Recessions are bad. But they do have one benefit: They act as a spotlight that can expose every inefficiency in business.

While countless valuable positions are often eradicated by an initial and continuing economic decline, there are other positions whose true value (or lack thereof) is discovered when businesses are forced to face a lack of disposable resources. In simple terms, the dumb creations of an over-healthy environment are culled.

But too often, people fail to remember the lessons of each recession and quickly forget how easily we went without these ridiculous positions as soon as we’re able to pay for them again. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are the perfect example.

Bloomberg recently reported that layoffs in the tech industry are “hitting diversity and inclusion jobs” particularly hard, noting that “companies that made promises to hire more underrepresented groups are gutting departments meant to achieve these goals” after a “diversity and inclusion hiring boom” in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter unrest in 2020.

While many are mourning this supposedly backward step in the world of equity, the removal of these jobs is undeniably a net positive for society.

First, this effort has bred the expanse of the self-feeding and self-justifying industry of DEI, with roles such as “chief diversity officer” created out of thin air. The sole purpose of such a role is to justify its own existence — a fundamentally un-capitalist notion — and only serves to reinforce the fundamental lie that diversity, as they see it, provides any benefit for industry because the only forms of diversity valued by these charlatans revolve around what we can see, rather than what we can learn or experience.

Companies are celebrated, or criticized, when they do or do not hire the “correct” number of people with a certain gender (when gender existed), skin color, country of origin, sexual orientation, or any other increasingly random combination of immutable characteristics.

But the harsh reality is that such on-the-surface diversity does nothing to improve the products and services developed by Silicon Valley. After all, what is it about someone’s skin color that makes them any better or worse than another person at developing an algorithm, designing a user interface, or debugging a broken process? The answer: nothing.

If anything, the obsessive pursuit of proportional representation undermines achievement by routinely selecting candidates based on immutable characteristics that have quite literally nothing to do with their job, all as better-qualified candidates are potentially ignored because they are unlucky enough to fall into a less-desirable category.

Meanwhile, the only form of diversity that provides any societal value, ideological diversity, is forcibly ignored by those who claim to worship at the altar of inclusion. “Diversity is our strength,” declare the cohort of tech employees who all voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) lost his primary race.

As a former tech employee myself — one of the few conservatives who emerged unscathed — I remain hopeful that once investment inevitably returns to this industry, these companies might refuse to fall for the same pandering nonsense of 2020 and pursue the only form of diversity that would improve tech as it becomes ever-more ingrained in our lives: ideological diversity. But I’m not holding my breath.

Ian Haworth ( @ighaworth ) is the host of Off Limits with Ian Haworth .