Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Thomas Sowell

Genre:  Non Fiction, Cultural, Public Policy, Economics

192 pages, published March 20, 2018

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Discrimination and Disparities, Thomas Sowell, famed economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, explains why one-factor explanations of economic outcome differences as discrimination, exploitation or genetics are misleading and wrong.  With reams of empirical evidence, Dr. Sowell backs up his analysis demonstrates why so many “mean well” policy fixes have turned out to be counterproductive.

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?”

 

“24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing.”

 

 “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.”

 

“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.”

 

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

 

“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.”

 

“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.”

 

“In seeking to establish the causes of poverty and other social problems among black Americans, for example, sociologist William Julius Wilson pointed to factors such as “the enduring effects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, public school segregation, legalized discrimination, residential segregation, the FHA’s redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1940s and ’50s, the construction of public housing projects in poor black neighborhoods, employer discrimination, and other racial acts and processes.”1 These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be “yes.” Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.2 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? As far back as 1969, young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards, and who also had the same education as young white males, had similar incomes as their white counterparts.5 Do racists care whether blacks have reading material and library cards?”

 

“When John Rawls, in his A Theory of Justice repeatedly referred to outcomes that ‘society’ can ‘arrange,’ these euphemisms finessed aside the plain fact that only government has the power to override millions of people’s mutually agreed transactions terms. Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinction.”

 

“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.”

 

 “Discrimination as an explanation of economic and social disparities may have a similar emotional appeal for many. But we can at least try to treat these and other theories as testable hypotheses. The historic consequences of treating particular beliefs as sacred dogmas, beyond the reach of evidence or logic, should be enough to dissuade us from going down that road again—despite how exciting or emotionally satisfying political dogmas and the crusades resulting from those dogmas can be, or how convenient in sparing us the drudgery and discomfort of having to think through our own beliefs or test them against facts.”

 

“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.”

 

“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”

 

“But, if the wealth of rich capitalists comes from exploitation of poor workers, then we might expect to find that where there are larger concentrations of rich capitalists, we would find correspondingly larger concentrations of poverty.”

 

“Economists tend to rely on “revealed preference” rather than verbal statements. That is, what people do reveals what their values are, better than what they say.”

 

“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.”

 

“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.”

 

“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.”

 

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

 

“In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally. Fernand Braudel”

 

“…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.”

 

“Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time, and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it.

 

“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.”

 

“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.”

 

“The first edition of this book addressed 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.”

My Take

Wow!  I have long heard of Dr. Thomas Sowell and read many of his articles, but had never read any of his books.  I am glad to have finally rectified that by reading Discrimination and Disparities.  He is a brilliant economist and compelling writer who backs up absolutely everything he puts forth with numerous facts and logical arguments.  If you actually cared about helping the poor or disadvantaged rather than just make yourself feel better by advocating an emotionally appealing position, you would do well to read Dr. Sowell and consider his well thought out and empirically supported arguments.  My only critique of the book is that it can be a bit dense at times.  Even so, well worth a read.