Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

A division in which one woman gets a shilling and another three thousand shillings for an hour of work has no moral sense in it: it is just something that happens, and that ought not to happen. A child with an interesting face and pretty ways, and some talent for acting, may, by working for the films, earn a hundred times as much as its mother can earn by drudging at an ordinary trade.4 Here productivity is not simply missing, but implicitly repudiated, as a basis for income. The child movie star who is paid many times what her mother is paid is obviously being paid by someone who values her movie role more than anyone values her mother’s work. In short, she is being paid for productivity—as judged by whoever pays her, who in turn is paid by vast numbers of other people, who pay for the enjoyment they get from watching her in the movies. It is not “just something that happens” and there is no basis on which a third-party observer can say that this voluntary transaction is something “that ought not to happen”—that his personal opinion should override other people’s right to do as they choose with their own money or their own time.

Contrary to fashionable rhetoric, this fortune was not some share of “the world’s income” that Gates somehow “grabbed,” “took” or “cornered.” It was what billions of people around the world voluntarily paid for purchasing computers containing Gates’ operating system—

Moreover, surrogate decision-makers often pay no price for being wrong, no matter how wrong or how catastrophic the consequences for those whose decisions they have preempted. Given the fallibility of all human beings, the chastening effect of facing the consequences of one’s decisions can be dispensed with only at great peril.

In an era of group-identity politics, various group spokesmen, activists or “leaders” may be preoccupied with languages as badges of cultural identity, but cultures exist to serve human beings. Human beings do not exist to preserve cultures, or to preserve a socially isolated constituency for the benefit of “leaders.”

Before we can say who has failed, or who has succeeded, in some endeavor, we must first know who was trying to succeed in that endeavor in the first place. Those who are not trying are not likely to succeed, regardless of how much innate ability they may have, and regardless of how much opportunity may exist.

Illiteracy isolates people from thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, skills and insights from people around the world. After literacy, or even higher education, has been acquired, that does not make their benefits equally available to all who have acquired these things.

The violence unleashed against successful groups has often exceeded the violence unleashed against lagging groups disdained as “inferior.” The number of overseas Chinese killed by mobs in Vietnam, in just one year, exceeded the number of lynchings of black Americans recorded in the history of the United States.25 So did the number of Armenians killed in just one year by rampaging mobs in the Ottoman Empire,26 and so has the number of Jews killed in a given year, at numerous times and places throughout history,27 even before millions were murdered in the Holocaust.

In New York State’s regular public school district with the highest percentage of its students passing the math and English exams, 65 percent of those students were Asian and 29 percent were white. In fact, among the state’s top five regular public school districts with the highest proportion of their students passing the statewide math and English exams, white-and-Asian majorities ranged from 86 percent to 94 percent.

How many observers—of whatever race, class or political orientation—can honestly say that they expected such outcomes? Such results are a challenge, if not a devastating contradiction, to prevailing beliefs about either heredity or environment, as those terms are conventionally used. Neither the genes said by some to be a crippling intellectual handicap, nor the poverty said by others to blight minority children’s educational prospects, turned out to be such insurmountable obstacles as many across the ideological spectrum believed.

egalitarianism as an abstract philosophy has often meant resentment of success as a social reality.

Among the consequences have been that unemployment among foreigners has become more than twice as high as among native Swedes. Moreover, “after 10 years in Sweden, only half of asylum seekers have a job.”39 Immigrants, who are now 16 percent of Sweden’s small population, have become 51 percent of the long-term unemployed and 57 percent of the recipients of welfare payments.40 In Norway, the cost of supporting a single refugee in the manner prescribed by the country’s many welfare state provisions has been calculated as

$125,000, which would be enough to support a number of Syrian refugees in Jordan.

As the ethnic and cultural homogeneity within Scandinavian countries has been changed by an influx of immigrants within recent decades—and especially immigrants admitted from non-Western nations—some of the same social problems as those in Britain and the United States have also begun to appear in Scandinavia.

Any concerns about a need to preserve a domestic culture that has produced a level of prosperity, order and freedom seldom found in some other cultures risks being dismissed as phobias or racism. It is as if the only morally legitimate way to discuss immigration issues is in terms of the prevailing social vision, based on the seemingly invincible fallacy of assuming a sameness of developed capabilities among both peoples and cultures.

Why should eliminating gaps be the goal when different individuals and groups do not want the same things, or do not have the same priorities or urgencies about these gaps?

John Stuart Mill saw this problem back in the nineteenth century, when he said, “even if a government were superior in intelligence and knowledge to any single individual in the nation, it must be inferior to all the individuals of the nation taken together.”

To people who conceive of consequential knowledge as concentrated in a highly educated few with high IQs, specifying particular outcome goals for a whole society may seem far more doable than to people who see vast amounts of consequential knowledge as highly diffused among the people at large, in individually unimpressive fragments. It may be virtually impossible for any given individual, or any manageable number of surrogate decision-makers collectively, to take all the factors into account. But where decisions are made by vast numbers of individuals transacting in a marketplace, each with their own fragment of the necessary knowledge of factors to be considered, and all are forced to reach mutually compatible terms, that is when all the knowledge available to all those concerned affects the economic outcome.

In many countries, including notably India and China, the decision to allow freer markets led to significantly higher economic growth rates and striking reductions in poverty rates.

Progressives who accepted the proposition that minimum wage laws priced low-skilled workers out of jobs were not at all deterred by that prospect, for the Progressives of that era specifically welcomed that outcome, especially when the low-skilled workers displaced were non-white.56 That was what would fit the particular tableau they sought in that era.

Louis XIV said, “L’état c’est moi” (I am the state); today’s income redistributionists say “social justice” or “the common good.” But it all means essentially the same thing in decision-making terms—third-party compulsion to preempt individual choices.

Much of what is said in the name of “social justice” implicitly assumes three things: (1) the seemingly invincible fallacy that various groups would be equally successful in the absence of biased treatment by others, (2) the cause of disparate outcomes can be determined by where statistics showing the unequal outcomes were collected, and (3) if the more fortunate people were not completely responsible for their own good fortune, then the government—politicians, bureaucrats and judges—will produce either efficiently better or morally superior outcomes by intervening.

In what country, or in what kind of endeavor, or in what century out of the vast millennia of human history, has there ever been a proportional representation of various groups in any activity where people have been free to compete?

Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time, and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it.

Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by Barbary Coast pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed.

After territorial irredentism has led nations to slaughter each other’s people over land that might have little or no value in itself, simply because it once belonged in a different political jurisdiction, at a time beyond any living person’s memory, what is to be expected from instilling the idea of social irredentism, growing out of historic wrongs done to people long dead?

Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.