Art Carden
– May 20, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research
There is much in Thomas Sowell’s Discrimination and Disparities
that the seasoned Sowell reader will find familiar. Nonetheless, Sowell
brings new insights and a clear perspective to a pressing issue. I
snatched up Discrimination and Disparities when it first
appeared in 2018, and this past Spring I led a couple of students
through an independent study based on the 2019 “Revised and Enlarged”
Edition.
Throughout the book, Sowell evaluates what he calls “the invincible
fallacy.” He starts his preface by pointing out “the seemingly
invincible fallacy that statistical disparities in socioeconomic
outcomes imply either biased treatment of the less fortunate or genetic
deficiencies in the less fortunate.” I think it’s actually two
fallacies. At one end of the spectrum, we have a kind of cultural or
systemic determinism, where the former is deliberate oppression and the
latter is unintentional oppression attributable to systems and
structures constructed on the basis of racist assumptions. Even if
people aren’t consciously and deliberately racist, the invisible dead
hand of the past still guides them toward inequities which may be no
part of their intention. At the other end of the spectrum, we have
racist genetic determinism where one group lags behind another due to
genetic deficiencies.
Sowell, as his longtime readers well know, has little patience for
simplistic, monocausal stories and easy answers. In light of their
ubiquity in academia and politics, Sowell concentrates on explanations
that attribute group differences to bias and discrimination. In addition
to the invincible fallacy, he “takes on other widespread fallacies,
including a non sequitur underlying the prevailing social vision of our
time–namely, that if individual economic benefits are not due solely to
individual merit, there is justification for having politicians
redistribute those benefits.”
Sowell asks us to distinguish some important questions. First, are differences prima facie
evidence of mistreatment? Sowell argues that they are not, and he
explains that we have no reason to think they would be given the
unimaginable diversity of the human experience. He instances geography,
for example, noting the vast majority of tornadoes happen in a small
sliver of North America. In a passage reminiscent of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel,
he points out that the orientation of the Eurasian landmass means that
European and Asian civilizations have been far less isolated from other
civilizations than the peoples of Africa and the Americas.
An issue that should probably get a little more attention is the
difference in the pace with which people developed or adopted written
languages. Written languages emerged in Western Europe before they
emerged in Eastern Europe, and in reading a book of mesoamerican myths
with our younger son I have been struck by how frequently the text has
pointed out that this or that story was only written down a few hundred
years ago by European missionaries. For better or for worse, a written
tradition is a much more efficient way to encode and transmit knowledge
than is an oral tradition. Sowell queries us not to ask whether or not
this should be the case in some cosmic sense. He asks us to accept that it simply is and then asks us to see what that might imply about the group differences we observe today.
Second, there is the question of whether or not invidious, racist
discrimination still exists. The answer is an obvious yes, of course,
but Sowell asks us to look beyond the simple existence theorem or the
mere existence of a residual that cannot be explained by other factors
to a more nuanced analysis asking whether or not discrimination–which
exists, and which he and I do not deny–is the primary or even an
important cause. Armed with a unique historical and international
perspective, Sowell concludes that discrimination is an obstacle but not
an insurmountable one; moreover, he argues that hopes for improvement
cannot be profitably based on the expectation that minorities will
somehow suddenly be better treated by oppressive majorities. As he
argues with reference, for example, to Jews and Asians, these groups
excelled even in the face of discrimination and well before
discrimination started to decline. With respect to the black experience,
Sowell never tires of pointing out that so many of what appear to be
the material gains of the Great Society reflect the continuation of
trends that had started decades before.
Background, home life, and culture, according to Sowell, matter a
lot. He notes near the beginning of the book that the children of
parents with professional occupations hear 2,100 words per hour, the
children of working-class parents hear 1,200, and children on welfare
hear 600–with the added difference that a greater proportion of the
words heard in professional households are encouraging while a greater
proportion of the words heard in welfare households are discouraging.
Sowell thinks it is basically silly to expect the same outcomes from
people raised in such disparate environments; as he writes (p. 18), “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.”
I have come to dislike the “playing field” metaphor.
Sowell does not go into as much detail on this as I would like, but one
of the most pervasive fallacies in discussions of discrimination and
disparities is the zero-sum fallacy, which treats income or output or
wealth as a fixed and unchanging pie. The fallacy infers or assumes–even
if it does not explicitly state–that the child of a professional
household hearing 2,100 words per hour and going on to a successful
career as a doctor or lawyer is somehow taking something away from the
child of the welfare household who only hears 600 words per hour and
ends up in a much lower-status, much lower-income occupation. It has
never been clear to me that we should care as much as we do about
relative position rather than absolute position and opportunities to
improve.
