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This article argues that said hidden engine is actually workplace equality, which is a pretty “woke” argument — since people have been trying to link “equality” to “financials” for years, without a huge amount of luck.
Here’s one way to conceptualize this stuff: In 1960, roughly 94% of doctors and lawyers in the U.S. were white men. Fifty years later, this number was closer to 60%.
Now you have this, from the article above:
“The 94% figure, of course, is really, really, really far from that,” Jones says, “which suggests that in 1960, you had all these not-very-talented white men who were doctors and lawyers and lots of extremely talented people from other groups who were excluded. In the past 50 years, these groups have been changing places.”
Per their research, then — which some can quibble with — greater opportunity over the last 50 years has contributed to 29% of earnings growth among black men, 51% among black women, and 77% among white women.
Stands to reason that replacing “mediocre white men” with “more diverse, talented people” would impact GDP. As Andrew Yang consistently discusses, GDP is a flawed metric — a mom of a special-needs child works her ass off every day in many respects, but technically contributes nothing to GDP. So there are better ways to conceptualized all these…
