Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

Late in the eighteenth century, the United States became a pioneer in granting Jews the same legal rights as everyone else, as a result of the Constitution’s general ban against federal laws that discriminate on the basis of religion. France followed suit after the revolution of 1789, and other nations began easing or eliminating various bans on Jews in various times and places during the nineteenth century. In the wake of these developments, Jews began to flow, and then to flood, into universities. By the 1880s, for example, Jews were 30 percent of all the students at Vienna University.41 The net result in the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century, was a relatively sudden proliferation of internationally renowned Jewish figures in many fields, including fields in which Jews were virtually non-existent among the leaders in earlier centuries. From 1870 to 1950, Jews were greatly over-represented among prominent figures in the arts and sciences, relative to their proportion of the population in various European countries and in the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century, with Jews being less than one percent of the world’s population, they received 22 percent of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, 32 percent in medicine and 32 percent in physics.

Conversely, China was for centuries the most technologically advanced nation in the world, especially during what were called the Middle Ages in Europe. The Chinese had cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans.43 A Chinese admiral led a voyage of discovery that was longer than Columbus’ voyage, generations before Columbus’ voyage,44 and in ships far larger and technologically more advanced than Columbus’ ships.45 One crucial decision in fifteenth-century China, however, set in motion a radical change in the relative positions of the Chinese and the Europeans. Like other nations demonstrably more advanced than others, the Chinese regarded those others as innately inferior—as “barbarians,” just as the Romans likewise regarded peoples beyond the domain of the Roman Empire. Convinced by the exploratory voyages of its ships that there was nothing to be learned from other peoples in other places, the government of China decided in 1433 to not only discontinue such voyages, but to forbid such voyages, or the building of ships capable of making such voyages, and to greatly reduce the influence of the outside world on Chinese society.

It is worth examining some of that empirical evidence as to self-sorting, before going on to consider the consequences of third-party sorting or unsorting of other people. The crucial point here is that, when people spontaneously sort themselves, the results are seldom even or random, and are often quite skewed.

In the year 2000, for example, data from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that 44.6 percent of black applicants were turned down for those mortgages, while only 22.3 percent of white applicants were turned down.1 These and similar statistics from other sources set off widespread denunciations of mortgage lenders, and demands that the government “do something” to stop rampant racial discrimination in mortgage lending institutions. The very same report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which showed that blacks were turned down for conventional mortgages at twice the rate for whites, contained other statistics showing that whites were turned down for those same mortgages at a rate nearly twice that for “Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians.” While the rejection rate for white applicants was 22.3 percent, the rejection rate for Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians was 12.4 percent.2 But such data seldom, if ever, saw the light of day in most newspapers or on most television news programs, for which the black-white difference was enough to convince journalists that racial bias was the reason.

The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole.3 In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.4 Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today’s black married couples exempt from slavery and other injustices?

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? Why should the gross “under-representation” of Asian Americans in professional basketball be a “gap” to be closed, if Asian Americans do not have nearly as much interest in that sport as black Americans have? 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.