Post-America: where diversity ranks higher than effectiveness

I didn't even know the SEC kept tabs on the demographic makeup of corporate boards, did you? Let alone that Norway has a damn quota for the percentage of women on boards there.

Just a couple of the tidbits you'll find in Kevin Williamson's typically marvelous piece at NRO today on this silly obsession.

It's another one of those I hesitate to cull money paragraphs from, because you ought to read the whole thing, but allow me to try to give you a representative taste:

The Left loves quotas, because the Left loves control. But what is really remarkable about the progressive attitude toward what Ms. Covert regards as an insalubrious excess of white men on corporate boards is the breathtakingly primitive concept of “diversity” on display. Intellectual diversity is good for corporate boards, and for many other kinds of organizations, because it is good for problem-solving, as decades’ worth of evidence attest. And it may be the case that in the context of the United States at large, ethnic and sexual diversity is a relatively useful proxy for diversity of background and experience, though that is not necessarily true in any individual instance. But to the point: Race and sex are by no means a useful proxy for intellectual diversity among the relatively small and highly self-selected group of people who are credible candidates for positions on the boards of directors of publicly traded companies. A black Harvard MBA from Kenilworth with 20 years at Morgan is much more like a white Penn MBA from Chevy Chase with 20 years at Citigroup than either is like a high-school graduate of any background from Muleshoe, Texas, with 20 years at Caterpillar. A corporate-management type who says things like “We need a tighter read on how paradigm changes in this space will impact our deliverables” is categorically useless without regard to race, religion, sex, creed, national origin, or bedroom shenanigans.

Now go read the whole thing.