Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, “The world has never been a level playing field.”64 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. 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. Geography and demography, for example, are among the many factors that make equal or random outcomes among human beings very unlikely.

Most mountain peoples have had nothing resembling equal opportunity, compared to their contemporaries in more favorable geographic settings, even though the cause of their plight was not other human beings

“In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally”76—is a conclusion reached by many others who have done empirical studies of peoples, institutions and societies around the world.

Among the most overlooked factors in socioeconomic outcome differences, both within nations and between nations, are such demographic factors as differences in median age. These differences are not small, and neither are their consequences. In the United States, for example, income differences between middle aged people and young adults are larger than income differences between blacks and whites.

In the United States, for example, the median age of Japanese Americans is 51 and the median age of Mexican Americans is 27.84

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 terms of capabilities, a man is not even equal to himself at different stages of life, much less equal to the wide range of other people at varying stages of their own respective lives.

American Progressives took the lead in promoting genetic determinism in the United States then, as they later took the lead in promoting the opposite presumption that disparities imply discrimination in the second half of the twentieth century. On both sides of the Atlantic, and in both eras, leading intellectual and political figures were in the forefront of those promoting the prevailing presumption of their times.

we find assumptions of equal or comparable outcomes as a default setting in many social theories that regard the absence of equality of outcomes as automatic signs of some sinister influences which have prevented this natural equality from taking place. But neither equality of achievements nor equality of crimes is common.

The students in a college classroom are not likely to be a random sample of the full range of variations found in the general population, and are more likely to represent a narrower range of people assembled there for a narrower range of purposes, and with a narrower range of individual characteristics, as well as being in a setting less dangerous than a dark street at night.

A real-life example of the effect of the cost of knowledge in this context is a study which showed that, despite the reluctance of many employers to hire young black males, because a significant proportion of them have had criminal records, those particular employers who automatically did criminal background checks on all their employees tended to hire more young black males than did other employers.

In other cases, where such information is too costly to be worth it, individuals may be judged by empirical evidence on the group they are part of. This can be called Discrimination IB. Both

Therefore, in the interests of workforce efficiency, when a particular occupation is overwhelmingly chosen by women, such as nursing, the employer may be reluctant to hire a male nurse. Conversely, where lumberjacks are overwhelmingly male, the employer may be reluctant to hire a female lumberjack, even if she is demonstrably as fully qualified as the men.

One of the consequences of such situations is that a law-abiding majority in a high-crime neighborhood can end up paying a high price for the presence of a criminal minority among compatriots living in their midst. Some businesses will not deliver their products—whether pizzas or furniture—to high-crime neighborhoods, rather than risk bodily harm, including death, to their drivers.

A study titled The Poor Pay More saw the poor in general as “exploited consumers,”3 taken advantage of by stores located in low-income neighborhoods. This

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.

Even if a local store charging a dollar is making 15 cents gross profit per item, while Walmart is making only 10 cents, if Walmart’s inventory turnover rate is three times as high, then in a given time period Walmart is making 30 cents selling that item,