Do knowledge and competence matter?
Or should race, gender, sexual preference or ancestry guide our choice of experts?
Two hundred years ago, sociologist Vilifredo Pareto studied many economies in the world and many fields of endeavour and came to the now accepted observation that in all fields 80% of the progress in the field emanates from a number of people equal to the square root of the population in the field , and among those comprising the contributors to the 80% of progress, a similar analysis found the square root of the 20% contributed 64% of the 80% of advances. His findings became popularly known as the Pareto distribution or colloquially as the 80:20 rule and found many applications.
For example, Vilifredo found that millions of musicians produced only a handful of Mozart’s, Bach’s etc. and similar ratios were evident in all walks of life. Edison, Bell, Ford, Gutenberg, da Vinci, and a list of other famous inventors are famous because there are so few of them and their contribution to society’s advances were so great. In sports today, there are thousands of professional tennis players but the top ten in the world contains the same names often for decades. At 41, Roger Federer announced he is retiring but was ranked number one in the world by the Association of Tennis Professionals for 310 weeks. I have little doubt there were many tennis professionals who had every advantage Federer had in terms of tennis training, fitness training, coaching, etc. but Federer remained the acknowledged best for years. My point is simple, skill matters. In many fields, skill is analagous to knowledge and competence.
In some areas, knowledge and competence are extremely important. Would you like to undergo heart or brain surgery at the hands of the surgeon ranked 100th in your country if you could have selected number one?
The breakdown of society by identity politics and concepts like “diversity and inclusion” now promote the idea that knowledge and competence are not enough and may be less important than race, color or sexual preference in hiring people for important jobs, selecting people for high office (such as Cabinet Ministers in Canada or high court judges). Justin Trudeau proudly touts his choice of a “gender balanced” cabinet which is interesting since his left wing ideology denies the existence of only two genders and promotes the idea that gender is a choice.
Some simple mathematics points out the foolishness of this approach to selection for important positions or even for opportunities such as university admissions or scholarship support. If you have two candidates for a position requiring high intellectual capability and one has an objective IQ in the 99th percentile and the competing candidate has an IQ score in the 99.9th percentile, some might argue it would be immaterial which one you selected. Or would it? Someone in the 99th percentile is a 1 in 100 shot while in the 99.9th percentile is one in 1,000. That is not an incidental difference but represents a virtual chasm of difference. You may end up choosing someone adequate over someone exceptional. What is worse is if you make your field of candidates artificially small by defining characteristics of race, gender, sexual orientation etc. as mandatory before selecting a candidate for the key job.
The United States Biden Administration did just that when President Biden announced loudly and publicly he would appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court well before doing a search for candidates. Women make up slightly more than 50% of American population and Blacks about 13%, so the candidate pool was reduced by 50% by insisting on a “woman” and another 87% by insisting the candidate be Black, reducing the potential candidate pool by a staggering 93.5%. A position on the Supreme Court is vitally important given its role as the third co-equal branch of the U.S. government, as important as the selection of the President but unique in that a Supreme Court justice can be chosen solely based on knowledge and competence while a President is chosen based on popularity.
The odds that Justice Katanji Brown Jackson was the best possible candidate are no higher than 6.5%. She is well qualified, a brilliant jurist with an impressive resume. Had their been an open and objective process to find the best possible candidate she might well have been chosen. We don’t know because there was not such a process. But what we do know is that inspite of her credentials for office she was unwilling to answer the simple question “what is a woman?” and replied “I don’t know, I am not a biologist” during her confirmation hearing. It is amusing to have Biden claim diversity and inclusion progress by appointing a black “woman” to the Supreme Court when that woman herself can’t define what is a “woman”. That simple question and answer made one thing clear - she was bringing ideological baggage into the Court, somewhere it has no place (although I have no doubt there is plenty of it on both sides of the aisle already). Previous bad choices are not improved by another poor choice.
I was for several years a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Many of my late friends were also fighter pilots who lost their lives to what boards of inquiry found to be “pilot error”. It is a stark reminder to me that knowledge and competence are critical skills among fighter pilots, and I would argue similarly important among commercial pilots. When you put your life or the life of others in someone’s hands, that person you trust with that duty should not be someone chosen to meet a “diversity and inclusion” percentage goal.
I often see Democrats critical of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, among others, for their success. Musk almost single-handedly created the first, largest and most successful electric vehicle (EV) producer and to date the only one that has been profitable. In parallel he built Space X, put rockets into space more often and more reliably than NASA, and donated satellite based internet access to Ukranians fighting Russia. Bezos created the most successful online retailer in existence, delighting customers across the globe. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sander want to tax these and other “billionaires” out of existence but their proposed policies would just see them move to more hospitable jurisdictions and America lose the economic benefits of their brilliance.
United States developed into one the strongest economy in the world and a bastion of freedom, with Canada becoming “land of the free” in its wake. But it take a lot less time than people realize to lose freedom and opportunity and descend into chaos. Venezuela’s experience is illustrative. This can happen here.
One thing is clear to me - Western democracies are in a culture war and traditional values (like individual freedom, freedom of speech, free markets, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, the right to peacefully protest government actions, the secret ballot, etc.) are under constant attack. They are being replaced by “cancel culture” and “wokeism” which separates societies into groups and pits those groups against one another. Things we have worked for centuries to make irrelevant have become the only things that matter to the left wing - skin color, religious belief, sexual orientation, ancestry. Martin Luther King had it right - people should be valued by the content of their character and not by the colour of their skin. That concept has disappeared and today we have “Pride month”, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous Reconcililation, micro-aggression, safe spaces, trigger points, and whole plethora of left wing nonsense endemic in our society and infecting our education systems.
There is a culture war raging in Western democracies and we are rapidly losing that war to committed socialists in the Democratic Party in America and the Liberal Party in Canada . It does not end well. Civil war is a long term possibility if Canadians and Americans do not act now to put an end to it.
Elections matter. Vote them out or suffer the consequences.
Beautiful article. Of course, to many of us, knowledge and competence is a given. It is self evident. What is also self evident is that our freedoms are NOT free. We must, now more then ever, fight for our rights. I think I'll read Atlas Shrugged again.
Whether the woke win this war depends on the Canadian/US voters.