Consequences Matter: Thomas Sowell on “Social Justice Fallacies” | Uncommon Knowledge

two events in the life of today's guest he just turned 93 and he just published his latest book Thomas Seoul on uncommon knowledge now [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson after Growing Up In Harlem Thomas Saul served in the United States Marine Corps then received an undergraduate degree from Harvard a master's degree from Colombia a doctorate from the University of Chicago after teaching at universities that included Cornell Brandeis and UCLA Dr Soul became a fellow at the Hoover institution in 1977 Thomas Sowell is the author of some 40 books including his newest volume social justice fallacies and this past spring he turned 93. Tom welcome back to uncommon knowledge oh good being here you know I can't help thinking reading your background if only you'd been a little bit more industrious you might have been able to make a name for yourself social justice Dr Martin Luther King in 1963 quote I have a dream [Applause] [Music] they live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character I have a dream [Applause] and you write Dr King's message was equal opportunity for individuals regardless of race in the years that followed the goal changed to equal outcomes for groups what now Rose to dominance was the social justice agenda if the social justice those backing the social justice agenda could have everything they wanted what would the country look like uh we'd be killing each other all right can you give me intermediate steps in other words what is the social justice agenda what do they want they want everybody to have have we equal equal outcomes or as close as they can get to it unfortunately you don't have you don't have the preconditions for that even in the same family I one of the examples I I use in the book is uh among among five child families right uh the National Merit finalist is the firstborn just over half the time that is more often than the other four siblings combined this if the fifth born is six percent of the time and so there was even where you have almost ideal conditions they're born to the same parents raised under the same roof and they are not the same because all kinds of things matter including birth order oh absolutely absolutely all right let's you you take on various fallacies here let's take on a couple of them the equal chances fallacy even in a society I'm quoting you social justice fallacies even in a society with equal opportunity people from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things in American Sports blacks are very overrepresented in professional basketball whites in professional tennis and Hispanics in Major League Baseball why is that telling because the the implicit assumption you know sometimes explicit assumption is that in a world where everything was fair everyone's treated fairly you would have uh things would be representative of the population the demographics as a whole and all these various activities right imagine a black kid born in Harlem and he's born with a a body identical that of Rudolph the ray of the great of a ballet dancer there's the odds are a thousand to one that he'll become a ballet dancer much less another Rudolph the redo I mean he would be uh looked at strangely by all his uh friends in the neighborhood if he even wanted to do that what you mean he wouldn't even think about it right right right right right so you mean to say that when you tried out for the you tried out for the pitching position in the Brooklyn Dodgers and they didn't hire you you were not being discriminated against actually I was trying out off the first base on the real real reason I messed up was that my position was Senate field but in order to be a good center field I need hours and hours of practice and and it was it was a very bad spring I got very little practice and so I figured by at least I I I won't go out and make an idiot of myself and send his feelings I've made an idiot of myself at first base all right um chess pieces fallacy the chess piece is fallacy explain that one well Adam Smith uh had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who imagined that they can uh control a whole society with the ease with which one puts uh puts chess pieces where you want them on on a chessboard and so there's this notion of this inert mass of people down there and then the wonderfully brilliant people at the top who ought to be telling them what to do and there's no thought that uh first of all those times don't even notice the people's uh individual conditions who are very different from themselves and when they try to help they make things so they can make things disastrous you discuss the theory of Justice this is under knowledge yes a theory of Justice which is in certain circles certain circles every University in the country the philosophy Department political science you'll get it in sociology this is the big book oh yeah on social justice written by John Rawls philosopher at Harvard quote I'm quoting you Tom Rawls refers to things that Society should arrange you quote him a range that's the word he uses and then Tom Soul says interior decorators arrange governments compel it is not a subtle distinction explain that well if you're going to try to get some kind of result you have to specify through what kinds of mechanism you expect to get that result and different mechanisms whether it's the government the market uh the Red Cross whatever they have their own individual things that they're good at and not so good at and so you can't get the social justice result that you want unless you have the kind of uh institution that's likely to produce that result politics is not that kind of institution and yet they all implicitly rely on government yes redistribution of wealth uh adjusting using legal regimes to adjust the proportions