-
Looking Back — And Forward
May 15, 2013 | 19 comments
-
Lies About Libya
May 14, 2013 | 80 comments
-
Bouncing Ball Politics
May 8, 2013 | 16 comments
-
Words That Replace Thought
May 7, 2013 | 57 comments
-
Is Thinking Obsolete?
May 1, 2013 | 36 comments
The Public Policy
Intellectuals and Race: Part II
“Disparate impact” has not basis in historical understanding.
Once we recognize that large differences in achievement among races, nations, and civilizations have been the rule, not the exception, throughout recorded history, there is at least some hope of rational thought — and perhaps even some constructive efforts to help everyone advance.
Even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, “We owe London to Rome” — an acknowledgement that Roman conquerors created Britain’s most famous city, at a time when the ancient Britons were incapable of doing so themselves.
No one who saw the illiterate and backward tribal Britons of that era was likely to imagine that someday the British would create an empire vastly larger than the Roman Empire — one encompassing one fourth of the land area of the earth and one fourth of the human beings on the planet.
History has many dramatic examples of the rise and fall of peoples and nations, for a wide range of known and unknown reasons. What history does not have is what is so often assumed as a norm today, equality of group achievements at a given point in time.
Roman conquests had historic repercussions for centuries after the Roman Empire had fallen. Among the legacies of Roman civilization were Roman letters, which produced written versions of Western European languages, centuries before Eastern European languages became literate. This was one of many reasons why Western Europe became more advanced than Eastern Europe, economically, educationally, and technologically.
Meanwhile, the achievements in other civilizations — whether in China or in the Middle East — surged ahead of achievements in the West, though China and the Middle East later lost their leads.
There are too many zig-zags in history to believe that some single over-riding factor explains all, or even most, of what happened, either then or now. But what seldom, if ever, happened were equal achievements by different peoples at the same time.
Yet today we have bean counters in Washington turning out statistics that are solemnly presented in courts of law to claim that, if the numbers are not more or less the same for everybody, that proves that somebody did somebody else wrong.
If blacks have different occupational patterns or different other patterns than whites, that arouses great suspicions among the bean counters — even though different groups of whites have long had different patterns from each other.
When American soldiers were given mental tests during the First World War, those men of German ancestry scored higher than those of Irish ancestry, who scored higher than those who were Jewish. Mental test pioneer Carl Brigham said that the army mental test results tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”
An alternative explanation is that most German immigrants came to the United States decades before most Irish immigrants, who came here decades before most Jewish immigrants. Years later, Brigham admitted that many of the more recent immigrants grew up in homes where English was not the spoken language and that his earlier conclusions were, in his own words, “without foundation.”
By this time, Jews were scoring above the national average on mental tests, instead of below. Disparities among groups are not set in stone, in this or in many other things. But blanket equality of outcomes is seldom seen at any given time either, whether in work skills or rates of alcoholism or other differences among the various groups lumped together as “whites.”
Why then do statistical differences between blacks and whites set off such dogmatic assertions — and “disparate impact” lawsuits — when it is common for different groups to meet employment or other standards to different degrees?
One reason is that “disparate impact” lawsuits require nothing more than statistical differences to lead to verdicts, or out of court settlements, in the millions of dollars. And the reason that is so is that so many people have bought the unsubstantiated assumption that there is something strange and sinister when different peoples have different achievements.
Centuries of recorded history say otherwise. But who cares about history anymore? Certainly not as much as they care about the millions of dollars available from “disparate impact” lawsuits.
About the Author
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (12) | Leave a comment
More Articles by Thomas Sowell
More Articles From The Public Policy
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/03/13/intellectuals-and-race-part-ii
Follow us:
ADVERTISEMENT
Current Issue
- Inside the Gates of Eden
- The End of the Castros?
- Ailes: A Voice for the Silent Majority
SPONSORED LINKS
FLASHBACK TO: 1995
-
Pope Culture
A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
-
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
-
Dames at Sea
-
In the Absence of Guns
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
-
The Metaphysical Martini
-
Counting the Costs of Clintonism
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
-
Chuck McHagel
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
-
The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
-
It’s the Best Time of the Year
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
-
The Bush Crack-Up
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
Clip of the Day
ADVERTISEMENT
Von Mises Jr| 3.13.13 @ 8:18AM
Statistical averages are intended for large samples. If you flip a balanced coin one-thousand times, you will get near 500 heads and 500 tails. If you get 520 v 480, your variance is 4%. But if you flip it ten times and you get 6 v 4, your variance is 20% (Excuse me if I do not use the correct terminology since it has been a few years out of the classroom).
