Major corporations were long seen as natural allies of the tax-cutting American Right. But that changed with the rise of “woke capital,” especially in 2020, when big companies fell over each other in a rush to proclaim their support for Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, and the rest of the Left-wing identity-politics agenda.
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Of course, it’s one thing to see such trends play out, and another to measure them empirically. A new working paper tracks the rise and fall of corporate wokeness, testing a few key hypotheses against the data in the process.
The authors’ major contribution is to tally up the “DEI commitments” that more than 15,000 companies have made in their securities disclosures over roughly the past two decades. They’re able to do so by identifying buzzwords in the text and having AI evaluate whether each mention is a voluntary commitment to DEI or just boilerplate. The resulting trendline, which I recreated from their chart with some help from ChatGPT, is quite striking:
Through the W. and Obama years, these public commitments were rare, if becoming ever-so-slightly more popular. They rose more noticeably under Trump I, then exploded in late 2020 and through the Biden years. At the height of DEI mania, the average firm was making multiple DEI commitments per quarter. But as the wave crested—and especially as Trump was re-elected and moved back into the White House—corporations changed their tune back, and quickly at that.
Pro-DEI comments in these documents are not the same thing as actual DEI policies, which is an important limitation of this method. However, the authors do find a modest connection between these commitments and the firms’ non-white employee share. And as they note, these disclosures “are not entirely cheap talk insofar as misstatements may carry liability under the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws, and various stakeholders (including political ones) parse them.”
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The post The Spectacular Rise and Gruesome Implosion of ‘Woke Capital’ appeared first on American Renaissance.
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