of various groups that get certain jobs they all rely on government and what's distinctive about government is it's the one institution that can send you to jail yes all right and that's the point is that's dangerous we shouldn't want more government more hands in the power of the politician yeah one of the real one of the real problems is that you have people making decisions for which they pay no price when they're wrong no matter how high a price other people pay and right now the the the homicide rates are beyond anything that were around let's say uh prior to 1960 uh and I mentioned in 1960 in this case uh because that's when the Supreme Court remade the criminal law they discovered rights in the Constitution that no one had noticed for over a century uh and and they were impervious to evidence so contrast your neighborhood in Harlem when you were in eight and nine and ten-year-old boy with what we see in neighborhoods in Chicago today oh my gosh people are astonished when I tell them I grew up in Harlem I can't remember ever hearing a gunshot and then I I I've chat with my relatives who grew up in similar neighborhoods in Washington and down in North Carolina they never heard us gunshot when they were growing up uh you know I remember going back to Harlem some years ago to do some research at High School and I looked out the window and there's this park there near the high school and I mentioned in passing that when I uh when I when I when I lived in Harlem I was as a kid I would take my dog for a walk in that Park and look so hard I came over the students faces people have no idea how much has retrogressed over the years uh in the black community and and how much of what progress has been made has not been made by politicians or by charismatic leaders uh if you one of the things that drives me crazy are people who uh cite Trends over time without deciding where they're going to start the the the the the the the time period for example as I said all sorts of wonderful things happened in the 1960s and Beyond uh and especially for the minorities and the poor and so forth uh so I what I did I said no well you care if you if you start the data in 1960 we don't know how much how much uh was a result of that and how much the results of other things that also applies in other things though for example one one simple one uh many people say you know we're off native wrote this book in 1965 and as about the automobile safety and so on as a result there were laws that by the government and the and the the death rates went down after that which is true in itself but the death rate went down at a far higher rate prior to his writing the book and this was the continuation of of a trend that went back uh another 20 or 30 years because the market because car manufacturers when it came right down to it had very little interest in getting people killed yeah you killed off your customers your chances are you won't sell as many cars right the big fallacy at least I take this is in many ways the heart of the book racial fallacies now in this section in this chapter on racial fallacies you begin almost all of this book is addressed to the current moment but in racial fallacies you start by going back about a hundred years yes to lay out the progressive position in the 1910s and 20s in and for some years afterward I'm quoting you in addressing the massive increase in immigration from eastern and southern Europe This begins this massive increase in Immigration begins toward the end of the 19th century and Carries On Through the 1920s and addressing the massive increase in Immigration progressives claimed that these new immigrants were inherently genetically and therefore permanently inferior so your argument is that a century or so ago progressives believed roughly the same about polish and Italian immigrants that whites in the South had long believed about black oh yes all right social justice fallacies I'm going to read a quotation that I'd like you to take us through this material with the passing years more and more evidence undermined the conclusion of the genetic determinists Jews who had scored low on the 1917 Army mental test began to score above the national average on various tests as they became a more English-speaking group a study showed that black orphans black orphans raised by white families had significantly higher average IQs than other black children close quote so in the century since this you call them genetic determinants which is one way of putting they were racist they believed that some races were permanently inferior yes and and should be eliminated and we've learned that's total nonsense but even more than that we've learned that IQ is malleable is that correct I'm not sure what you mean by malware well that that is to say that this ranking of or the the rat or the ranking changes are stupid in 1917 because they score badly on tests but they started yeah on tests written in English written tests written in English Okay and people who who spoke English did better when those deaths or that or that or that blacks have a certain fixed IQ ranking and yeah and then you have black orphans raised by white families in other words a different cultural or uh yeah but even before that's that's 30 wasn't done until 1976. but even as of the time World War One uh the data show that black soldiers scored below white white soldiers uh and this is one of the reason reasons so if you're you need people with contrary opinions to to be able to be free to attack things uh the people who believe that that this this is genetically determined they said that's it that's the answer and they moved on some other people said let's look at it more closely they discovered that black soldiers from New York uh uh New York Pennsylvania Ohio uh one or two other states scored higher than white soldiers from Mississippi Alabama etc