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The disparities can also reflect the plain fact that success in many kinds of endeavors depends on prerequisites peculiar to each endeavor—and a relatively small difference in meeting those prerequisites can mean a very large difference in outcomes.
When there is some endeavor with five prerequisites for success, then by definition the chances of success in that endeavor depend on the chances of having all five of those prerequisites simultaneously.
When the chances of having any one of the five prerequisites are two out of three, as in this example, the chance of having all five simultaneously is two-thirds multiplied by itself five times. That comes out to be 32/243 in this example,1 or about one out of eight. In other words, the chances of failure are about seven out of eight. All those people with fewer than five prerequisites have the same outcome—failure. Only those with all five of those prerequisites succeed. This creates a very skewed distribution of success, and nothing like a normal bell curve of distribution of outcomes that
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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.
If you are illiterate, for example, all the other good qualities that you may have in abundance count for nothing in many, if not most, careers today.
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.
Among those men who were least successful, nearly one-third had a parent who had dropped out of school before the eighth grade.8 Even extraordinary IQs did not eliminate the need for other prerequisites.
Sometimes what is missing may be simply someone to point an individual with great potential in the right direction.
This is both inspiring AND quite sad.
Most professional golfers have never won a single PGA tournament in their entire lives,11 while just three golfers—Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods—won more than 200 PGA tournaments between them.12 Moreover, there are similarly skewed distributions of peak achievements in baseball and tennis, among other endeavors.
When the gain or loss of just one prerequisite can turn failure into success or turn success into failure, it should not be surprising, in a changing world, if the leaders and laggards of one century or millennium exchange places in some later century or millennium.
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?
Whatever the general advantages or disadvantages the children in a particular family may have, the only obvious advantage that applies only to the first-born, or to an only child, is the undivided attention of the parents during early childhood development.
Most notable achievements involve multiple factors—beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, and a willingness to do what it takes, without which all the native ability in an individual and all the opportunity in a society mean nothing, just as the desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability.
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.
Here, as in other very different contexts, changes in the extent to which prerequisites are met completely can have dramatic effects on outcomes in a relatively short time, as history is measured. The fact that Jews rose dramatically in certain fields after various barriers were removed does not mean that other groups would automatically do the same, if barriers against them were removed, for the Jews already had various other prerequisites for such achievements—notably widespread literacy during centuries when illiteracy was the norm in the world at large—and Jews needed only to add whatever
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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.
These scientists were a key resource that the United States had and that Hitler could not have, as a result of his own racial fanaticism. The whole world escaped the prospect of mass annihilation and/or crushing subjugation to Nazi oppression and dehumanization because Hitler’s nuclear program lacked one key factor. He had some leading nuclear physicists, but not enough.
Such a correlation between complexion and ability would be taboo today, but there is little reason to doubt that a very real correlation existed among Europeans as of the time when this observation was made. The fact that Northern Europe and Western Europe would move ahead of Southern Europe economically and technologically many centuries later was a heartening sign that backwardness in a given era does not mean backwardness forever. But that does not deny that great economic and social disparities have existed among peoples and nations at given times and places.
Just one key factor changed in the photographic industry—the substitution of digital cameras for film cameras.
Multiple factors have to come together in order to create tornadoes, and more than 90 percent of all the tornadoes in the entire world occur in just one country—the United States.
Neither in nature nor among human beings are either equal or randomly distributed outcomes automatic. On the contrary, grossly unequal distributions of outcomes are common, both in nature and among people, including in circumstances where neither genes nor discrimination are involved.
The idea that the world 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.
Back in the days of the Roman Empire, the cost of shipping a cargo across the length of the Mediterranean Sea—more than 2,000 miles—was less than the cost of carting that same cargo 75 miles inland.65 This meant that people living on the coast had a vastly larger universe of economic and cultural interactions with other people available to them.
Coastal peoples around the world have long tended to be more prosperous and more advanced than people of the same race living farther inland, while people living in river valleys have likewise tended to be more prosperous and more advanced than people living up in the isolated hills and mountains around the world.
Geographic differences alone have been enough to preclude the equal opportunity that many seem to assume would exist in the absence of discriminatory bias or genetic differences.
the United States, for example, income differences between middle aged people and young adults are larger than income differences between blacks and whites.
Even if Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans were absolutely identical in everything else besides age, they would nevertheless differ significantly in incomes and other age-related outcomes. Racial, ethnic and other groups are of course seldom, if ever, identical in everything else. That makes the prospects of equal outcomes even more improbable, and disparities in outcomes even more questionable as automatic indicators of discrimination.
In general, even a major factor—unchallenged as a scientific fact—can be outweighed by some combination of other factors. It is no denial of the influence of differences in north-south locations on temperatures to point out that the average high temperature in December is the same in London as in Washington, even though London is located more than 850 miles farther north than Washington.93 The warm waters of the Gulf Stream, flowing through the Atlantic Ocean, transfer warmth northeastward past Western Europe, including London, creating milder winters in that part of the world than at the same
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Other factors enable many other places in the temperate zones to reach higher temperatures than many places in the tropics.94 None of this contradicts the scientific fact that sunlight is hotter in the tropics. But that unchallenged fact does not mean that this single factor automatically determines all outcomes. Similarly, among human beings, the unchallenged fact of discriminatory bias against various groups in countries around the world does not preclude outcomes from being determined by a wider range of other factors in particular places and times.
