Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

The most reliable and objective crime statistics are statistics on homicides, since a dead body can hardly be ignored, regardless of the race of the victim. For as long as homicide statistics have been kept in the United States, the proportion of homicide victims who are black has been some multiple of the proportion of blacks in the population.

Since the homicide rate among blacks is some multiple of the homicide rate among whites, it is hardly surprising that the arrest rate of blacks for homicide is also some multiple of the rate of homicide arrests among whites.

Capital gains in general are recorded in income statistics as being the same as an annual salary, when clearly they are not.

Such data are also relevant to the oft-repeated claim that “the system is rigged” by the wealthy. That claim certainly fits the prevailing social vision. But if the question is whether it also fits the facts, then it can be tested like any other hypothesis. In light of these data, if the top 400 income recipients in the United States rigged the system, and 71 percent of the people in the “top 400” are in that category just one time during a period of more than two decades, why would anyone rig the system in such a way that they themselves would be unlikely to remain in the topmost income bracket?

If, for example, there are 10 people who are in a high income bracket, each earning $500,000 a year, while there are also 10 people in a lower income bracket, each earning $50,000 a year, it might seem as if there is a ten-to-one difference in income between people in these two brackets. But, if only one of the ten people in the higher bracket is earning $500,000 every year in a decade, while the others are there for just one year each in that decade—the year in which their accrued capital gains are turned into cash income—then, given the very high rate of turnover in very high income brackets, the situation is very different from what it would be if there were the same ten people in the higher bracket every year of the decade.

If most of the people in the higher income bracket have a one-year spike in income from capital gains, after which they return to some lower level of income, which may still be above the national average—say, an individual income of $100,000 a year—then, over the course of a decade, the income disparity between people is substantially less than the income disparity between income brackets.

the disparity in income between people is less than four-to-one, while the disparity in income between their respective income brackets is ten-to-one.

How surprised should we be that Asian students in general tend to do better academically than white students in general, in predominantly white societies such as Australia, Britain or the United States? The same pattern can be seen among whole nations, as such Asian countries as Japan, South Korea and Singapore likewise show patterns of hard work by their students and academic results on international tests that place these countries above most Western nations.

When we find some race whose students spend less time and effort on their school work than students in some other race, and yet get educational results superior to the results of hard-working students in that other race, this would be evidence supporting the genetic hypothesis. But such evidence does not seem to be available.

Clearly there was Discrimination II in such situations, but where the discrimination took place cannot be determined by where the statistics were collected.

That is, when black and white workers with the “same” amount of schooling received different pay, that was not necessarily all due to employers’ biased discrimination, as distinguished from biased discrimination that took place for years in the school system, before black workers reached an employer.

comparisons of apples and oranges. In situations where data are available on a wider range of work qualifications, so that truly comparable individuals from different groups can be compared, income disparities tend to shrink, often to the vanishing point, and sometimes the inequality reverses.

Part of the problem is that, as we have seen in other contexts, most of what are called “the poor” are not permanent residents in low-income brackets, any more than other people are permanent residents in other income brackets.

About half of all Americans earning at or near the minimum wage rate are from 16 to 24 years of age,

After having acquired work experience in some simple, entry-level job, most young beginners go on to other jobs, with different employers, where work experience of some sort may be a prerequisite for getting hired.

If workers in fact stayed on permanently in such jobs, which usually have no automatic promotions ladder, those workers would in fact be in dead-end jobs. But, when the average tenure of supermarket employees has been found to be 97 days, that is clearly not the case.

Decades after Professor Lester’s challenge to traditional economic analysis, other economists, also at Princeton, again challenged traditional economic analysis on the basis of survey research, though now by surveying the same employers before and after a minimum wage increase, and asking each time how many employees they had. The answers convinced the Princeton economists that the minimum wage increase had not reduced employment. They and their supporters therefore declared the traditional analysis to be a “myth” that had now been “refuted.”

But, even if the Princeton economists’ statistics were completely accurate, that would still not address the key weakness of survey research in general—which is that you can only survey survivors. And what may be true of survivors need not be true of others in the same circumstances who did not survive in those particular circumstances.

The only firms that can be surveyed for their employment data, both before and after the minimum wage was imposed or raised, are the firms that were there in both time periods—that is, the survivors. If there has been a net decrease in the number of firms, the employment in these surviving firms need not have gone down at all, regardless of a decline in employment in the industry as a whole. The firms surveyed are like the people who survived playing Russian roulette, which may well be a majority in both cases, though not an indicative majority in terms of the issue at hand.

Internationally, unemployment rates have been markedly lower in times and places where neither governments nor labor unions set most wage rates.

These would include Switzerland and Singapore today, and Hong Kong under British rule, prior to the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China.

Yet discussions of minimum wage laws, even by some academic scholars, are often based on the intentions and presumed effects of these laws, rather than being based on empirical evidence as to their actual consequences.

Whether income differences are measured before taxes or after taxes can change the degree of inequality. If inequalities are measured both after taxes and after government transfers, whether in money or in goods and services, that can reduce the inequality considerably, when high-income people pay higher taxes and low-income people receive most of the government transfers.

taxes.” In reality, all that the government can do is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.

