Putting Stock in Competition

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal

Editor:

A satisfying, if sad, irony lurks in Nasdaq’s decision to require companies listed on its exchange to have at least one female board member, plus one from an underrepresented minority (“Nasdaq Proposes Board-Diversity Rule for Listed Companies,” Dec. 1).

Bigoted companies that allow their attitudes toward people’s genitalia, sexual preferences, or ethnicity to skew their business decisions are eventually out-competed by companies that ignore such superficial and economically irrelevant facts. This reality is a happy one. And so as long as Nasdaq’s competitors – exchanges such as the NYSE and the Chicago Stock Exchange – resist the bigotry of wokeness to which Nasdaq has succumbed, Nasdaq’s insistence on skewing its business decisions with considerations of irrelevant criteria such as people’ genitalia, sexual preferences, and ethnicity will ensure that more enlightened and capable exchanges gain market share as Nasdaq deservedly loses it.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030