An Elegy for the DEI Boogeyman

Rapidly changed government and corporate policies mean the era of DEI is coming to a screeching halt. But gross racial discrimination in the U. S. labor market persists. Just one example: The black unemployment rate is almost always double the white unemployment rate. In this episode we muddle through what can be said about DEI now at its funeral that wasn’t said during its lifespan. You can also find Optimist Economy on: TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@optimist_economy YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@optimist_economy Instagram https://www.instagram.com/optimist_economy/ Substack https://optimisteconomy.substack.com/ Support us by becoming a paid Substack subscriber or at https://buymeacoffee.com/optimisteconomy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy were about as different as two politicians could be. The lanky businessman and the stout old senator, the conservative darling and the liberal icon. But did you know they once teamed up to tackle an elusive challenge: universal healthcare?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is a politician's dream.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  In season four of the Big Dig podcast, we tell the story of Romney Care and the odd couple alliance behind it. Find Mitt and Ted wherever you listen.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.

• 0:38Robin Rauzi?

  I'm Robin.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  We envision for this show to have three segments, and they're going to have really awesome, catchy, clever titles that are the epitome of being pithy and witty at the same time.

• 1:05Robin Rauzi?

  At some point, in the future.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  In the future. At the moment, this is called Segment One.

• 1:11Robin Rauzi?

  Segment One.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  The first segment. Robin, what did you look up this week? What did you read this week?

• 1:18Robin Rauzi?

  You know, I looked up a couple of words, but one was, now I don't know how to say it, autarky?

• 1:24Speaker 02

  I think it's autarky.

• 1:25Robin Rauzi?

  I think it's autarky. And it's a great-looking word, A-U-T-A-R-K-Y, but it can also be spelled with a C-H, which makes it look a little bit like autocratic. Autarky is a state of being economically independent or self-sufficient, came up in the context of tariffs and trade policy. And I always find it interesting when new words just start popping up in especially journalistic outlets. It sort of signals that there's something going on, and that was the one I looked up this week.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Economists can use it synonymously with it's a country that doesn't trade.

• 1:58Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  So it's the the positive version of that is that you're economically independent or self efficient but self sufficient, but we think of it as being on some level, just this is a country that doesn't trade. And so their economy is, I think, in autarky. I think it's a noun. Yeah, it's not good. It's not like we're like, oh, man, autarky, that's where we want to be. I think you could argue that there's only one true autarky in the world right now, and that's North Korea.

• 2:24Robin Rauzi?

  North Korea.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's not it's not good. Self sufficiency as an economy sounds great, but it typically means that you've closed yourself off to innovation, to communication and to the world. And you're not as good as the world on your own, and you suffer for it. Economics is taught as if it's a science, but I have always thought of it as a language. Autarky is another is an example of a word that like only economists would really ever use, and it's part of our language and how we read the world.

• 3:00Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, which is why it's interesting when it starts to pop up in journalistic discourse, right? I felt like same way with oligarchy. When when you have to start learning new words as a newspaper reader, it's telling you something about what's happening in the culture. What did you look up this week?

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Sometimes it's hard to find good news. And in my newsletter, Kedits, I've been trying to put kind of like, see the bright points, see the points of light of what's going on in the current administration. So one thing that I got really deep in the weeds on this week was looking up the productivity of the 117th Congress, which is the Congress that started with Joe Biden's term in 2021. And what struck me as really remarkable is by the first week of March, not only had they impeached Trump for his involvement in January 6, but they had passed the American Rescue Plan. And they had used their power and their resources to immediately address the economic needs of Americans. And they

• 4:00Speaker 02

  did it in a concerted and legal, above the board way. They helped childcare, they helped public education, they helped people with housing, they helped state and local governments, and they did it in about five weeks. I was looking this up because I'm trying to write something for my newsletter that puts this together with just how much weakness there is from all these executive orders and these constitutionally questionable, if outright constitutionally violating actions from Trump and Musk, that as much power as they're grabbing, it's because they don't have that much.

• 4:35Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  And it's a sign of weakness. So I got really deep into the 117th Congress. And they passed so many laws, apparently every time you rename a post office, it's a law. So there's just-

• 4:46Robin Rauzi?

  An individual post office?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Like, an individual post office is named after somebody, it requires Congress to vote on it. And so I was like, okay, let's pass the American Rescue Plan, we're gonna include the child tax credit to halve child poverty and almost eradicate it in the United States, and then it's like, post office, post office, post office, post office. It's not good for my mental health to discuss Congress any further than we just have.