Likewise, when you look at say the chance of getting three heads in a row (50% x 50% x 50%) you get 12.5% probability. But if you flip two heads and want to calculate the probability of getting a third, it is 50%.
So when a company has 50 or 500 employees, the distribution does not correlate closely to a population of 320M, nor does your next hire if based on merit have much to do with distributions at all.
But this is called "critical thinking" and taught in Business Graduate School classes, not to mathematically ignorant lawyers and race hustlers. As Dear Leader said about abortion, it is above his pay grade.
JD| 3.13.13 @ 11:23AM
A fine start, and we could go on for quite a while.
In a population where 12% of members are black, if we assume that talent is not inherently tied to race at all, then hire the best 100 employees for a given job, how many will be black?
The odds that the number is 12 are higher than the odds that the number is any other number than 12. However, the odds that the number is 12 are far below 50%. The odds that the number is not 12 - determined by summing the odds of the number being 0-11 and 13-100 - are far greater than 50%. Therefore, it is very wrong to declare that racism must be in play if the number is not 12!
It's just like the fact that flipping a coin 10 times and getting heads 4 times doesn't prove that the coin is biased towards tails.
Not only do Leftists demand that we share the terribly unscientific assumption that skin color doesn't correlate with any capability attributes in genetics (despite the clear clustering of basketball ability in people with dark skin), but they also get this basic understanding of statistics wrong.
And they double down on their wrongness by being blatantly inconsistent in their beliefs, as we all know that neither they nor their policies (Affirmative Action) care one whit about cases where blacks are OVER-represented.
Von Mises Jr| 3.13.13 @ 12:08PM
We have had 44 men and no women as President. Should the next 44 Presidents be women?
If you look at it the other way around, we have had one black President and he is a Marxist. Do we now need to elect Allen West to make it one Marxist and one Constitutionalist black President?
Is it not Rubio or Cruz turn since we have had no Hispanic Presidents?
JohnLeo| 3.13.13 @ 3:11PM
And here I thought all along that the National Basketball Association was a racist organization. Shows ya how much I know.
Von Mises Jr| 3.13.13 @ 3:43PM
I propose that for "fairness" the NBA start a midget team with Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Elena Kagan, Sotomayor and Rambo Rahm.
They can spot them "affirmative action" height points perhaps 100 per game just to make it fair.
Terrible Ted| 3.13.13 @ 11:49PM
I think they would call that team the mental midgets, at least in the case of Krugman.
AlanAnti-RoveCheneyBrooks | 3.13.13 @ 1:26PM
AlanAnti-RoveCheneyBrooks | 3.12.13 @ 3:00PM
Jim, Bob,
Sowell used the military to get to his position. Affirmative Action or the military: it is all about differing statisms; individuals using the state any way they can to get ahead.
----------------
Jim Adcox| 3.12.13 @ 4:40PM
I see but do not concede your point. Do you equate Affirmative Action with military service?
-----------------
The answer is Yes: the funds come from the same place; the purpose is to get ahead by stepping on people in other countries.
cicero| 3.13.13 @ 10:33AM
"But who cares about history..." But where do they actually teach history in our schools today? They have been teaching "social studies" instead for about the past 40 years. That is easier, and does not require, nor encourage, critical thinking. A read of Dr. Williams column today in the local newpaper (Macomb Daily) may give somewhat of an explanation. Unless and until we take back our educational system, and once again teach our young the history of how we got here, we will be subject to the silliness of equality of outcome. Dr. Tom, keep beating the drum of reason.
C. Vernon Crisler | 3.13.13 @ 11:31AM
Yes, there are differences between individuals and races. That's why governments should only enforce formal equality, not material equality.
JD| 3.13.13 @ 1:20PM
No, governments shouldn't attempt to enforce ANY equality. There isn't even credible evidence that equality is a merit!
Governments should protect natural rights. "Equal treatment", if you must use the E word.
C. Vernon Crisler | 3.13.13 @ 3:54PM
That's what formal equality is JD, protecting everyone's natural rights.
Dave Williams| 3.13.13 @ 2:19PM
It's not race, it's culture. ANY people brought up to believe their highest aspiration is to suck off the government's tits will become dependent, lazy, and stupid -- hardly worth being called human at all. See the collected works of Theodore Dalrymple for what liberalism has done to the lower orders in Britain....and be very, VERY afraid of the strong turn the US has taken in that direction in the last 5 years.