Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

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 ...