What is MEI? It’s the ‘new corporate rage’ as DEI dies, says a Harvard economist — but is this true?

DEI programs absorption connected ensuring just attraction and adjacent information for everyone, peculiarly targeting biases against marginalized groups successful workplaces, assemblage campuses, and organizations. But the Trump medication wants DEI gone, labeling DEI authorities programs “radical” and “wasteful.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has regularly utilized the word successful its updates astir "wasteful" contracts and grants it has cancelled.

Now, there’s a caller acronym grabbing attraction – MEI, abbreviated for merit, excellence, and intelligence. Harvard economist Roland Fryer dubbed MEI "the caller firm rage" successful a caller op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

So is MEI penning DEI’s obituary?

MEI advocates for hiring candidates strictly based connected merit, excluding factors similar race, gender, age, oregon ethnicity from the equation. Fryer describes this displacement arsenic "refreshing," and supporters reason the attack people fosters diverseness due to the fact that the champion endowment inherently includes divers backgrounds and perspectives.

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who coined the term, explained connected his blog that “a hiring process based connected merit volition people output a assortment of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas.”

Elon Musk, different salient MEI supporter, has been notably blunt astir his absorption to DEI, tweeting provocatively that “DEI means radical DIE.” In effect to Wang's announcement astir the MEI hiring argumentation astatine Scale, Musk simply tweeted, “great!”

MEI supporters reason that focusing purely connected merit is simply a instrumentality to accepted American values similar enactment ethic and idiosyncratic achievement.

However, critics specified arsenic Adia Wingfield, a prof astatine Washington University successful St. Louis, antagonistic that the meritocratic past referenced by MEI proponents ne'er genuinely existed. Historically, women and radical of colour faced important barriers preventing adjacent workplace opportunities.

According to Wingfield and different experts, DEI initiatives are precisely what’s needed to make a genuine meritocracy. As Wingfield explained to Fortune magazine, “The thought is to determination distant from a precise non-meritocratic past into a aboriginal wherever everyone truly does person opportunities.”