The Competence Crisis Isn't Over Yet

Unlike intellectuals who usually begin at first principles and then reason towards final conclusions, my writing has always started from first-hand experiences. So it was with Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis. Two events were the catalysts of an essay that I had wanted to write for years. The first was seeing DEI affect every aspect of my profession, finance, culminating in a ‘temporary pause’ on hiring ‘non-diverse’ professionals. The result, of course, was hiring standards also being temporarily paused. This crystallized the obvious damage that DEI caused to competence, morale, and, ultimately, outcomes.

The second event was the runway incursion at Austin-Bergstrom Airport on February 4th, 2023. The incident was highly personal to me for reasons I shared with friends. The local cause of the runway incursion was an incompetent air traffic controller, but the greater issue was the system that allowed him to become an ATC.

The essay made a prediction: “Between the issues at ATC and Boeing, damage to the U.S.’s phenomenal aviation safety record seems almost inevitable.” Since then, almost six months to the day after the essay was published, a door plug on a shoddily constructed Boeing 787 Max blew off at 16000 feet, resulting in uncontrolled decompression. Only the skill and heroism of the pilots saved 177 souls. Bismarck Analysis wrote an excellent piece deconstructing the many decisions that led to Boeing’s decline.

Boeing Starliner bears special mention, as the delay and overrun rife project experienced multiple issues during its inaugural crewed launch last June. During what should have been an eight-day mission, multiple helium leaks and the failure of five reaction control thrusters resulted in NASA choosing to strand the two astronauts on the International Space Station to be returned by a SpaceX Crew Dragon at some later date.

While both astronauts survived, on January 29th, 2025, the 64 passengers and crew on American Airlines Flight 5342 were not as lucky. A female military pilot flew a US Army Black Hawk into the path of a commercial airplane on final approach, and everyone in both vehicles was killed when they collided in mid-air. While the final assignment of blame has not been made, the identity of the Black Hawk pilot was concealed until it couldn’t be, an obvious suggestion of guilt. In the hours that followed the crash, commentators were quick to observe that changes in FAA ATC hiring practices and standards could have been partly at fault.

Those tragedies aside, Complex Systems may have ‘marked the top’ of the DEI movement. Four important events in conjunction set the stage for the pushback of the 2024 Presidential Election. The weakest of four was the interest rate surge of 2022; moving from zero percent to over five percent began putting pressure on debt-laden corporations to improve their financial performance. Old economy companies with looming debt maturities and financial covenants could no longer point to the percentage of “diverse” senior leaders at their firms. Tech startups burning cash with stagnant revenues could no longer point to the establishment of affinity groups when negotiating with their VC investors. Chief Diversity Officers began getting pushed out when it became clear that the double bottom-line promise: more diversity AND better operating performance, was a lie all along.

The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022 also marked a sea change in the discourse around DEI. Whereas prior management algorithmically suppressed narratives, X under Elon was christened a Free Speech zone, where the best narratives would circulate undisrupted. The free exchange of ideas was devastating to DEI, which has always been a minority position held mostly by members of the professional managerial class and their clients, who directly benefit.

Twenty-eight days after the publication of Complex Systems, in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) decision, the Supreme Court overruled Grutter vs. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke (1978). In a landmark decision, the Court found that race-based affirmative action programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The legal edifice underpinning over fifty years of affirmative action was swept away in a pen stroke. Corporations noted that the Supreme Court would soon come after their race-based hiring practices and quotas.

The last and perhaps most underappreciated blow to DEI before the Election came during the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. During the weeks and months that followed, anti-Zionist protests erupted on the campuses of America’s elite universities. Harvard alumnus and billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman fired off a series of viral tweets pressuring Harvard and other Ivy League universities to take action against Hamas-supporting students and faculty. On October 22, he promoted a New York Post article that directly linked DEI to the rise of antisemitism on college campuses. Six weeks later, the presidents of Harvard, U-Penn, and MIT gave disastrous congressional testimonies on their responses to antisemitism on college campuses. Soon thereafter, Chris Rufo and Aaron Sibarium published plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first black president. In January of 2024, she resigned her position. These events together led to an important shifting of beliefs among professors like Amy Simon and lawyers like Alan Dershowitz. No longer was DEI an issue of right versus left, DEI became symbolic of the battle between civilization and barbarism.

The establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Trump's initial executive orders marked the next phase of efforts to reverse DEI initiatives in both public and private sectors. This short essay will not list all the accomplishments to date. Still, it will be noted that hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, HR workers, professors, teachers, lawyers, CEOs, and Board Members are still ideologically committed to pushing DEI. Many apparent DEI proponents now, in hindsight, appear to be Václav Havel’s greengrocers. These minor players pushed DEI, not out of ideological commitment, but because doing so was essential to proving loyalty to the regime. The critical next step is to root out the former while not unduly punishing the latter.

While DEI must be eliminated, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard singled out Asians for protection. Jonathan Greenblatt has advocated expanding DEI to protect Jewish Americans. Libertarians and conservatives have advocated expanding civil rights protections to all groups, including white men. While coming from an understandable place, these are all a mistake, treating the symptom but not the disease. The disease is what Christopher Caldwell titled “the new constitution,” a body of laws, court rulings, executive orders, and corporate policies that govern every aspect of free association in American society. Companies will still find it challenging and expensive to fire incompetent “underrepresented” employees. Universities will still face pressure to ensure their student bodies are “representative.” Banks will still risk legal consequences if they fairly assess credit risk among borrowers. Homeowners will still risk legal action if they exercise discretion when choosing tenants. The giant bureaucratic machine that was established to advance DEI at every level of American society will remain, ready to be weaponized once again.

Unless the entire edifice of civil rights law is unwound, America will not be able to continue on a path to national greatness and the stars.