etc and as I mentioned in the book uh people genes do not change when they cross a state line uh uh uh the problem is when you have people who are crusading for some idea whatever the idea is and they find some data that fits what they believe that's the end of the story as far as they concerned which is fine if there are other people with with contrary ideas who will look closer for something that goes the other way and then get listened to yes yes by the way you describe in the book The Flynn effect yeah discovered by your your friend the late James Flynn can you describe that that's fascinating well the the idea of the genetic determinist is that you had to uh rid the country of these these uh inferior races because otherwise the national IQ would go would go down over time because the poorer people had more children than the Richer people uh and so that that went on for here again the IQ Data there that that the genetic determinants were relying on looked like it supported what they said but Jim flan decided that uh well first of all you have to understand what an IQ score how an IQ score has arrived at whatever number of uh questions answered correctly is the average at a given time uh is given the number 100. because uh when you do these tests especially with children uh if a six-year-old child uh scores uh the same as a 12 year old child uh uh that means the 60 year old child is either much brighter than usual or the 12 year old child is a lot less than the usual and so you compare the all the six-year-old children and whatever the six-year-old children how many questions they answer correctly that becomes 100 and then similarly for all the other ages right so you can do that and at an adulthood at some point you simply say adult and non-adult all right now that sounds very very innocent in itself but what what happens when people start answering more questions correctly than before the Next Generation he answers more questions now the now the number of questions answered by the second generation becomes 100. and so over time as more and more people black white and whatever are answering more and more questions correctly uh the the the tests are renormed so so having an IQ of 100 uh in 1925 is not the same thing as having IQ of 100 in 1935 or 1950 and this is exactly what was going on yeah people of all different kinds were were yes and it's smarter crudely but once Jim Flynn decide to go back to the raw data not just take take the take the IQs how many how many questions was this and he just he discovers that the number of questions being answered correctly was increasing by large amounts roughly one statistical uh uh deviation deviation right uh uh from from one generation to the next which is big yes and and so uh the the number the number of questions that the blacks were answering you know I'm saying around 2000 uh uh and having an IQ of 85 would have been an IQ of 104 back in 1947. and so all this information was was being uh ignored because they people took the IQ test as if that was a fixed num fixed number of uh questions I answered correctly and so you take the lid off that one the Flynn of the Flynn effect shows that the opposite of what's Happening that instead of the national iQ going down it was going up it was going up and so we have this fascinating discovery that somehow or other the conditions of Modern Life that requires more abstract thinking somehow it's bringing in um uh the whole group of girls right the whole group is rising all right all right from the progressive position a century ago to the progressive position today racial assertions have ranged from the genetic determinism that we just discussed which proclaimed that race is everything as an explanation of group differences to the opposite view that racism is the primary explanation of group differences yes how did this happen oh it happened because a lot of people arrived at that same conclusion and they had IQ High IQs and phds and that was the end of the story as well as far as many people were concerned all right I mean a high IQ and low information is a very dangerous combination I I have to sorry but you once told me I'm talking to a Harvard Man of course I'm very conscious of this and you once told me Peter the main advantage of earning a Harvard degree is that you never again in all your life to have to be intimidated by anyone who has a Harvard degree listen Tom for the most as I read this book for the most part it's objective it's it's objective throughout it's calm it's analytical but when you take on this modern Progressive position that racism accounts for anything there are passages in which you're angry I felt that there are passages in which there's emotion that is very close to this so let me just read a little bit okay median black family income has been lower than median white family income for Generations but the median per capita income of Asian groups is more than fifteen thousand a year higher than the media per capita income of white Americans is this the white supremacy we're so often warned about for more than a quarter of a century in no year as the annual poverty rate of Black married couple families married couple families been as high as 10 percent and in no year has the poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent if black poverty is caused by systemic racism do racists make an exception for blacks who are married I guess you're allowed to be angry yes yes so do you have the feeling when you're addressing this notion that racism accounts for everything do you have the feeling that there's that the that the arguments are subtle it's persuasive you can forgive someone for buying that argument or do you have the feeling that it's willful that the case is so clearly mistaken that there's a willfulness about it no I I don't I don't I think that the the people don't look for for certain