Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

this can be a major deficiency in their education, for nothing is more certain than that they will encounter conflicting beliefs on many subjects in the years after they have left the politically correct monoculture on many academic campuses.

What words openly declare can be tested against empirical evidence, but what words insinuate can bypass that safeguard.

In each case, the key trick is to verbally collectivize wealth produced by individuals and then depict those individuals who produced more of it, and received payment for doing so, as having deprived others of their fair share.

With such word games, one might say that Babe Ruth took an unfair share of the home runs hit by the New York Yankees.

Euphemisms are another form of insinuation that enables ideas to bypass factual or analytical tests.

Most people do not have simply a random assortment of opinions on various subjects. More commonly, there is a certain coherence among their views on different issues, suggesting that there is some underlying vision of the world,

Rousseau, like many later believers in this seemingly invincible fallacy, took it as axiomatic that only human biases create inequalities.

“Disparate impact” statistics that carry much weight in courts of law, as evidence of biased discrimination, are collected not only from specific industries but more often from a particular firm within an industry. The more narrowly the specific endeavor is defined, the less likely is equal representation of groups to be found, and therefore the less likely are group statistics to be valid indicators of biased treatment.

Different social classes raise their children differently.

All too often, there is an implicit assumption that the cause of some disparity is located where the statistics on that disparity were collected.

embedded in the law of the land by the Supreme Court of the United States, which has treated disparities in the employment, pay and promotions of people from different groups as evidence of discriminatory bias by employers under its “disparate impact” standard. That approach ignores the very possibility that what happened to people before they reached an employer—or a college admissions office or a crime scene—may have had a “disparate impact” on the kinds of people they became and the kinds of skills, values, habits and limitations they bring with them to the places where statistics are later collected.

All that is needed is the implicit assumption that statistical disparities originated where the statistics were collected.

Nearly two million people are estimated to have fled that famine-stricken country between the mid-1840s and the mid-1850s,48 a massive loss of population in a small country.

what good temper or moderation can be expected when a major segment of the population becomes convinced that “the system is rigged” against them and morality is just a giant fraud?

There is no reason whatever to assume that education is valued equally by all individuals or groups.

Clearly then, not all groups value education, or the behavior that leads to greater educational success, the same.

For people enthralled by the prevailing social vision, with its invincible fallacy, all forms of sorting in schools are taboo, whether sorting by behavior, ability or other factors that can affect educational outcomes.

It would be difficult to find even a single country, ruled by Marxists, where the standard of living of working-class people has been as high as that of working-class people in a number of capitalist countries.

Moreover, the triumph of that vision in Western societies during the 1960s entailed far more than the welfare state itself. With the prevailing social vision came a more non-judgmental approach to behavior, as well as multiculturalism, a de-emphasis of social rules and moral standards, as well as a de-emphasis of policing and punishments, and an emphasis on demographically based “fair shares” for all—along with a delegitimizing of both legal and moral standards. The

What is particularly salient is that various social pathologies which had been declining—some for years, decades or even centuries—had a sudden resurgence, as these new and often self-congratulatory ideas triumphed politically and socially in the 1960s, on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, homicide rates, rates of infection with venereal diseases and rates of teenage pregnancies were among the social pathologies whose steep declines over the preceding years were suddenly reversed in the 1960s, as all these pathologies soared to new and tragic heights.

Newsweek asked: “why the upsurge of thuggery among a people renowned for civility?”81 Poverty seems an unlikely reason, if they could afford to travel to other countries to engage in mob thuggery.

Contrary to beliefs that crime is caused by poverty, there is no evidence that there was more poverty in England in the second half of the twentieth century than in the first half. What had changed were the attitudes toward law and order in England, as in the United States and in other places where the new social vision took hold.

Yet in both countries—and others—after the welfare state produced higher living standards for low-income people, the social degeneracy that this was supposed to reduce, rose instead to far higher levels.

In New York, for example, the earlier housing projects screened applicants and screened out people with a history of “alcoholism, irregular work history, single motherhood and lack of furniture.”99 In short, it was judgmental and exclusive—contrary to the taboos of the new social vision that began its triumph in the 1960s. The

Earlier times were by no means idyllic. They had many problems. But common decency was still common.