Sowell distinguishes two kinds of discrimination. “Discrimination I”
is the kind of discrimination we practice all the time, which is trying
to find out whether or not someone can actually do a job–as Sowell puts
it, “ability to discern differences in the qualities of people and
things.” “Discrimination IA” is discrimination based on information
already obtained or less costly to acquire. A band looking for a new
guitar player might hold auditions and discriminate against aspirants
who only know two or three chords. “Discrimination IB” is discrimination
based on information that might be costly to obtain and where,
therefore, the discriminator relies on knowledge about group
differences. A death metal band looking for a guitar player is likely to
advertise in guitar shops and guitar magazines on the reasonable belief
that people who frequent guitar shops and who read guitar magazines are
more likely to be technically proficient. Meanwhile, the band is not as
likely to advertise at a fabric store or quilting convention for what I
hope are obvious reasons: there’s probably not a lot of overlap between
quilters and death metal enthusiasts.
Discrimination II, meanwhile, is the kind of discrimination that
pretty much everyone agrees is immoral. This is purely taste-based
discrimination, what Sowell calls “arbitrary aversions or animosities to
individuals of a particular race or sex.” Does Discrimination II exist?
Undoubtedly. Does it explain the lion’s share of the discrepancies we
wish to explain? Sowell grants that there is at least a residual that
can be explained by Discrimination II, but he doesn’t think it is the
primary cause.
Discrimination and Disparities is a lesson in being careful
with numbers, being careful with words, and being careful with visions.
Sowell points out that a lot of what he calls elsewhere “A-ha!”
statistics–statistics that allegedly show something is amiss–crumble
under additional scrutiny. There is a gap between the median incomes of
Japanese-Americans and Mexican-Americans, for example, but as Sowell
points out, the median age of Japanese-Americans is 51 while the median
age of Mexican-Americans is 27. It should surprise us if there isn’t
a large gap between a population centered around those in their peak
earning years and a population centered around people who are not that
far into their adult lives.
Furthermore, as Sowell argues, a lot of things people attribute to
Discrimination II are far more likely the products of Discrimination IB
or even Discrimination IA. He offers the example of prices at grocery
stores in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. The fact that prices at
these stores are higher than prices in the suburbs is sometimes offered
as evidence that the poor are being treated unfairly. Sowell argues,
however, that there are far more plausible explanations. First, stores
that operate on the edge of town like Walmart, Target, and Costco can
turn over their inventory more frequently. Second, he points out that it
likely costs less to deliver 100 boxes of cereal to Walmart in the
suburbs than to deliver ten boxes of cereal to ten different stores in
town. Third, high prices reflect a risk premium for doing business in
high-crime neighborhoods. As Sowell points out, the critics rarely
acknowledge that while urban stores might charge higher prices, they
earn lower profits.
Sowell also urges readers to pay particular attention to how people
use words like “diversity,” “opportunity,” “access,” and “privilege.”
Sowell is incredulous at statements claiming, for example, that members
of a persecuted Chinese minority in Malaysia are “privileged” because of
what they have achieved. In an effort to explain disproportionate Asian
achievement in the United States, Sowell notes that at least one
plausible explanation is data suggesting that Asians spend more time
studying than others do.
Discrimination and Disparities is another in a long line of Sowell works explaining the importance (and stubbornness) of visions. In Intellectuals and Society,
Sowell argued that a lot of the intellectuals’ arguments about the
“root causes” of crime and other elements of their vision “are not
treated as hypotheses to be tested but as axioms to be defended.” He
offers, for example, Karl Marx’s use of exploitation in Capital:
It “was at no point…treated as a testable hypothesis. Exploitation was
instead the foundation assumption on which an elaborate intellectual
superstructure was built–and that proved to be a foundation of
quicksand” (p. 27). He notes that the “surrogate decision-makers” who
wish to organize society “often pay no price for being wrong, no matter how wrong or how catastrophic the consequences for those whose decisions they have preempted.” As opposed to the outcome goals of the aspiring surrogates, Sowell emphasizes processes: “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.” Maybe
a better world is out there, but Sowell doubts that it will be
discovered or designed by people who have little to no skin in the game.
Like a lot of the other work he has produced in the last several years, Discrimination and Disparities
is classic Sowell, and people who are already familiar with his work
will find a lot of claims he has made elsewhere. However, these will
likely be news to people who haven’t already read Intellectuals and Society, Intellectuals and Race, or Affirmative Action Around the World. Discrimination and Disparities is an important contribution with something to say to everyone who wants to understand the debate.
I am grateful to Andrew Clark and Sydney Rennich, both
participants in Samford’s Brock Scholars Program, for hours of
discussion of Discrimination and Disparities during our Spring 2021 Oxbridge Tutorial.
Art Carden is a Senior Fellow at the
American Institute for Economic Research. He is also an Associate
Professor of Economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and a
Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.
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