This explains why some of the most polluting and damaging companies can be the most woke in their training and marketing. This has led to a major backlash with some companies now advertising themselves as anti-ESG. Splitting out the scores that are determined by independent agencies (not fund managers) could maybe improve the situation, but the botched history will impede any efforts to reform.

You need to discriminate against Asians too! Or at least the algorithm I’ve seen used by universities and DEI HR groups ends up discriminating against them most.

The notion of a social score is absurd. You'd first have to define *society*. At least here in the USA, there is no monolithic society. Cultures differ greatly depending on which state you're in and sometimes even within a state.

That's really it, we've no great unifying force as a country except occasional wars which force us to innovate. Otherwise we're usually just riding the wave of those times and really prolonging it at the great expense of everyone except those who know the game, want to play the game, and have enough money to participate in the game.

Its in the words themselves, society is not culture, society means bonding of people/association to a thing, generally implied "civil society". This has nothing to do with some guy being a punk rocker skateboarder anarchist and the other a Mormon and the other a rural farm guy, that they cannot be a part of the same society. That's just not it.

A couple of hiring managers from oil and gas companies have told me there is a strong push to try not to hire white ICs if you can help it. This makes more sense in the context of trying to get a good ESG score to improve their P/E ratio.

Wouldn't good ESG score mean worse P/E ratio? As that would mean driving up the Price while Earnings might not be affected?

What a better P/E ratio depends on whether you're buying or selling. As the CEO you want the highest price possible for your earnings.

Then it is probably better just to speak about straight up price.

Lawyers are going to have a field day over the next few years litigating over these discriminatory practices in view of SFFA and it’s logical corollaries: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/AGLetterFortune...

What’s remarkable is that apparently none of these hiring managers and executives saw this coming. The stuff they’ve put into writing is wild. Some of the stuff, like aspirational racial quotas, wasn’t even legal under pre-SFFA law. I don’t know who was advising these people.

What specifically are you talking about?

Here’s Apple’s ESG report: https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_downloads/2022/08/2...

In it they say: “We’re making progress in increasing representation, and currently 50 percent of our workforce in the U.S. is made up of people from underrepresented communities.”

“Please see the Appendix on page 81 for more data on representation”

Then scroll to page 81.

We see that 43% of the company is white (the US is 60% white as of the last census, so white people are in fact underrepresented at Apple)

27.9% of the company is Asian

9.4% black

14.8% Hispanic

So they have stated that they are working on “increasing representation” (hiring) all categories of people except white.

They report these numbers because they are used to calculate the company’s ESG score. More diversity = higher score, where diversity is defined as fewer white people.

A higher ESG score means that ESG funds are more likely to invest in this company, pushing up the company’s value.

This is a literal economic incentive to discriminate against white people.

> They report these numbers because they are used to calculate the company’s ESG score. More diversity = higher score, where diversity is defined as fewer white people.

Where do you see that? That's not part of the criteria for my Vanguard ESG fund.

“What's #ESG Score and How it is calculated”

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whats-esg-score-how-calculate....

“There are several organizations and rating agencies that calculate ESG score”

“Corporate Knights: Corporate Knights is a media and research company that publishes an annual ranking of the world's most sustainable corporations. Their methodology evaluates companies based on a range of ESG factors, including carbon productivity, diversity and inclusion, and clean revenue.”

From the Corporate Knights website itself:

“All publicly-traded companies with over US$1 billion in revenue are assessed across 25 key performance indicators, including % sustainable revenue, % sustainable investment, % taxes paid, carbon productivity, and racial and gender diversity.”

Corporate Knights is a free insert in newspapers that gives out a bunch of awards. They are not a fund manager and to my knowledge are not used by fund managers.

In any event they’re talking about board member diversity, not company employees.

Interesting. How's that measured, quantified?

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing the site guidelines and taking their intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I am sorry, I was not trying to post flamebait. I have provided more context with sources and an explanation of what I was talking about in questioning responses further down in the thread. I would include them in the parent comment if I was still able to edit it.

I really don’t feel like it was a harmful comment, it has net upvotes, the majority here seem to agree with the sentiment.

Your comment pointed directly to race war. That's practically the biggest flamebait there is—especially when you use high-indignation, low-information phrases like "how much you discriminate against $group".

It's important to understand the concept of "generic tangent" - when a thread moves away from the specifics of a given story toward more familiar/bigger/hotter/divisive/sensational things, the discussion is guaranteed to get more repetitive, less interesting, and more likely to turn into a flamewar.

You can't judge these things by upvotes—sensational comments and flamewar comments frequently get heavily upvoted. This is a weakness of the upvoting system. Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Okay, I will be more substantive and try to leave out indignation in the future. I think I need to spend less time on the internet.

Appreciated!