• 5:11Robin Rauzi?

  Exactly. This is a good stopping point on that.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Ready for our natural transition to segment two?

• 5:18Robin Rauzi?

  It's supernatural.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  This is our first show, our first real show, in which we're pretending to be the podcasters that all of our tens of listeners expect us to be.

• 5:30Robin Rauzi?

  Exactly.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  If you read a lot of stories and you listen to a lot of stories, you get the polished version. Robin is my editor, and she taught me how to tell stories, you know, one column at a time. And so what we wanted to do on this show was bring you into that process, not me presenting a packaged version of what Robin has helped me find, but into the process of Robin and I trying to find the story from the data and evidence and case that I want to make.

• 6:00Robin Rauzi?

  Good luck.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Good luck, yeah. And for the record, this is how it goes with writers and editors, is, you know, I'm pitching with like, you know, my whole heart on the line, and Robin just gets to be like the gladiator, like, thumbs down, like, this one wasn't good.

• 6:16Robin Rauzi?

  We maybe should clarify, I'm not your editor at Bloomberg.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  You're not my editor at Bloomberg. You are no longer my editor.

• 6:22Robin Rauzi?

  That's right.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  We are rekindling our writer-editor relationship.

• 6:26Robin Rauzi?

  Getting the band back together.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  For the podcast.

• 6:29Robin Rauzi?

  For the podcast, right?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  I'd just like to point out that, from this perspective, this is like grossly unfair for Robin because I'm going and prepped like guns blazing, like here's what I want to share with the world. And she just has to be sitting there cold, possibly rejecting me with all of you to hear. So this, segment two is gonna be...

• 6:48Robin Rauzi?

  It's raw.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  It's raw. Segment two is raw. Segment one and three, we've thought about it. But segment two, this is just, let's see if we make it to segment three.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Okay, here's what I want to talk about, and I have two things I'm trying to connect, and I'm missing something.

• 7:06Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  One of Trump's first executive orders was, I'm not sure of the technical term for this, the slashing of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming within the federal government.

• 7:17Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  And these workers were put on administrative leave, these offices were shuttered. Every DEI effort of the federal government came to a screeching halt within an afternoon.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  That follows movement at a lot of private companies to do the same, sometimes in response to activists who are trying to get them to do that. But this era of DEI is coming to a close. And I want to write some kind of elegy for it. Of what it was meant to do, what it didn't do.

• 7:51Robin Rauzi?

  Why it was so vulnerable to this attack?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Why it was so vulnerable. But I think what people miss when they... So DEI for me, maybe it's like autarky in this language of economics. It became a word that did not mean what I think it was trying to do. And so what I want, the story I want to tell is to explain in a way that people who might celebrate the end of DEI would understand that there is gross discrimination in our labor market. And DEI was not intended to elevate people. It was intended to find people that discrimination missed, or that discrimination made you miss. And it was trying to correct for a problem, and it didn't do it. I mean, it didn't fix it. But the problem is still there. That's the issue is that the problem is still there.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  So I have these threads of like, was DEI even a thing that we tried to do that hard? Was it all a PR campaign on behalf of private companies? And the absolutely gross levels of discrimination and inequity that still live in the labor market? And then somehow tying that together to get people to feel like, maybe not DEI, but we need to do something.

• 9:03Robin Rauzi?

  So tell me some of the examples that you are looking at bringing in. Are you going to talk about any of the corporation moves?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  I don't know, because corporate DEI, I mean, you have no idea what they were doing. I mean, a company was like, we have a very aggressive DEI campaign. Like, I don't know what that means. It's not like they turn over their data on hiring, firing, pay or promotion and say, why don't you guys all look at it and tell us how we did? I'm an economist. I want to see everything. I want all the pay scales.

• 9:32Robin Rauzi?

  I guess I was thinking about, I have been particularly interested in what happened with Target. Target made some very specific promises. They're based in Minnesota and coming straight out of the reaction to the murder of George Floyd, that they were going to do better, very specifically about black employees. And then they very publicly said, oh, never mind, about a month ago. You know, that to me was sort of the worst of both ends of it. It was so clearly a response not to the discrimination that you're talking about and the inequality of the labor market, but a political reaction. And of course, a political reaction is vulnerable to a shift in political sentiment.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  But maybe that's the point I need to somehow make is that it's, the problem's still there. It's not like we're done.