evidence and therefore they don't find it and so from from the on the basis of what they know at a given time this may be very plausible the problem is that you know what you really need are other people with different orientation who are who who are skeptical and who will then look for things and find things that are very different from that uh one of the one of the things that uh like that I found uh interesting what was the the uh fact that there are various counties in the United States which are among the poorest counties in in the country and six of those Counties have have uh uh a population that ranges from 90 percent white to 100 white Appalachian counties yeah Kentucky yeah Kentucky and Ohio as I recall yeah and and but mainly is this is the hillbilly communities right and of course there's that great book that was written in the hillbilly allergy it was on the best seller list for more than a year consecutively and what's now Senator Vance yes and and there these are people who have faced zero racism they are white and they're white and and zero racism and also there back in the 30s when they did IQ studies uh their IQs were not only at the same level as those of blacks they had the same pattern namely that that the young the young people where they were black or hillbilly uh would have an IQ very close to the national average at age six but by the time they were teenagers it kept going down and down and down because it's relative to the other other people of that age group and they simply would not were falling behind uh so it was clearly not biological it was it was social but uh despite that these these hillbilly counties had uh income incomes they were not only lower than the national average they were lower than the average of black incomes for a period of half a century it may have been longer than that because I only went through half a century but in every study that was done over that half century they scored lower their family incomes were lower than the family incomes the blacks so obviously there must be other things that cause people to be poor other than racism all right people in low-income American hillbilly counties already faced zero racism because they are virtually all white yes yet they have lower incomes than blacks just as you were saying in other words some Behavior patterns seem to pay off now this book is dedicated to fallacies to showing errors in premises and errors and Analysis it's not dedicated to an alternative explanation nevertheless you've got this argument lurking in here that it's the way people live it's the way cultural yeah so what are the patterns that pay off well all my Heavens that's a much much larger book than those well you've got time on your hands uh in terms of policies or public policy what does not pay off is having charismatic leaders uh depending upon government to do things because if you look what has happened to blacks before and after that there was a massive uh government effort on their behalf the poverty rate among blacks if you start in 1940 instead of 1960 because 1960 is the magic number for people who are saying the government you see all these wonderful things and life's Advanced because of it in 1940 uh the black poverty rate was 87 percent uh by 1960 it was down down to 47 percent that's dramatic uh ninth what from 1960 to 1970 it went down and notice it went down to uh 30 percent and in night and in 1970 affirmative action was now in place it went down to 29 percent so in the in the 20 years prior to 1960s the black poverty rate went down by 40 points and in the 20 and in the 20 years after 1960 it went down by 18 points uh but again you saw the same thing you had with what was the Ralph's Nader effect you see it started in 1960 you missed this you missed all of that so you've got in this book this is a point you make again and again in the section on racial fallacies that I started thinking of it I don't think you use these terms but this is not an original thought with me I started thinking of it as a as a hidden century of black progress yes from emancipation with the end of the Civil War through to 1965 let's say the Civil Rights Act of 1964-65 through the early through the mid 60s you've got a century and you argue that black educational attainment Rises yes black property rate drops dramatically yeah and these are people who started with no property overwhelmingly illiterate this is from the moment yeah the sort of the the year zero in 1865 for African Americans and they climb and and the other point that you make at a number of places is that the black family is overwhelmingly intact yes most black people yeah and uh not only not only do people take credit for things that were not not not there doing uh they Overlook the negative things that came in after the 1960s as a result of policy in 1940 uh 17 of black children were raised in single parent homes Seventeen percent Seventeen at the end I forget the exact date in in the 20th century but it but uh after these wonderful reforms were put in that quadrupled to 68 of black children were being raised in single parent homes now there's a whole literature on all the bad things that happen to kids who are raised by single parents whether they are black or white American or British the studies show the same things one study said that uh fatherlessness has a bigger effect than even race and poverty and certainly I think back in my own life I was I realized how fortunate I was because even though my biological father died before I was born I I would and I was adopted I was adopted into a family where I was the only child uh in a family of four adults uh and and these were not people who were out having an active social life someplace the life was there in the home they gave you their time yes yes and I remember years later when I became a parent and like other new parents I wanted