Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation
By J.E.R. Staddon
Academica,, 2026, 174 pages, $100
Few books in recent memory have demanded as much intellectual courage from their author as John Staddon’s Inevitable Differences. A behavioral scientist of formidable credentials, Staddon enters territory that most academic peers prefer to navigate around, doing so not with ideological bluster but with methodological precision that makes his arguments genuinely difficult to dismiss. The book earns its place in any serious conversation about race, inequality, and the policies constructed to address them, because Staddon applies the same rigorous skepticism to popular narratives on the left as others might apply to those on the right.
Staddon’s central theoretical argument is a sustained critique of Rawlsian philosophy, and the difference principle in particular. John Rawls argued that social and economic inequalities are only justifiable insofar as they benefit the least advantaged members of society. In practice, Staddon shows, this is both empirically unsupportable and incoherent. The principle rests on the assumption that interpersonal utility comparisons can ground redistribution. However, economists have long established that such comparisons are scientifically impossible, and behaviorist psychology reaches the same conclusion by a different route.
A more honest reckoning with what makes individuals and communities succeed might do considerably more good than training sessions, reparations schemes, or the unrealistic principles of left wing thinkers.
Yet, there is a deeper flaw. The difference principle ignores what wealthy people are disproportionately likely to do with incremental wealth: start businesses, fund ventures, take risks that create employment and tax revenue. When Jeff Bezos builds a yacht, progressive critics reach for the language of obscene disparity, even though that vessel employs engineers, craftsmen, and skilled laborers, and its voyages sustain marinas, suppliers, and tourism industries. Luxury spending is not zero-sum extraction from the poor. Applied consistently, the difference principle would equalize wealth downwards, suppressing the excellence and risk-taking that sustains prosperity across the income distribution. Hence, the principle does not merely elevate poverty; it devalues genius.
Indeed, Staddon does not deny the historical reality of racial discrimination in America. What he challenges is whether the framework of systemic racism as currently deployed constitutes a genuine scientific explanation of present-day disparities, or whether it functions as an unfalsifiable ideological posture. The most frequently cited historical example is redlining, whereby mortgage lenders denied credit to residents of predominantly black urban neighborhoods. The damage was real, but urban scholar Alan Mallach has examined the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps central to this narrative and found that the majority of black households historically lived outside the areas designated as hazardous. The causal chain from those maps to contemporary inequality has been substantially overstated.
Staddon also draws on Thomas Sowell’s insight that genuine racial discrimination in lending would manifest as above-average profitability on loans to black borrowers. Over preceding decades, no such pattern appeared, which undermines the claim that discrimination remained systematically operative in mortgage markets long after the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Nowhere is Staddon more forensically effective than in his treatment of the Implicit Association Test, which became the empirical backbone of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry. The IAT treats millisecond differences in reaction time as evidence of unconscious racial bias. Its scores vary wildly between sittings for the same individual, failing basic reliability standards, and it does not reliably predict actual discriminatory behavior, failing validity standards as well. Google’s own summary concedes the IAT cannot indicate whether a person is or is not prejudiced, and a major 2021 academic review confirmed the absence of psychometric evidence for either construct or predictive validity.
The test thrived not because it was scientifically sound but because it answered a pressing ideological need. At a moment when overtly prejudiced behavior had become genuinely rare, the IAT offered a way to discover racism in the colour-blind, turning ordinary whites into unwitting offenders in need of remediation — and sustaining a vast commercial training industry built on an instrument that, by the standards of any other field of psychology, would long ago have been retired.
Staddon does not dispute that slavery was a catastrophic injustice or that its aftermath shaped black American life in lasting ways. What he disputes is the logic connecting these historical facts to a present-day obligation on the part of people who were not party to those crimes. Following John Locke’s own formulation, reparations are owed by the person who caused the harm to the person who suffered it. Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2014 Atlantic essay catalysed the modern reparations movement, quietly omitted the second half of that stipulation.
History’s constraints are not inescapable, and that is precisely why reparations is not a serious policy idea. Research by Alesina and co-workers into the persistence of elite status across revolutionary upheaval reinforces the point. Examining societies that underwent radical redistribution, they found that displaced elites tended to recover their socioeconomic position relatively quickly, regardless of the material assets stripped from them. The reason is that human capital, meaning knowledge, networks, habits of mind, and orientations toward deferred gratification, cannot be confiscated by decree. It reproduces itself in children and grandchildren even when original wealth is gone. This suggests that financial transfers, even large ones, may do far less to alter long-term outcomes than the human capital framework a community carries forward. The same pattern is visible in the trajectory of Jewish and Asian immigrants, who arrived in America with little money, faced substantial discrimination, yet achieved extraordinary rates of educational attainment and entrepreneurial success within a short span of time, not through inherited wealth but through cultivated dispositions.
Furthermore, Staddon addresses the subject that most reliably silences academic discussion: group differences in cognitive test performance. He acknowledges straightforwardly that black Americans score substantially lower on average than white or Asian Americans on IQ tests. Unfortunately, the refusal to investigate this honestly has caused genuine harm to scholarship and to the communities whose outcomes remain poorly understood. Researchers such as Linda Gottfredson and Charles Murray have been subjected to professional destruction based not on the quality of their arguments but on the unacceptability of their conclusions.
Yet Staddon resists despair. Human talent is not reducible to IQ. Success in music, sport, art, oratory, entrepreneurship, and other endeavours do not always require exceptional intelligence. Martin Luther King scored in the lower ranges on the verbal GRE in his youth; a measure that failed to recognize one of the most consequential orators in American history was measuring something real, but not everything. In a free market, food influencers, craftsmen, athletes, and community builders all generate value in ways that owe nothing to the cognitive profiles universities privilege. Diversity of talent is not a problem to be solved through equalization but a resource to be understood and welcomed.
Moreover, the descendants of enslaved Africans who ended up in America are, by the hardest measures of poverty, disease, and political violence, considerably better positioned than those whose ancestors were not transported. For example, the spending power of black Americans is over $2 trillion. Life in America has created so many opportunities for blacks, that their combined spending power is superior to the GDP of several countries.
Inevitable Differences will not please everyone, and it is not designed to do so. The great irony of the equalitarian project, as Staddon charts it, is that in its anxiety to protect certain groups from uncomfortable truths, it has stripped those same groups of the intellectual engagement their situation demands. A more honest reckoning with what makes individuals and communities succeed might do considerably more good than training sessions, reparations schemes, or the unrealistic principles of left wing thinkers. That is Staddon’s wager, and he makes it with a precision his critics will find genuinely difficult to evade.
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