• 10:19Robin Rauzi?

  No, and I think they even said, you know, they weren't moving the needle.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Yes, it's this, it's this acknowledgement of, we don't need to do it anymore, not because it's solved, but because it's not our job. We tried one thing and it didn't work, so we're not going to try anymore.

• 10:36Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  That's DEI. So I think it's, it would be fair for me to talk about the, what we mean by discrimination exists in the labor market, and that's a fact, not a speculation or opinion.

• 10:47Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, tell, let's put out some of those data points.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  I've written about this before, that there is this kind of pervasive belief that because of DEI, somehow white men are like falling in their status.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely and unequivocally not true. As long as we have had labor market data, black people have been behind white people in unemployment rate, in earnings, in hiring. And when we test to see if this is because they are black, the tests come back with almost no variation, even over a quarter a century. Yes, it is because they are black. Economists didn't pioneer this. We just, we figured out a way to do it really quickly and come up with a lot of studies. So it's, it's called audit testing, and it was something that the Department of Housing and Urban Development started in the 1970s, although back then it was called a slammed door test or a paired test. So what they would do is they would get two people, one black, one white,

• 11:46Speaker 02

  and kind of coach them on various aspects of their finances and then send them in turn to knock on doors when there was a for rent sign. And what they were testing for was the slammed door, that black people would get a door slammed in their face when they wanted to rent somewhere. And brace for impact, they found it.

• 12:05Robin Rauzi?

  Shocking.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Shocking. And they've done this, they've done this over the years where HUD has, you know, they've expanded their methods, but it's, it's still very much the same flavor.

• 12:14Robin Rauzi?

  Is this the same thing that they do with those resume submission tests?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yes. Audit studies are really common, and we use it to test all kinds of discrimination in the labor market. We use it to test if there's discrimination against unemployed people who have gaps on their resume, against people who went to certain colleges, if private school matters more than public school and so on. And it's still, I mean, you still find massive gaps. It's a very effective tool at finding gaps and how people are treated in the labor market. So most people, when you read the news, you see the unemployment rate. We calculate the unemployment rate for every demographic group that's possible. And it might surprise some people, although it's so true to be a fact in labor economics that the black unemployment rate is almost always twice the white unemployment rate.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  So if the overall unemployment rate is 4%, the unemployment rate for white people is closer to 3, and for black people it's closer to 6, all the time.

• 13:13Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  And what's particularly disturbing about that is that there could be a good reason for that, because, you know, white people and black people don't have the same jobs, they don't have the same level of educational attainment, and so there could be kind of a, just a difference in their various characteristics as workers that would explain the unemployment rate. But the problem is that the unemployment rate for white men with a high school degree who never went to college is about the unemployment rate for black men who have a college degree.

• 13:43Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  This isn't like a one month, or it happened during a recession, this is just a permanent feature of inequality in our labor market, that black men, you know, essentially the type of boost you would get to your labor market opportunities as seen through the unemployment rate black men don't get, and it aligns perfectly with these studies of resumes that find that a black name will have you called back less.

• 14:07Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right. So, I'm just thinking about how these things compound, too.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  I mean, this is, this is the problem, right, that you have DEI as people see it, you know, Target says, "We're gonna try or hire black people," and then they're like, "We're not gonna do this anymore," versus this kind of immutable fact about the US labor market that black people and white people do not have the same level of success due to their race. There's some way to connect this here to kind of bring home that the end of DEI shouldn't be the end of trying.

• 14:40Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. Um, I think that the argument that, you know, merit and quote-unquote competence is the end-all, be-all, it's sort of winning the day, except that what we know from those studies is that it's not winning the day. We've got people who are equally meritous and equally competent, who aren't being given opportunity.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  The same opportunity, the same opportunity. So, the, the idea of DEI was always misunderstood, and that it's not trying to elevate people

• 15:17Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  just for the sake of like hitting some numbers in terms of the, you know, a company's diversity.

• 15:23Robin Rauzi?

  And people absolutely believe that that's what DEI is.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yes, mo- I think most people would tell you, "It's just about finding black people or gay people or women to work here, so that when they publish their statistics on who works here, they can say, 'We're diverse.'"

• 15:36Robin Rauzi?

