Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

we should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites—which is to say, most meaningful endeavors. And if these are indeed prerequisites, then having four out of five prerequisites means nothing, as far as successful outcomes are concerned. In other words, people with most of the prerequisites for success may nevertheless be utter failures.

As for factors behind differences in educational and career outcomes within Terman’s group, the biggest differentiating factor was in family backgrounds. Men with the most outstanding achievements came from middle-class and upper-class families, and were raised in homes where there were many books. Half of their fathers were college graduates, at a time when that was far more rare than today.

Most professional golfers have never won a single PGA tournament in their entire lives,7 while just three golfers—Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods—won more than 200 PGA tournaments between them.8 Moreover, there are similarly skewed distributions of peak achievements in baseball and tennis, among other endeavors.9

Clearly there were other prerequisites, since these particular combinations of things had not produced agriculture, or civilizations dependent on agriculture, for most of the existence of the human species. Genetic characteristics peculiar to the races in these particular locations hardly seem likely to be the key factor, since the populations of these areas are by no means in the forefront of human achievements today.

Yet that flawed perception of probabilities—and the failure of the real world to match expectations derived from that flawed perception—can drive ideological movements, political crusades and judicial decisions, up to and including decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States, where “disparate impact” statistics, showing different outcomes for different groups, have been enough to create a presumption of discrimination.

A study of National Merit Scholarship finalists, for example, found that, among finalists from five-child families, the first-born was the finalist more often than the other four siblings combined.12 If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable? First-borns were also a majority of the finalists in two-child, three-child, and four-child families.13

Scotland was for centuries one of the poorest, most economically and educationally lagging nations on the outer fringes of European civilization. There was said to be no fourteenth-century Scottish baron who could write his own name.32

And yet, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a disproportionate number of the leading intellectual figures in Britain were of Scottish ancestry—including James Watt in engineering, Adam Smith in economics, David Hume in philosophy, Joseph Black in chemistry, Sir Walter Scott in literature, and James Mill and John Stuart Mill in economic and political writings.

Among the changes that had occurred among the Scots was their Protestant churches’ crusade promoting the idea that everyone should learn to read, so as to be able to read the Bible personally, rather than have priests tell them what it says and means. Another change was a more secular, but still fervent, crusade to learn the English language, which replaced their native Gaelic amo...

Conversely, China was for centuries the most technologically advanced nation in the world, especially during what were called the Middle Ages in Europe. The Chinese had cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans.37 A Chinese admiral led a voyage of discovery that was longer than Columbus’ voyage, generations before Columbus’ voyage,38 and in ships far larger and technologically more advanced than Columbus’ ships.39 One crucial decision in fifteenth-century China, however, set in motion a radical change in the relative positions of the Chinese and the Europeans. Like other nations demonstrably more advanced than others, the Chinese regarded those others as innately inferior—as “barbarians,” just as the Romans likewise regarded peoples beyond the domain of the Roman Empire. Convinced by the exploratory voyages of its ships that there was nothing to be learned from other peoples in other places, the government of China decided in 1433 to not only discontinue such voyages, but to forbid such voyages, or the building of ships capable of making such voyages, and to greatly reduce the influence of the outside world on Chinese society.

What China lost were not the prerequisites represented by the qualities of its people, but the wisdom of its rulers who, with one crucial decision—the loss of just one prerequisite—forfeited the country’s preeminence in the world.

Germany was, at that point, in the forefront of science in nuclear physics. However, it so happened that, at that particular juncture in history, many of the leading nuclear physicists in the world were Jewish—and Hitler’s fanatical anti-Semitism not only precluded their participation in his nuclear bomb project, his threat to the survival of Jews in general led many of these physicists to leave Europe and immigrate to the United States.

As late as the tenth century, a Muslim scholar noted that Europeans grew more pale the farther north you go and also that the “farther they are to the north the more stupid,

gross, and brutish they are.”43

While some have found it surprising that genetic similarities between chimpanzees and human beings extend to well over 90 percent of their genetic makeup, what may be more surprising is that even a microscopic, worm-like creature also has most of its genetic makeup match that of human beings.50 But having many or most prerequisites can count for nothing as far as producing the ultimate outcome.

“The world has never been a level playing field.”56 The idea that it would be a level playing field, if it were not for either genes or discrimination, is a preconception in defiance of both logic and facts. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings, but to automatically make those sins the sole, or even primary, cause of different outcomes among different peoples is to ignore many other reasons for those disparities.

While racists, by definition, prefer their own race to other races, individual racists, like other people, tend to prefer themselves most of all.

The famous Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 arose from the cooperation of the railroads with Homer Plessy, who was challenging these racial segregation laws, in order to create a test case. Although Plessy was part of the black community, he was genetically far more Caucasian than African, and was physically indistinguishable from white men. Had he simply gotten on a train and ridden to his destination, there was little likelihood that he would have been questioned about being seated in a railroad car set aside for whites only. But the attorneys for the railroad and the attorneys for Plessy cooperated in arranging a legal confrontation, so that there would be a case to take into the courts.27 Unfortunately for both, and for the cause of equal rights in general, the Supreme Court majority ruled against them.

