Richard Hanania’s THE ORIGIN OF WOKE is about the damage done to America by civil rights bureaucracy, affirmative action, and other things we’ve been writing about for years, but being impeccably mainstream, it doesn’t use either VDARE.com or Steve Sailer as sources. There is one mention of VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow, below:
A study of all class action settlements in the federal courts between 2006 and 2007 found that while 89 percent of all class actions resulted in cash relief, and less than a quarter included declaratory or injunctive relief, for civil rights class action settlements, the numbers were 49 percent and 75 percent.18 In other words, compared to other types of legal settlements in class action cases, civil rights defendants are more likely to be required to take on indirect burdens. An analysis from 1980 found that OFCCP regulations had increased the labor and capital costs of federal contractors by 6.5 percent, which according to a 1993 estimate from Forbes magazine would amount to 1.7 percent of GNP.19 This does not even include the costs of EEOC compliance.
Footnote 19 goes to this, from when VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow was a financial journalist, 30 years ago in Forbes:
19.Brimelow, Peter, and Leslie Spencer. Feb 15, 1993. “When Quotas Replace Merit, Everybody Suffers.” Forbes: pp. 80–102.
That article, like a lot of Peter’s early work, can be read on VDARE.com here: When Quotas Replace Merit, Everybody Suffers.
Why is that the estimate used by Hanania? Well, in 2000, Peter wrote that it was ”STILL THE ONLY ESTIMATE EXTANT, incidentally, thanks to the cowardice of American academe” and in 2016 I answered a letter [A Reader Wonders How Much Affirmative Action Costs America—We Don’t Know For Sure, Because The Answer Would Cost An Economist His Job] by saying ”As far as I know, there isn’t one—it wouldn’t be safe for a financial journalist or economist to make one...” and that means it may still be the only professional estimate of the financial cost of Affirmative Action to the American people.