  And I'm just gonna tell you, by the way, as a gay person, nobody ever counts the gay people.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, I laughed.

• 15:43Robin Rauzi?

  It's true, they don't.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  And. Public surveys don't count the gays. That's I will say, the census doesn't have, we don't have a straight gay wage gap because the census doesn't count the gays. If I'm allowed to say the gays.

• 15:57Robin Rauzi?

  You can say the gays.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Okay, great.

• 16:00Robin Rauzi?

  Uh, they do do salary surveys, right? And gay, gay men earn more than above-average salaries often, and gay women don't. Uh, at least that used to be the case. And, you know, whatever, I'm not griping.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  You can gripe a little bit.

• 16:15Robin Rauzi?

  I know. But, you know, absolutely, gay people don't get all sorts of jobs because they're gay.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  And the, and DEI is not about elevating people above their station. It was a recognition, or maybe it wasn't a loud enough recognition, that people are missed. And it's correcting after the fact that people are missed. And that if you have systemic discrimination and bias built in to a search mechanism, then you are going to disadvantage black people who are just as capable of being there. So this elegy I want to write, I, it's somewhere between, like, hey, just so we all remember, discrimination is definitely a thing. The labor market is not an equal or meritocratic place, not in the way that you think.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  I never really thought that much of DEI initiatives at private employers. I think some of them were very well-intentioned, but this is about productivity and your bottom line. You're missing out on the best talent. That is the story. For private companies, you are missing out on the best talent, and that is absolutely the story. And so you need to fix your talent pool to reflect that. But I don't know, something about the elegy had to do with, like, white people.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  And what it, what is it, what does it mean for white people if this problem was solved?

• 17:41Robin Rauzi?

  If this problem of discrimination in hiring were solved?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  If this problem in discrimination against black people in many labor market institutions, in education, hiring, promotion, and so on.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Because I got a question about this through the DMs. That was basically, I mean, they didn't say this because it was very hateful, the way that they said it. But, but the, the basic question was, in a world where black people are treated equally, are white people worse off? And can you speak to that?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  And I was like, wow. Loaded question.

• 18:18Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  There was some kind of like, is this what's actually wrong with DEI? Is that no one's willing to admit that you want white people to be worse off?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  You can't see because we're recording audio. You can't see because it's a podcast and I'm just like.

• 18:37Robin Rauzi?

  Rubbing her face.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Okay. Maybe I should, maybe I should say, deep sigh. These are the pieces I have, right? I have discrimination is real and bad.

• 18:49Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  I have DEI didn't solve it and is gone.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  And the conversation of what comes next almost seems taboo in today's climate to say, and we keep trying and like pursue the policy that will make a difference as opposed to doing the same thing over and over again, expecting black people to suddenly magically become economically equal to white people.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  This puts the just unfettered attack on federal workers into deep perspective that, you know, of all the employers in the labor market, the federal government was probably the closest to equal between black and white as you get.

• 19:31Robin Rauzi?

  Really?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Really, yes. The, the federal government is more diverse in the right ways than the private sector. So I had a paper about this that I did while I was at RAND that looked at black white pay gaps amongst highly educated STEM workers.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  And the question that was put to us was, how does the federal government change its compensation in order to recruit like the highest talent STEM people? And what we pointed back out to them, which they didn't really love, is that you don't want to pay like the private sector, because the private sector has incredible inequality between black and white STEM workers, and between male and female STEM workers, and that it's one of the, like, in terms of just unexplained wage gaps that come down to discrimination, you do not want the federal government to pay like the private sector, because you'd be absorbing the private sector's inequality, whereas the federal government actually does a really good job of not absorbing racial discrimination that is palpable on its private sector competitors.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  As far as we are an equal opportunity employer, not many places put their money where their mouth was, but the federal government did.

• 20:38Robin Rauzi?

  Do you think that you can write this piece so that it's narrowed to the federal workforce?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Maybe there's a separate piece on what's at risk when you target the federal government as an employer, not as, you know, what did he call it? I'm not going to justify it or elevate it, but it's a basis attack on our federal workforce, but it's also an attack on a really, really good employer.

• 21:01Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  So it's two things.

• 21:03Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Then, I mean, they're kind of, I feel like I could have seen this beforehand, that like, the private sector needs to do one thing, and the public sector needs to do one thing. It's like, one of them needs to continue evolving, and the other one needs to defend.

• 21:15Robin Rauzi?