to know when it was a kid supposed to do this when he's supposed to do that when I said I said uh how old was I when I started to walk and uh just sort of the long-surviving member of the family raised me said Tommy nobody knows when you could walk somebody was always carrying you you know but so you had four adults doting yes yes yes and that that's that's what and and then part of the part of the the rise of blacks before was because of things that were done by blinds uh I I thought example I think of a lot was a kid who grew up in Harlem at the same time I I did we was in the same school you live two blocks from me uh and we met many years later by accident on the street in San Francisco and we talked about the old times and one of the things he mentioned to me that because he had gone on he was making more money than I was uh and and he would become wealthy and he lived overseas with servants and he came back and moved out to the wine country and all that stuff but one of the things that struck me he said that he could remember times when he was growing up when his father would sit at the dinner table watching the children eat and not eat anything himself now it's not it's not that's what and now the father isn't even there yes that's right that's right so that those kinds of things are what do it right social justice fallacies the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major factor in ending the denial of basic constitutional rights to blacks in the south but there is no point trying to make that the main source of the black rise out of poverty nor can the left act as if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was solely their work a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the ACT close quote so this is this you're saying something here which is it is it's it's shocking it's heretical yeah you're saying well you're saying the Civil Rights Act ensured equality before the law that was overdue it was necessary it was just that's an accomplishment in American history yes but at about the same time we get the creation of a vast expansion of the welfare state and it does people harm yes it harms the African-American family it leads to fatherless have I got your argument right yeah and you want to stand by that yeah the other and the other thing too it a Civil Rights Act was not what got blocks into professional occupations uh in the decade prior to the to 1964. the number of blacks and professional occupations doubles so this is not this is not the result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. all right Tom a few uh closing questions here first of all may I read to you this is a note to readers from The New York Times in 2020. all right the Nationwide protests over racism and police violence have prompted A Renewed focus on a long-standing debate whether to capitalize the term black we here at the New York Times have talked to more than 100 staff members the feedback has been thoughtful and nuanced thoughtful and nuanced mind you and we've just started just we've decided to start using uppercase black to describe people and cultures of African origin close quote the New York Times capitalizes black but you don't Tom Soule how dare you engage in this act of Defense oh it is amazing the things that people can can focus on uh it it may seem to be a big issue to the New York Times I suspect that the people who are being uh uh murdered in these uh big cities are like New York and Chicago may have a somewhat different view of the importance of of what is capitalized and not capitalized Tom let me read a few single sentences from social justice fallacies I'll read a sentence you tell us what you meant stupid people can create problems but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe that is so my gosh think of this catastrophes of the 20th century you mentioned the genetic determinants they drew the conclusions from their reasoning that uh you had to to put an end to certain races because they they would they had what they call Eugenics but what was later called genocide and so that idea originated with the progressives uh and there was a progressive who wrote a book with that theme uh which was translated into German and Hitler called it his Bible and so this this Holocaust you draw a line from the progressive eugenesis to Adolf Hitler he drew the line he drew the line and wrote a letter of fan mail letter to to the author of that book and saying that that book was his Bible and we see what that led to uh during during the 1920s in reaction to World War II one which was so what so bad the idea arose among the intellectual Elites that the way to prevent war was to stop which was to stop arming you see and you saw disarmament was the weight of avoid a war uh no evidence made the slightest uh impression on them uh and they and they blundered the West into into a war that probably would never have happened because the the totalitarian dictatorships the start of that war were well aware that the United States Britain and France had an industrial capacity greater than theirs and you don't you wouldn't ordinarily attack countries that have greater industrial capacity than yours unless you thought that they weren't they they were gutless and were and were foolish enough not not to remain armed and for three years of that war their Axis Powers won every single battle the Western democracies lost in Europe and Asia wherever they fought uh in 1942 uh Western traditional such made a speech and we said uh we have a new experience we have Victory and when they won that victory in El Alamein and Northern Africa that was the first battle won by the Western democracies in a war that it was already three years old and from that point on especially when the United States came in and the American productive capacity was mobilized then then it turned around uh today people