Sowell on Discrimination and Disparities

Clear thinking instead of reckless emoting is needed here:

Why do some people, or groups, or nations, seem to do better than others in various ways? The standard leftist answer is simple: there are two groups of people in the world, the oppressed and the oppressors. If one group seems to lag behind others, they are obviously the victims, and another group is exploiting and harming them.

Thus all Blacks today in America are kept down by discrimination and the like. All whites are obviously the villains, and only revolutionary social upheaval can set things right. That is the usual woke response to all social, economic and political disparities.

But the truth us, these disparities come about for all sort of reasons. American Black economist Thomas Sowell is one clear thinker who has discussed this in detail. He has penned dozens of vitally important books that dissect and dismantle the reigning leftist orthodoxies.

As he had put it back in 2003:

Virtually everybody is worse off than somebody else, if only in one dimension, so there are nearly unlimited opportunities to pander to people’s sense of injustice, victimhood and entitlement. Any of us can think back to situations where we got the short end of the stick. On the other hand, we may not be quite as quick to recall the times when we got more than we deserved — and neither politicians nor the intelligentsia have anything to gain by reminding us of that. https://capitalismmagazine.com/2003/02/hard-times-for-envy/   

One of his more recent volumes that is especially worth considering on this is Discrimination and Disparities (Basic Books, 2018, 2019). In the first chapter of the book Sowell looks at disparities and prerequisites. He writes:

[W]e should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites—which is to say, most meaningful endeavors. And if these are indeed prerequisites, then having four out of five prerequisites means nothing, as far as successful outcomes are concerned. In other words, people with most of the prerequisites for success may nevertheless be utter failures.

 

Whether a prerequisite that is missing is complex or simple, its absence can negate the effect of all the other prerequisites that are present. If you are illiterate, for example, all the other good qualities that you may have in abundance count for nothing in many, if not most, careers today. As late as 1950, more than 40 percent of the world’s adult population were still illiterate. That included more than half the adults in Asia and Africa.

 

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.

 

Not all the prerequisites are necessarily within the sole control of the individual who has them or does not have them. Even extraordinary capacities in one or some of the prerequisites can mean nothing in the ultimate outcome. (pp. 2-3)

Sowell looks at research and various studies on this, and then offers a down-to-earth case in point:

There may be more or less of an approximation of a normal bell curve, as far as how many people have any particular prerequisite, and yet a very skewed distribution of success, based on having all the prerequisites simultaneously. This is not only true in theory, empirical evidence suggests that it is true also in practice.

 

In golf, for example, there is something of an approximation of a bell curve when it comes to the distribution of such examples of individual skills as the number of putts per round of golf, or driving distances off the tee. And yet there is a grossly skewed distribution of outcomes requiring a whole range of golf skills—namely, winning Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) tournaments.

 

Most professional golfers have never won a single PGA tournament in their entire lives, while just three golfers—Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods—won more than 200 PGA tournaments between them. Moreover, there are similarly skewed distributions of peak achievements in baseball and tennis, among other endeavors.

 

Given multiple prerequisites for many human endeavors, we should not be surprised if economic or social advances are not evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations at any given time. (p. 4)

In Chapter 6 he looks at “Social Visions and Human Consequences”. A few more quotes are worth offering here.

While the welfare state helped raise the material standards of living of low-income people, the social vision that created the welfare state also featured an undermining of behavioral standards and moral values. In New York, for example, the early housing projects screened applicants and screened out people with a history of “alcoholism, irregular work history, single motherhood and lack of furniture.” In short, it was judgmental and exclusive – contrary to the taboos of the new social vision that began its triumph in the 1960s. The New York City Housing Authority, for example, loosened its selectivity in 1968, under immense pressure from the federal government and social justice activists.

 

In the world of words, the “social justice” vision had triumphed, far beyond New York or even the United States. But, in the world of reality, there have been consequences unlike anything envisioned by “social justice” advocates – and the consequences have extended far beyond public housing projects, which are only one of the many places where social degeneration became painfully visible. However commendable the intentions, the actual consequences of that vision have been toxic, and especially so for those who were expected to be its principal beneficiaries. (p. 178)

Fatherless children has been just one of the results:

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. Among black families in poverty, 85 percent of the children had no father present.

 

Although white American families did not have nearly as high a proportion of children living with one parent as blacks had in 1960, nevertheless the 1960s marked a sharp upturn in white children born to unwed mothers, to levels several times what they had been in the decades preceding the 1960s. By 2008, nearly 30 percent of white children were born to single mothers. Among white women with less than 12 years of education, more than 60 percent of their children were born to single mothers in the first decade of the twenty-first century. (p. 180)

Sowell continues:

Seldom does any era in human history have exclusively negative or exclusively positive trends. 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. But facts that do not fit the prevailing vision tend to be simply ignored in much of the media and academia.

 

However important civil rights laws and policies were for securing basic legal rights, they were not the basis for the economic rise of blacks. Poverty among blacks declined far more in the two decades before 1960 than in the two decades afterwards.

 

Putting aside arbitrary changes in the official definition of poverty, and using instead of fixed definition of poverty-level real income in purchasing power terms, the proportion of the black American population living below the poverty line declined during the 1940s and 1950s, at a rate that slackened as the 1960s began and then temporarily stopped declining during the decade of the 1970s.

 

Much of the economic progress among American blacks in the 1960s was a continuation of trends from earlier decades, usually at no increased rate and often at a lower rate.

 

In contrast with this economic progress among American blacks that continued, social retrogression set in during the 1960s, in the form of massive urban riots that spread across the country. Many of the same kinds of social retrogressions took place among the low-income whites in England during the second half of the twentieth century.

 

Much of the social retrogression that took place on both sides of the Atlantic is traceable to 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.

 

Despite what was, at best, a mixed record of outcomes from the new social vision, and the new laws and policies that flowed from that vision, the image of the 1960s has been celebrated in the media, in politics and in academia, especially by those who took part in its social crusades…. (pp. 181-182)

This book, like so many of his other crucial volumes, helps put to rest all the myths and nonsense about disparities and discrimination. You really should get it.

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