By Steve Sailer
04/10/2024
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
The Return of Skepticism
Steve SailerApril 10, 2024
McKinsey & Company, the famous management consulting firm, has published a number of wildly popular reports during the Great Awokening — such as 2015’s “Diversity Matters,” 2018’s “Delivering Through Diversity,” 2020’s “Diversity Wins,” and 2023’s “Diversity Matters Even More” — asserting that gender and ethnic diversity in corporate management is a magic bullet for making money.
McKinsey is a (highly) for-profit entity not otherwise known for doing disinterested scientific research just to advance the frontiers of knowledge. Then again, neither is McKinsey an investor trying to pick undervalued stocks. Instead, it makes its money telling the C-suite what the bosses want to hear.
But all that didn’t induce much news media skepticism about McKinsey’s reports…until recently as DEI has slightly receded in fashion.
Now, however, the conservative press is finally starting to publicize the old doubts of the business school researchers who live to find ways to outsmart the stock market … .
You might have wondered why, if McKinsey had actually discovered a major, enduring, and well-publicized violation of the notorious Efficient-Market Hypothesis (that it’s tough to consistently beat the stock market using public information), why day traders weren’t sitting at home counting pictures of corporate officers and board members by demographic categories, and getting rich by betting on the more diverse firms.
Note that you don’t have to believe in the Efficient-Market Hypothesis, which has been around more or less since finance economist Eugene Fama’s 1970 paper, but you very much ought to consider it when thinking about how to invest.
Read the whole thing there.
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