Two of the monumental catastrophes of the twentieth century—Nazism and Communism—led to the slaughter of millions of human beings by their own governments, in the name of either ridding the world of the burden of “inferior” races or ridding the world of “exploiters” responsible for the poverty of the exploited.
Mein Kampf nor Marx’s Capital was an exercise in hypothesis testing. While Karl Marx’s vast three-volume economic treatise was a far greater intellectual achievement, “exploitation” was at no point in its 2,500 pages treated as a testable hypothesis. Exploitation was instead the foundation assumption on which an elaborate intellectual superstructure was built—
Another way of saying the same thing is: Are group disparities in outcomes a result of internal differences in behavior and capabilities, accurately assessed by outsiders, or are those disparities due to external impositions based on the biased misjudgments or antagonisms of outsiders?
In other contexts, you may in fact judge each person as an individual. But that this depends on context means that people have already been implicitly pre-sorted by the context, and only after that pre-sorting are they then judged as individuals.
In short, one of the differences between the applicability of Discrimination I and Discrimination II is cost—and this is not always a small cost, nor a cost measured solely in money. Everyone might agree that Discrimination I is preferable, other things being equal. Nevertheless, one may still be aware that other things are not always equal, and sometimes other things are very far from being equal.
People who would never walk through a particular neighborhood at night, or perhaps not even in broad daylight, may nevertheless be indignant at banks that engage in “redlining”—that is, putting a whole neighborhood off-limits as a place to invest their depositors’ money. The observers’ own “redlining” in their choices of where to walk may never be seen by them as a different example of the same principle.
Observers who point out that particular individuals are equally qualified, regardless of sex, miss the point. An equally qualified individual may do the work just as well as others, but if some of the others are distracted from their work, the net effect can be a less efficient workforce. That is the empirical basis that can lead employers to practice Discrimination IB, even if the employers have no bias or aversion to those less likely to be hired.
For example, forbidding employers from checking criminal records of job applicants can mean reducing the job opportunities of those young black males who have no criminal record.
It may be no consolation to those law-abiding citizens in a high-crime neighborhood that the higher prices they have to pay are reimbursing higher costs of doing business where they live. Meanwhile, politicians and local activists have every incentive to claim that the higher prices are due to discrimination, in the sense of Discrimination II, even when in fact the community is simply paying additional costs generated by some residents in that community.
Those local residents who created none of those costs can be victims of those who did, rather than being victims of those who charged the resulting higher prices.
The difference between Discrimination IB and Discrimination II is not just an academic distinction.
Although higher prices in low-income neighborhoods are often discussed in the context of racial or ethnic minorities, the same economic consequences have been found where the people in the low-income neighborhoods were white.
Among the things that might be done to reduce the burden of unfairness to law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods could be stronger law enforcement by the police and the courts. But, to the extent that the public—both inside and outside the affected communities—sees the high prices as Discrimination II against the affected community as a whole, due to bias or antipathy by the larger society, the imposition of stronger law enforcement may be seen as just another imposition of injustice on the affected communities.
Community or ethnic solidarity can be a major obstacle to seeing, believing or responding to the facts.
costs paid by the discriminators, because these costs are factors in how much Discrimination II can persist in particular circumstances and institutions. Such costs have no such moral, political or ideological attraction as the costs paid by victims. But the costs that discriminators have to pay—and the various circumstances in which they do or do not have to pay those costs—can affect how much Discrimination II is in fact likely to be inflicted.
By contrast, economist Robert Higgs, who researched the actual consequences of those efforts of white employers and landowners in the postbellum South, found that such organized efforts often collapsed, as a result of competition among white employers and landowners for black workers and sharecroppers.16 It might seem as if newly freed blacks—desperately poor, usually illiterate and unfamiliar with working as free people in labor markets—would be easy prey for whites united to enforce whatever wage and sharecropper conditions they wanted. But that ignores the inherent, systemic competitive
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What was different was that employers who failed to hire black workers whom it was profitable to hire paid a price for Discrimination II, in the form of lost opportunities to make money, while the legislators who passed laws imposing Discrimination II paid no price at all.
However, the costs of Discrimination II to the discriminator—in the context of a competitive market—are far lower, or even nonexistent, in situations where free market competition does not exist, such as in (1) public utility monopolies whose prices and profit rates are directly controlled by government, (2) non-profit organizations, and (3) government employment. In all these particular situations, Discrimination II has tended to be far more common than in competitive markets, not only in South Africa under apartheid, but also in other countries around the world.
Not surprisingly, municipal transit companies in the South fought against the passage of laws requiring racially segregated seating in streetcars. After losing politically in the legislatures, some municipal transit companies then took the issue into the courts, where they lost again. Then, after the laws went into effect legally, many Southern municipal transit companies simply did nothing to enforce racially segregated seating. In some places, passengers continued for years to sit wherever they felt like sitting.
Like municipal transit companies, railroad managements in the South opposed the racial segregation laws, in their own self-interest, even if their racial views might have been no different from those of politicians who passed such laws. But the incentives to which the politicians responded were votes—that is, white votes—while the incentives to which railroad owners and managers responded were financial, and money was the same, regardless of the racial source.
What was consistent in all these various regions was that additional costs entailed by either preferential or discriminatory treatment of black job applicants were costs that phone companies could pass on to customers, who had little choice but to pay them, since there were only land lines at the time, and each phone company was a monopoly in its own area.