  I'm just also thinking about how, how much power we're giving larger and larger consolidated corporations, you know?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a whole, that's got to be a whole other episode about labor market concentration, and if you've got four big firms, and one of them is deeply racist in hiring, like, never going to progress. Too many eggs in one basket.

• 21:37Robin Rauzi?

  Too many eggs in one basket, but...

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Okay, so I'm writing about DEI, almost as like, the performative DEI that the private sector had and walked away from.

• 21:47Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  That in some ways was separate from the actual progress that was made in reducing black-white differentiation in certain places. I don't know, do you, do I have to put in there something like, so are white people worse off when black people are equal? Because there's a lot of people who would say yes.

• 22:03Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. You know, it's sort of, again, that thinking about the economic pie, I think, and, and how, as a company, are you worse off if you've got a smaller talent pool to draw from? As a boss, are you worse off if you don't have better, a bigger talent pool to hire from? I mean, it's as if there's only a finite number of jobs, and if we give some to black people, white people won't get them. That's not how, that's not how an economy works.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  I mean, so some people would view the hiring process as a zero-sum game. Like, this company has 100 jobs, and so if they apportion five for black people, it should be closer to 15, because that's the share of their population. But if they, if they save 15 jobs for black people, that means that 10 white people won't get it. And I think they view it as a zero-sum game with any, I think, maybe this is, this like secret third thing we write about, but, because there can be zero-sum games within an abundance economy.

• 23:03Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Like, yes, there are a fixed number of spots of who goes to Harvard.

• 23:08Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  And it is possible that if they try harder to find bright black people, who their typical systems of finding bright people for Harvard overlook, that there are going to be fewer white people that attend. And that is a zero-sum game within Harvard. But that doesn't mean white people don't get to go to college.

• 23:28Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  So there's some notion here of you can be right and wrong at the same time. Like, you can be right, there is a zero-sum game. I'm only hiring for one position.

• 23:36Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  But that's not the only job in the economy. Like, college admissions is not a zero-sum game. Employment is not a zero-sum game. The economy is not a zero-sum game, even if there's only a fixed number of spots at a particular place.

• 23:48Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Maybe there's some kind of, like, nuance there of, like, the zero-sum abundant world.

• 23:56Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I mean- It's not gonna be easy, but you know, if you can address that question and answer it in that way, I think that's a useful contribution to the conversation around whether it was misguided or whether it was misunderstood.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Hmm, misguided versus misunderstood. There's something here too about how, I mean, do most white people see themselves as like the marginal admission to a job or a school that like, I've always thought it was interesting that in these conversations, so many white people would identify as like, the marginal 1%. Like, I'm, I'm not gonna get into Harvard if they let in black people at a higher rate.

• 24:33Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm. I'm the person on the bubble.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  I'm the, I'm on the bubble. It, it, it speaks to something to overall economic insecurity that people have, that they kind of see themselves as on the bubble. Like, I'm on the bubble for everything. Are we using on the bubble correctly? I think so.

• 24:50Robin Rauzi?

  I think we are.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Any sports metaphors would be really dangerous for me.

• 24:54Robin Rauzi?

  That's not a sports metaphor.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  It's not?

• 24:57Robin Rauzi?

  I don't think so.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I thought they, don't they talk about it in the basketball tournament?

• 25:00Robin Rauzi?

  Well, maybe, but I think that the metaphor has to do with a level. Am I wrong?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, my mind is blown. My mind is absolutely blown.

• 25:08Robin Rauzi?

  You're kind of actually, you're making my brain hurt a little with this because it, it's a, it's almost a narcissism or, you know, like an exceptionalism, like, well, I'm the one who's getting hurt out of these 99 other people who also applied for this job, right?

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Like, maybe this is the story, the, that, like, what you got wrong about DEI, the lesson you should have learned was just how on the bubble people feel.

• 25:34Robin Rauzi?

  Everyone feels.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Everyone feels on the bubble about making it in our economy, to the point that if, like, hey, if one black person gets a job, that's my job that's lost.

• 25:44Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  And it's, that was one thing that we didn't learn from DEI. And I think maybe the second thing we didn't learn from DEI Was how to talk about who loses in a zero sum game in an abundance world.