Failing to get Congress to take steps toward ending tax exemptions for incomes from particular securities,76 Secretary Mellon sought instead to lower the tax rates to the point where it would in fact lead to collection of more tax revenues.

This increase in income taxes collected from high-income taxpayers was a result of the plain fact that 24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing.

All the voluminous and detailed statistics on tax rates and tax revenues published by the Internal Revenue Service, going back more than a hundred years, might as well not exist, as far as many of those with the prevailing social vision are concerned.

Numbers may deceive us because of their apparent objectivity, but words can deceive more comprehensively because of their emotional appeals that numbers seldom have. There may be very legitimate reasons to react adversely to words like “war,” “racism” or “murder,” but it is the illegitimate invoking of emotionally charged words that is especially dangerous—as anything that overrides thought, or substitutes for thought, can be dangerous. Emotional manipulation is, however, only one of the dangers when words are used in ways that obscure both realities and the connections of cause and effect behind those realities.

the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.2

The crucial question is not whether evils exist but whether the evils of the past or present are automatically the cause of major economic, educational and other social disparities today. The bedrock assumption underlying many political or ideological crusades is that socioeconomic disparities are automatically somebody’s fault, so that our choices are either to blame society or to “blame the victim.”

Many examples from other sources reinforce the same conclusion, that black communities were not nearly as dangerous in the past as they became in the second half of the twentieth century.9 In short, the supposed causes of major social pathologies in black ghettos today were much worse in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half—

It seems unlikely that marriage, as such, or library cards, as such, directly cause the difference. What seems more probable is that these are indicators of cultural lifestyle choices in general that make for better economic prospects.

A fragmented society of people polarized into separate group identities used to be called a “Balkanized” society, and the painful history of strife, bloodshed and atrocities in the Balkans stood as an example of how destructive that can be to all.

The word “diversity” is used to imply positive interactions, with benefits for the various participants and for society at large.

The actual track record of promoting separate group identities, whether called “Balkanization” or “diversity,” has been appalling, in countries around the world.

At a minimum, history shows how dangerous it can be, to a whole society, to automatically and incessantly attribute statistical differences in outcomes to malevolent actions against the less successful.

In addition to individual transformations of words and meanings, sometimes a particular change of meaning has been imposed on a whole category of words, creating very different implications. For example, some words that refer to initial conditions have been used to describe outcome conditions, making it appear that individuals or groups who did not do as well as others had barriers placed in their paths that others did not have.

Just as some people have been said to have been denied “opportunity” or “access” because their outcomes have been less favorable, so some other people who have had more positive outcomes have been called “privileged,” even if individuals from such groups had no more numerous, nor more favorable, options available at the outset than others whose outcomes have not been as positive.

Because someone ended up failing at some endeavor, that does not automatically mean that he was denied opportunity or access at the outset. Whether or not that was true in reality is a major empirical question, and a question too important to be answered by simply shifting the meanings of words.

from serious academic studies. In the ordinary sense of words, it is the Malays who have been privileged, even if they have not used their privileges to produce as beneficial outcomes for themselves as the Chinese have, when using their more limited opportunities.

The notion that those who achieved must have been privileged at the outset may be consistent with the prevailing social vision, but the more fundamental question is whether or to what extent, that vision itself is consistent with empirical facts. However, merely by changing the usage of a word, that empirical test is circumvented.

when beliefs are anchored in a social vision protected by redefined words, empirical tests are finessed aside.

outcomes in the absence of biased treatment or genetic differences in ability. Here, yet again, there is an inversion of criteria, so that the prevailing social vision is not judged by whether it is consistent with facts but, instead, facts are redefined to make them verbally consistent with the vision.

Even racial or ethnic groups that arrived in the United States destitute during the nineteenth century, and were forced to live in a desperate poverty and squalor almost inconceivable today, have had their later rise from such dire conditions verbally erased by calling their eventual achievement of prosperity a “privilege.”

In short, mobility and movement are two fundamentally different things. One is ex ante and the other is ex post.

Social mobility is the extent to which a society permits upward and downward movement. How much movement actually takes place depends also on the extent to which individuals and families avail themselves of the opportunities.

One of the things that sometimes seems to threaten to puncture the verbally sealed bubble of the prevailing vision is the presence of some poor immigrant group with a culture very different from that of domestic low-income groups. Cuban refugees to the United States have been one of a number of such groups, who have initially been at least as poor as domestic groups living at the official poverty level. But when the newcomers have been unencumbered by the welfare state vision and its values, such groups have often risen socioeconomically above the domestic poor, and sometimes above the native population as a whole, as the descendants of the Cuban refugees have.

In New York City, for example, while students who pass the demanding tests to get into the most elite public high schools tend to be from high-income neighborhoods, an exception are students from low-income neighborhoods with concentrations of immigrants from Fujian province in China.

In the United States, particular minority groups also outperform the majority population. Asian American students outnumber white students in each of New York City’s three premier elite public high schools—Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech.

Despite an abundance of literature blaming disparate educational outcomes on the schools, the society or others, in keeping with the prevailing social vision, statistics on the average number of hours per week spent studying by high school students from different ethnic backgrounds show Asian American students spending more hours studying than either white or black American students.