who are trying to say we need to disarm in order to have uh you know peace don't understand in a nuclear age you're not going to get three years to figure out what's going on you're either going to be uh ready on the first day of that war or you are going to lose it in politics the goal is not truth but votes absolutely and why does that matter oh it it it it it it it matters because uh if you can get people to believe that their problems are all due to races uh you will get their votes but if you say but if you look at the a lot of data on different things you discover that's not the case this is very doubtful if all that races in the country today have half the negative effect on blacks as the teachers unions have because the teachers unions keep the schools lousy uh in areas where where the people who send their kids to school do not have the option to send them to a private school if the schools are bad you make the point that in Harlem there are charter schools that rent space in public schools and there are tests well go ahead you know what I'm referring to yes yes yes in fact there's a school I I thought the way to figure out the uh difference between the public school and the charter school the regular public schools and Charter Schools is to compare them in the same build when they when both schools are located in the same buildings so you have comparability that's so it's the same group when you same neighborhoods same bills yeah so everything uh uh and and when you do that what I found was that uh this the uh charter school kids and these low-income black neighborhoods pass the math test at a rate more than six times as high as that of the Public School located in the very same building and the main difference between the charter school and the public school yes the public school is run by the teachers unions the charter schools do not have to have unions at all in most cases one of the most extreme examples was a school that I went to when I was in Harlem uh and in that particular school only seven percent of the regular public school kids passed the math test uh in the uh Charter School 100 past it uh uh that they proficient they have different levels proficient means you've passed and there's a level above that when you've done more than what is necessary for that uh in that particular school only two percent of this of the charter school kids scored as low as proficient the other 98 percent were in the top bracket above proficient last last question here last quotation Tom one of many things that no individual no institution and no Society has any control over is the past yes why does that matter because when we talk we talk about groups and we we talk about their environment we usually mean their tangible current surroundings but of course all the groups have had different paths uh when the when the Irish the Jews and the Italian uh immigrants were were coming to America uh it was common for Irish for for Italian and Jewish neighborhoods of New York's Lower East Side to be represented by Irish politicians and why is that because if you look at what happened before they ever got to America you can see that the Irish had reasons to organize in a political kind of way the Jews and the Italians did not their circumstances it wouldn't have made any difference and now when they get to New York they were they may be living in the same neighborhoods and so forth and the tangible surroundings are the same but the whole past of the three groups is very different and even when it's the Italians and the Jews rise to the prosperity it's in different Industries it's indifferent occupations and the past means that we should never expect groups to end up evenly distributed across the past but but even such a thing as age people don't realize some American ethnic groups are a decade older than others and some are more than two decades older than others so the Japanese the difference between blacks and white is not the largest the difference in the country the Japanese Americans have are higher than Mexican Americans but even larger amounts Japanese Americans have a median age of 52 uh Mexican Americans somewhere in the 20s 52 year old people make more money than 20 year old people Tom would you close our discussion by reading a passage from social justice fallacies oh well if I still agree with it do we want the mixture of students who are going to be trained to do Advanced Medical Research to be representative of the demographic makeup of the population as a whole or do we want students with the highest probability of finding cures for cancer and Alzheimer's do you want airline pilots chosen for demographic representation of various groups or would you prefer to fly with pilots who are chosen for their Mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination consequences matter or should matter more than some attractive or fashionable Theory more fundamentally do we want a society in which some babies are born into the world as Heirs of pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day blighting both their lives or do we want to at least leave them the option to work things out better in their lives than we have in ours Thomas Saul author of some 40 books including social justice fallacies thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge the Hoover institution and Fox Nation I'm Peter Robinson [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

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Keywords: uncommon knowledge, thomas sowell, tom sowell, public policy, economics, social justice fallacies, equality, social just groups, systemic racism, black lives matter, segregation, thomas sowell new book, peter robinson, hoover institution, economist, consequences, civil rights movement

Id: pn2gda_phAA

Length: 42min 30sec (2550 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023