• 25:59Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm hmm.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  And that there was no, there was no like two way recognition on people who didn't like DEI and people who were in favor of it of like, yeah, there is a zero sum aspect. I don't give 500 people one job. But at the same time, I'm not, it's not like those 499 people are condemned to never work again because there's only a fixed number of jobs in the economy. And so that you had these two big losses from the DEI conversation that we never had. And this is what, at least at its like demise, we can talk about these two aspects of the labor market.

• 26:32Robin Rauzi?

  I like that. I really do.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Okay. Thank God we're recording. What was the second thing I said? No, okay, we'll go back and listen.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Sometimes it just comes off the dome and they're like, I like, I like that. I'm like, what did I say?

• 26:45Robin Rauzi?

  What did I say?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  What did I say? Okay, the two things we didn't learn. That's why I said the two things we didn't learn. Okay. This is good. This is what, this is what I'm going to write about. The two things we didn't learn from DEI.

• 26:55Robin Rauzi?

  That we can discuss at its funeral.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  That we can discuss at its funeral. The Irish wake for DEI. We're going to stay up all night, talking, drinking and singing.

• 27:04Robin Rauzi?

  And we're going to feel pretty hungover tomorrow.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Let's move on to the equally cleverly titled segment three. We wanted to do something that was equivalent to the last page of a magazine where it's always something really short and a little bit, it's a little bit fluffy. So what we've decided is that we're going to give, this is a show that we talk a lot about, you know, policy and actions. We're going to give for you our policies in the dictatorships that we run that are very mercurial and petty, but it's how we would run the world.

• 27:38Robin Rauzi?

  How we would run the world. And we could call it that.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  How we would run the world.

• 27:40Robin Rauzi?

  But I think we should call it executive order.

• 27:45Robin Rauzi?

  I have a new appreciation for executive orders.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  For executive orders.

• 27:51Robin Rauzi?

  So, the executive order one in the Republic of Rousey is, um, I call the No Logos on My Life Act. Though I guess it wouldn't be an act.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  It wouldn't be an act, No Logos on My Life Law.

• 28:03Robin Rauzi?

  Law. EO. Yeah, and it would be that, you know, you have a right to buy things with no logo on it. Apple. And cars especially.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  All cars.

• 28:16Robin Rauzi?

  All cars. My dad likes to say that you should always know what you want in case your car gets totaled. So I'm always looking at cars. And there are cars I will not buy because their badge is so ugly, looking at you Cadillac.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna say it, this is a really Gen X or take.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Some sellout, some sellout flashy logo car.

• 28:37Robin Rauzi?

  Can't stand it. Anyway. Yeah, that, that would be my, my petty thing.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Okay, the executive order from the Edwards Republic is that I think President's Day is a dumb holiday. It's vague. It doesn't say which president. Apparently, it's actually spelled differently in a bunch of different states about whether or not it's like there's an apostrophe there. So shout out to Optimist Economy, that we kind of have the same problem, so maybe I'm projecting. But President's Day is, I mean, if you told me that there was a country that has a day where you're supposed to honor its dead past leaders, I'd be like, 80% it's a fascist country. Like, that's just, we live in a democracy, we have the right to assail our leaders in however sarcastic way we want. I don't know why we have a day honoring them. We should come up with a new holiday.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  We could just have every federal holiday be birthdays to dead people. It would still be better than just random President's Day. We can't agree on Washington versus Lincoln and we can't give people 11 days off. We're so cheap on federal holidays, we have to squish together two presidents whose birthdays happen to lie near each other. I disapprove. I 100% disapprove. You either give me two holidays, or we come up with another one because Presidents is not working. That is my executive order.

• 29:56Robin Rauzi?

  Love it.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Before we end our show today, we would of course like to thank our sponsors, which as you know are not financial but spiritual. The spiritual sponsor I'd like to thank for the week is Dochi's Grammy Performance, which I have watched on YouTube upwards of 15 times.

• 30:13Robin Rauzi?

  The spiritual sponsor I'd like to thank is, thank you to Catherine for this recommendation, Chaperone and My Kink is Karma, which I like to blast at full volume in my car.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Finally, we'd like to thank our producer, Sophie, without which this show would not be possible. She doesn't just edit us and make us sound smart, but frankly, she makes us both a lot less nervous in an endeavor that we find very nerve-making. So, snapping out, Sophie.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  This is Optimist Economy. We are on all the platforms. We have a newsletter. I'm Ked's Economist. I'm on all the platforms and I have a newsletter. Robin is nowhere and doesn't want to be.