Empirical evidence is consistent with

The prevailing national minimum wage law in the United States is the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, high rates of inflation that began in the 1940s put virtually all money wages above the level specified in that Act, so that for all practical purposes, there was no minimum wage in effect a decade after the law was passed.

A 1966 study indicated that among the more than 4 million black American families at that time, just 5.2 thousand families produced all the black physicians, dentists, lawyers and academic doctorates in the country.17 Despite how exceptional such occupations and achievements were among blacks at that time, these particular families averaged 2.25 individuals each in those categories.18 That is, every four such families averaged nine individuals at these levels.

The later massive migrations of Southern blacks to Chicago in the twentieth century created acute polarization within the black community there.21 The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, was highly critical of the newcomers for behavior that gave blacks in general a bad name. So were other blacks from the pre-existing black community there and in other Northern cities, where both the existing black residents and the local black press denounced the new arrivals from the South as vulgar, rowdy, unwashed and criminal.22 Like other black newspapers in other Northern communities, the Chicago Defender published many admonitions to Southern blacks arriving in Chicago, including “Don’t use vile language in public places,” “Don’t allow yourself to be drawn into street brawls,” “Don’t take the part of law breakers, be they men, women, or children,” and “Don’t abuse or violate the confidence of those who give you employment.”23 As with other racial or ethnic groups, in other times and places, blacks in these Northern communities feared that the arrival of less assimilated members of their own race would provoke negative reactions in the larger society that would not only jeopardize the progress of their race, but would even threaten retrogressions, as the larger society turned against blacks in general.24

These fears as to how the new black arrivals from the South would behave, and how the local white population would react against blacks in general, both turned out to be all too well founded. A study in early twentieth-century Pennsylvania, for example, showed that the rate of violent crimes among black migrants from the South was nearly five times the rate of such crimes by blacks born in Pennsylvania.

In any event, the crusade to racially integrate public schools, during the decades following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, generated much social turmoil, racial polarization and bitter backlashes, but no general educational improvement from seating black school children next to white school children. One of the painful ironies of the racial integration crusade was that Dunbar High School’s 85 years of academic achievement came to an abrupt end, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. To comply with that decision, Washington schools were all made neighborhood schools, so that Dunbar could no longer admit black students from anywhere in the city, as it had before, but only students from the particular ghetto neighborhood where it was located. Dunbar quickly became a typical failing ghetto school, with both academic and behavioral problems.

Nearly two million people are estimated to have fled that famine-stricken country between the mid-1840s and the mid-1850s11—altogether a massive loss of population in a small country. Yet the very same kind of potato was grown in the United States—where Ireland’s potatoes originated—with no crop failure. The source of that crop failure has been traced to a fertilizer used in planting potatoes on both sides of the Atlantic. That fertilizer contained a fungus which flourished in the mild and moist climate of Ireland, but not in the hot and dry summers of Idaho and other potato-growing areas of the United States.12 That one difference meant millions of human tragedies and a massive loss of population from which Ireland did not recover, until generations later.

Those who seem to be promising an end to existing disparities as a result of whatever policies they advocate, may be promising what cannot be delivered, regardless of the particular policies being advocated. Moreover, the clash between numerical goals, fervently pursued, and the repeatedly frustrated attempts to reach those goals is not without social consequences, including dire consequences for society as a whole—and perhaps especially dire for the less fortunate, who suffer most when social order breaks down amid heady crusades.

Looking back at the past, there is much to inspire and much to appall. As for the future, all that we can be certain of is that it is coming, whether we are well-prepared or ill-prepared for it. Perhaps the most heartening things about the past are the innumerable examples of whole peoples who lagged far behind their contemporaries at a given time and yet, in later times, overtook them and moved to the forefront of human achievements. These would include Britons in the ancient world, when they were an illiterate tribal people, while the ancient Greeks and Romans were laying the intellectual and material foundations of Western civilization—and yet, more than a millennium later, it was the Britons who led the world into the industrial revolution, and established an empire which included one-fourth of the land area in the world and one-fourth of all the human beings on Earth. At various times and places, China and the Islamic world were more advanced than Europe, and later fell behind, while Japan rose from poverty and backwardness in the middle of the nineteenth century to the forefront of economic and technological achievements in the twentieth century. Jews, who had played little or no role in the revolutionary emergence of science and technology in the early modern era, later produced a wholly disproportionate share of all the scientists who won Nobel Prizes in the twentieth century. Among the appalling things about the past, it is hard to know which was the worst, since ...

human beings to enslave other human beings—including in many, if not most, cases people of their own race.63 Europeans enslaved other Europeans for