safety improves, the incentives for an airline CEO to boost profits by cutting corners on safety also increase. Say you have a plan to boost profits by employing lousier, cheaper pilots, which you think would double the risk of a major crash on your watch.
Let’s say your airline as 5% of the U.S. market, and you estimate that under the current traditional hiring standards, there will be one massive crash every 20 years. And you expect to be CEO for 10 more years. So, the odds of your airline suffering a giant crash each year are 1 in 400 or 1 in 40 over your remaining ten years.
If you cut corners and hire worse pilots, the odds double, but that means you still have a 19 out of 20 chance of getting away with it. Do you feel lucky this decade, CEO?
Now, it could be that it makes solid economic sense to hire worse pilots.
One thing I would point out, however, is that lots of passengers are somewhat scared of flying, so torturing them by putting your expensive Captain Sully’s out to pasture for your cheaper Captain Shaniquas might cost either you financially or your passengers psychologically.
And that’s probably why many people seem able to reason more clearly about the effects of affirmative action when it comes to air travel than anything else.
