Fortune Magazine had a recent interview with Jesse Jackson on diversity in Silicon Valley. After stating that "Creativity isn’t about locking people out," when asked about how to increase diversity here was one of the key elements of his plan:
We need to get rid of H1B workers. There are Americans who can do that work, and H1B workers are cheaper and undercut wages.
Compare to Tim Harford's A passport to privilege, who talks about various factors in his life and the lives of a few others that have left them well off and concludes that the British citizenship he and those he's comparing himself with share "is a greater privilege than all the others combined." A similar statement could be made about citizenship in a lot of Western countries.
How does inequality in reality exist?
... about 80 per cent of global inequality is the result of inequality between rich nations and poor nations. Only 20 per cent is the result of inequality between rich and poor within nations.
Despite all the shouting about the growth of inequality lately, at the global level inequality is decreasing as its been doing for the past few decades and the UN reported that its goal of cutting extreme poverty in half had been reached ahead of the 2015 deadline that had been set:
In 1990, almost half of the population in developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day. This rate dropped to 22 per cent by 2010, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 700 million
It's not that racism doesn't exist. One thing that Jesse Jackson and I would agree on is that it does. It's just that I think it's important when talking about increasing diversity to keep the global picture in perspective, and that's where he and I disagree. i.e. I think his notion of diversity is exclusionary and one-dimensional, focused more on perpetuating privilege rather than extending it. Going back to Harford:
... as I check off my list of privileges, I won’t forget the biggest of them all: my passport.