As of 1960, two-thirds of all black American children were living with both parents. That declined over the years, until only one-third were living with both parents in 1995. Fifty-two percent were living with their mother, 4 percent with their father and 11 percent with neither.106 Among black families in poverty, 85 percent of the children had no father present.107

These have not been simply inevitable consequences of modernization. Modernized Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea have not succumbed to the Western nations’ social vision, either as regards families or educational institutions.

Perhaps the most often cited positive achievements of the 1960s in the United States were the civil rights laws and policies that put an end to racially discriminatory laws and policies in the South, especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Although this has often been credited to the social vision of the political left, in reality a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans than of Congressional Democrats voted for these landmark laws.

the central tenet of the prevailing social vision, that unequal outcomes are due to adverse treatment of the less fortunate. This preconception became a fount of grievance-driven attitudes, emotions and actions—including what has been aptly called “decivilizing” behavior in many contexts.

The prevailing social vision has become so pervasive that aspects of it have become part of the thinking—or at least the consciousness—of even some conservatives and libertarians who oppose most of that vision.

what it has in fact done is replace the reciprocal obligations among members of a family with unilateral and unconditional subsidies of the welfare state that are a legal right and entitlement—freeing the recipient from reciprocal duties, even the duty of common decency.

While “rights” have proliferated, creating a sense of “entitlement” to what others have produced, duties have shrunk. A computer study of the frequency of the word “duty” in British and American books showed its frequency had shrunk to one-third of its frequency in earlier times.124 Shame is another of the concepts that seems to have faded, as shameless behavior

Many people may expect discussions of economic and social disparities to end with “solutions”—usually something that the government can create, institutionalize, staff and pay for with the taxpayers’ money. The goal here is entirely different.

But what they deserve morally is what we do not know and cannot know,

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. This is about the power to preempt other people’s decisions, even if it is called by the more appealing words “social justice.”

In many cases, educators verbally transmute higher capabilities into “privilege.”

Whether you went to a university in France or England, you were taught in Latin, because that is where the knowledge was stored, long after the Roman Empire was gone.

DISPARITIES RECONSIDERED Much attention has been paid to possible reasons why some individuals and groups have traveled farther or faster on the road to achievements, but not nearly as much attention has been paid to the question of why others are not even on that road in the first place.

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,

The Scandinavian countries have so often been used as an example of welfare states which avoided some of the serious problems found in other welfare states that a closer look at Scandinavia may be useful, especially now that the situation in those countries has begun to evolve into circumstances much more like those in other welfare states.

The very attempt to discuss such issues in factual terms has been treated as morally unworthy. 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.

Whatever the pros and cons of the particular goals, these pros and cons are not left to be weighed by those people directly affected, but by third-party surrogate decision-makers who may claim or assume superior knowledge, compassion or whatever.

By contrast, those who are promoting process goals are seeking to have incremental trade-offs made by individuals directly experiencing both the benefits and the costs of their own decisions. Those who are promoting outcome goals are seeking to create categorical priorities chosen by third parties, and imposed by government compulsion on those who directly experience both the benefits and the costs.

Why should the “under-representation” of women in chess clubs or men in nursing be a gap to be closed? The process goal of preventing biased decision-making from arbitrarily closing off opportunities is an understandable goal. Creating a tableau to match the preconceptions of a vision is something very different.

People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-offs they choose, whether as consumers or producers.

Whatever the amount of socially consequential information that is known to surrogate decision-makers, no given decision-maker is likely to know more than a small fraction of what is necessary to know, in order to make the best decisions for a whole society.

The boldness of their presumptions contrasts sharply with their suppression of relevant data61 and the silencing and demonizing of those with different views, instead of answering their arguments.

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.

There is a fundamental asymmetry in burdens of proof. No matter how much empirical evidence of skewed distributions of outcomes is presented as evidence against the invincible fallacy, there is no corresponding burden of proof on the other side to present even a single example of the equal representation of various social groups in any given endeavor.