Discrimination and Disparities Quotes

“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.' Yet whose fault are demographic differences, geographic differences, birth order differences or cultural differences that evolved over the centuries before any of us were born?”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Wrongs abound in times and places around the world - inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of virtually every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the word as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“If you are not prepared to undergo the extended toil and sacrifice that some particular endeavor may require, then despite having all the native potential for great success in that endeavor, and with all the doors of opportunity wide open, you can nevertheless become an utter failure.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Statistics compiled from what people say may be worse than useless, if they lead to a belief that those numbers convey a reality that can be relied on for serious decision-making about social policies.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the world as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day?”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Engels said: “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“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-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“The time is long overdue to count the costs of runaway rhetoric and heedless accusations - especially since most of the costs, including the high social cost of a breakdown of law and order, are paid by vulnerable people for whose benefit such rhetoric and such accusations are ostensibly being made.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“...lifelong benefits [to students who learn to think for themselves] include a healthy skepticism towards political slogans and a healthy desire to check out the facts before repeating rhetoric on other issues.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,”20 even though their ancestors arrived as slaves. Achievements are a threat to a social vision and a political agenda based on that vision, and so are often kept off the hypothesis-testing agenda by adherents of that vision. Redefining words is a key part of that process. Worse yet, children who are currently being raised with the kinds of values, discipline and work habits that are likely to make them valuable contributors to society, and a source of pride to themselves and to those who raised them, are called “privileged,” and are taught in schools to feel guilty when other children are being raised with values, behavior and habits that are likely to leave them few options as adults, other than to live at the expense of other people, whether via the welfare state or through a life of crime, or both.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Much of the difference between those who promote process goals and those who promote outcome goals seems to reflect differences in how they conceive what knowledge is, and whether relevant knowledge is concentrated in a few or widely diffused among the many. Such knowledge includes knowledge of costs. 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. That can be a much more serious problem when prescribing outcome goals than when prescribing process goals.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“In a sense, life is a relay race, and each of us receives the baton at a time and place over which we have no control. Our parents, our birth order, our country and our surrounding culture have already been predetermined for us. Some of the prerequisites for achievement can be affected later by individual choices or social policies, but by no means 100 percent in most cases, much less in all cases. No human being and no human institution has either sufficient knowledge or sufficient power for that. More important, we have zero control over the past—and, as was said, long ago, “We do not live in the past, but the past in us.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“The phrase “white privilege” is not the only verbal sleight of hand used to make achievement differences vanish. 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.”19 The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,”20 even though their ancestors arrived as slaves.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

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

“Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by 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.64 But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.65”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences—such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks—cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Despite the inability to confiscate and redistribute human capital, nevertheless human capital is - ironically - one of the few things that can be spread to others without those with it having any less remaining for themselves. But one of the biggest obstacles to this happening is the 'social justice' vision, in which the fundamental problem of the less fortunate is not an absence of sufficient human capital, but the presence of other people's malevolence. For some, abandoning that vision would mean abandoning a moral melodrama, starring themselves as crusaders against the forces of evil. How many are prepared to give up all that - with all its psychic, political and other rewards - is an open question.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Most notable achievements involve multiple factors—beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, and a willingness to do what it takes, without which all the native ability in an individual and all the opportunity in a society mean nothing, just as the desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“When there are major disparities in outcomes among men who are all in the top one percent in IQ, and among siblings raised under the same roof, as well as discriminated-against minorities being more economically successful than those discriminating against them—as has happened in the Ottoman Empire, many Southeast Asian countries, and much of Eastern Europe, for example—the insistence on believing that human biases are the primary cause of disparities in outcomes ignores a vast range of evidence to the contrary.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“Certainly there have been many examples of times and places where money or other physical wealth has been confiscated by governments or looted by mobs. But physical wealth is a product of human capital—the knowledge, skills, talents and other qualities that exist inside the heads of people—where it cannot be confiscated.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“People who admit that race-based “affirmative action” has been counterproductive, for example, nevertheless advocate affirmative action based on poverty or some other socioeconomic criteria.59 The fact that their policies have already inflicted decades of racial strife, polarization and lasting bitterness—among both the ostensible beneficiaries and those who resent the preferences given to the ostensible beneficiaries60—leaves those who orchestrated this policy undaunted in seeking to continue exercising their preemptive prerogatives. 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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“In other words, because no individual was solely responsible for that individual’s benefits, therefore politicians, bureaucrats and judges—that is, the government, Rawls’ “society” which can “arrange” things—are to preempt decisions and redistribute benefits, presumably in a more moral way. But no burden of proof of either superior morality or superior efficiency in government is required for this preemption. The brazen non sequitur—that if “you didn’t build that”58 it is something the government is justified in taking over—is a fitting companion to the invincible fallacy that people tend to have comparable outcomes in the absence of biased treatment.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities

“The feedback from process goals is inescapable for those who directly experience the costs and benefits of their own decisions, while adverse experiences for those directly affected can be ignored, rationalized or obfuscated by third-party surrogates reluctant to admit it to others, and perhaps even to themselves, when their decisions have made matters worse.”
― Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities