Discrimination and Disparities with Thomas Sowell

some people are rich and many are poor some are fortunate and many are not on the very face of it that is wrong and unfair and something must be done or so you might think until you read the work of our guests today dr. thomas sol on uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson Thomas soul has studied and taught economics intellectual history and social policy at institutions that include Cornell UCLA and Amherst now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution dr. Sol has published more than a dozen books including his newest volume just published discrimination and disparities Tom Sol welcome I hear good to be here first question disparate impact the legal standard holding the statistical differences in outcomes among groups can be enough to establish illegal discrimination even in the absence of evidence of intentional discrimination that's the concept two quotations one is you in your new book discrimination and disparities quote the disparate impact standard represents a major departure from American legal principles where the burden of proof is usually on those making the accusation close quote here's the second quotation this is the journalist Lauren kerchner writing in the Atlantic get ready attorneys have used the concept of disparate impact to successfully challenge policies that have a discriminatory effect it's been deployed in lawsuits involving employment decisions housing and credit over the past several decades disparate impact is represented an important tool for assessing and ass and addressing discrimination close quote an important tool are you persuaded oh I am lawyers have made millions doing this right but what about the what about the notion that we need a disparate impact test because discrimination particularly racial discrimination particularly against african-americans is so deeply embedded in the fabric of this country that people discriminate all the time without even being aware of it if you're going on that assumption then you don't need the disparate impact theory you just simply say what you've just said the to dress it up as the disparate impact Theory the disparate impact Theory depend on the truth although the assumptions I might also add that whenever you look at theory you see this implicit assumption that then all of the groups are very similar in their capabilities what they want to do and so forth when you look at facts you find disparate impacts everywhere there's been a story in The Wall Street Journal today about the Irish you know well you know if you take if you just go back to the 19th century and you take the Irish the Italians and the Jews just to pick three European groups you know something like forty percent of all the Italian immigrants to the United States return to Italy the Irishman Jews we're not going back to anywhere they were glad they got out of where like where they got out of and their stay here if you look at things like politics the Irish was so far more advanced politically than either the Italians of the Jews that for generations you had Irish politicians representing neighborhoods they will overwhelmingly Italian or Jewish everywhere you turn my gosh you find that you finally at least these disparate impacts and then the book I go in Edenton into nature that you don't find things happening randomly around the world you find 90% of all the tornadoes in the entire world occurring in one country namely the United States and only it was part of the United States you don't hear about tornadoes in Maine or another cific Northwest and so I don't know I think how much land area there is in the world and 90% of right in this one little place so reality the large point here is reality is lumpy and uneven in particular yeah and it just doesn't fit the kind of bland smooth reality that that seems to be in the the premise in the back of the theorists my yes all right discrimination and disparities let's get the the underlying argument of the book established here I'm quoting you again Tom the fact that economic and other outcomes often differ greatly among individuals groups institutions and Nations poses questions to which many people give very different answers at one end of the spectrum the belief that those who have been less fortunate are genetically less capable that's the racist argument essentially all right at the other end the belief that those less fortunate are victims of other people and that's the argument let's be for me to put it crudely that's the argument that liberals or progressives tend to me yes okay although I will say progressives we're in the forefront of those putting the genetic argument a hundred years ago oh so explain that for example Woodrow Wilson was a leader for the progressive movie s and one of the leading racism yeah of the day Oh see and many people look at you've actually well his racism was just an exception to his liberalism no that was the what progressives were pushing that whole time and not and not and not not so much against blacks because they just assumed that blacks couldn't do anything but they were pushing it against immigrants from Eastern Europe and southern Europe and it was they who pushed the ideas that led to the great immigration restrictions of the 1920s all right again discrimination and disparities disparities can reflect the plain fact that success and many kinds of endeavors depends on prerequisites peculiar to each endeavor and a relatively small difference in meeting those prerequisites can mean a very large difference in outcomes close quote now you illustrate that point by describing a sociological or psychological experiment that professor Terman here at Stanford conducted at the beginning of the 20th century or so well it wasn't so much experiment it was it was an empirical study he picked something like fifteen hundred people who had IQs in the top 1% and he followed them or his program did for a period of more than 50 years to see how they turned out and so and what I point out in there in the book is that the disparities within that narrow range that the top third for example had more than 10 times as many postgraduate degrees as the bottom third among people who were all in the top 1% so there are obviously many other things that had to come together the other thing was that two people who failed to make the 140 IQ cot cutoff ended up getting Nobel prizes in physics as nobody among these 1500 ever did so obviously there have to be a lot of things come together and you write again I'm quoting you here Tom the biggest differentiating factor in that study was family background yes and explain that well the ones who are in that top third they came from families that were more educated the ones who are in that bottom third something like almost 30 percent or so or had a parent who had dropped out of school before the eighth grade so it doesn't matter how much brain power you may have you know if you're not rated raised in a home where people are thinking where they doing an intellectual thing you're not in the same position as someone with the same IQ who's looking at a family right it has that that kind of surround so the point is you've got these 1,500 brilliant kids you've followed them for 50 years and if if nobody knew anything else about them they'd say gee some of these people are relatively poor and some of these people are relatively unfortunate by in comparison with the others and Tom soul says well the genetic argument is ruled out of bounds immediately because they're all brilliant and they're all in the top 1% by in terms of smarts but so is the argument that anybody victimized them the principal factor that accounted for success as opposed to failure or ending up was family background and that's really not victimization that's a question of almost cosmic luck many family that's right yes this is why spends too much time on the difference between the firstborn child and the others explain that well that I first became aware of this years ago when I came across some data on the finalists from the National Merit Scholarship and in five trial families that finalist was the firstborn more often than the other four put together and in four child families that firstborn was the finalists more often than the other three and I doubt and two shall wherever you do it and the only the only are the only child who does better than the firstborn is the only child and then the other thing is that twins tend to have several points lower average IQ than people who are born one of the time and so when you put all that together it suggests that the amount of parental attention a child guessed makes a huge difference in the future I see but again you can't you you you the argument of victimization doesn't really apply there that's what does genetics right there they're born so the same parents and raised under the same roof right all right the costs of discrimination again the book discrimination and disparities quote to many observers reason as if intentions automatically translate directly into outcomes and then she go on you of all people go on to quote approvingly from Friedrich Engels from Karl Marx's co-author in the Communist Manifesto and you he has this phrase what emerges that that angles makes the argument intentions don't matter as much as quote what emerges yeah use that so explain that well what angle says is that what each person wills is obstructed by everyone else and what emerges is something that no one will and so you can't go from intentions to or to results and is if they emphasize that I Laila go into the question of South Africa under apartheid so that we don't get it and bogged down in the question how much racism there is and so forth because it's quite it's an unambiguous right that the policy yes they polishes the law and yet there there are there were industries in South Africa under apartheid where there were more blacks higher than whites and not and in occupations where it was illegal to hire blacks at all and that part of the problem that the people who were imposing apartheid had what was it there's money to be made by hiring black workers and so whatever the racial use will be employer he said he's thinking about the money right and so you get all these anomaly and of course my my colleague and friend Walter Williams when he did research in South Africa for three months and he lived in an area that was set aside for whites only so and even in the housing mortgage you had this kind of thing and at least one other one a one area in South Africa non-whites were a majority and one of the areas set aside for whites only and again it's the cost of the discrimination and you get that with minimum wage arguments as well that if you have a minimum wage then that's said above whatever it would be in a free market then that means you're gonna have more people applying because there's a higher wage and they're gonna be fewer people hired because of the higher wage and so you're gonna have a chronic surplus of applicants now in a market where there say a chronic surplus of qualified people of say 200 and there are a hundred of blacks for example who are qualified in and then if the employer refuses to hire all hundred black qualified people he still has two hundred others he can call on and that's it it's cost him nothing but if there's no minimum wage now and there's no chronic surplus every time he turns away a qualified black person he has to have someone who's not black who's also qualified that he can hire and he may not be able to find that person at that price and so therefore the price will have to go up and so it's costing him and if he and if he doesn't raise the price he's gonna have to keep his custom was waiting because he doesn't have enough people to do the job got it so let me this question of the difference between intentions and what emerges yeah a couple of illustrations from the American experience that you described in in the book in the american south after the Civil War whites employed a number of measures to keep down the earnings of black workers and sharecroppers keep them poor yeah and yet you write quote black incomes in 1900 we're almost half again higher than they had been in 1867 to 68 in other words just after the Civil War after African Americans received their freedom this represented a rate of growth higher than that in the American economy as a whole just freed slaves improved their material well-being faster than the rest of the nation yes in spite of laws intended to keep them down how come well there was so much laws in this case it was agreements agreements I'm saying and many of these agreements simply fell apart because especially in agriculture Recor says the spring comes in you've got to get yourself a workforce out the attic to plow that ground and plant the plant the seeds otherwise knows all season right yeah and so the people who decided they weren't gonna stick by the landowners they weren't going to stick by this agreement they get they got the first dibs on the black workers and sharecroppers and the others had to take what was left over and and they got away with a lot of really very terrible cheating the first year or so but of course by experience the guy who was cheated the first year knows that his cousin is getting paid more they still you don't need to read about that you don't need anything else you got on the way or your cousins working got it got it again discrimination and disparities three decades after the end of slavery laws mandating racially segregated seating and municipal transit vehicles began to be passed in many southern communities this didn't happen immediately after the Civil War its toward the end of the 19th century municipal transit companies fought such laws how come yeah they may have had exactly the same racial views as the people who passed the law but the people who passed the laws paid no price for it people who own the transit companies I see the votes only White's could vote but but whites and blacks could both supply money and so on so the incentives were very different from the well from the people who owned transit companies they weren't then they were for politicians got it one final example of this difference between intentions and what actually emerges the reality on the ground housing right here in Northern California beginning in the 1970s as you explained in the book San Francisco and other communities right here in Northern California began enacting building restrictions in the name of protecting the environment open spaces protecting the environment and so forth by 2005 the black population in San Francisco was reduced to less than half of what it had been in 1970 even though the total population of the city as a whole was growing close quote what happened well as the prices as as as the restrictions on prone housing were put in then of course that meant the growing population would was not accommodated by a growing amount of housing in in Palo Alto for example at the prices of housing almost quadrupled in one decade it was not because the old building luxury homes because there was not a single new house built in Palo Alto during that decade it meant that the existing houses almost quadrupled in price it's amazing how in California there are people asking what can we do about the affordable housing right build more houses and they'll appoint some blue-ribbon committee nothing it's like appointing a blue-ribbon committee to go out there and find out why the ground is wet after the rain you know I mean it's really it's amazing how I think it's almost miraculous the way they can avoid the obvious so Tom if we were to apply the disparate impact standard to the question of the legal of the building regime the legal building regime in San Francisco we would be forced to conclude that the devout liberals of San Francisco had enacted a soft version of Jim Crow absolutely but but they don't seem to ever get around to applying the disparate impact theory in those days okay the great retrogression this may be the biggest contrast between intentions and what emerged and that is the way that circumstances for African Americans were starting to improve and then turned around poverty discrimination and disparities quote the plain fact is that black the black poverty rate declined from 87 percent in nineteen forty to forty seven percent in 1960 prior to the expansion of the welfare state that began in the 1960s under the Johnson administration there was a far more modest decline in the poverty rate among blacks after the war on poverty began close quote how could that have been well it could be it could be because the things that they thought was we're going to help did not help and in many cases made things much worse one would be the welfare state which provide and and the other would be things like minimum wages which just price people out of their jobs it's amazing how that simple concepts never seems to get through to so many people hmm all right crime and in this case you're writing not only about african-americans but about low-income people generally in the United States murder rates rates of infection among with venereal diseases and rates of teenage pregnancies were among the social pathologies who steep declines declines were suddenly reversed in the 1960s nowhere was rampant violence and other social pathology is common among low-income people in the first half of the 20th century when they were more deprived as in the second half when the welfare state had made them better off in material terms close quote again it's not the intention of anybody enacting the welfare state to cause increases in violence hmm but it happened yes what was the disconnect between intentions and what emerged oh heavens they misdiagnosed the causes of things and therefore they misdiagnosed the effect to expect for example in the case of venereal diseases sex education was introduced on a mass basis in the 1960s and when the audience for doing it were one to reduce the level of venereal diseases and of teenage unwanted pregnancies and both those things have been going down on their own that is and by 1960 the rate of infection for venereal diseases was something like half of what it was in 1950 and then they bring in the sex education and it turns around and shoots up among blacks under homicide rates among black males declined by 18 percent in the 1940s by 22 percent in the 1950s and then skyrocket in the 1960s wiping out all that progress and they they had a different view of the world and if you just did not meet the test of time mm-hmm one more instance of this kind of retrogression the family again discrimination and disparities as of 1960 this one I just find this one heartbreaking as of 1960 two-thirds of all black American children were living with both parents that declined over the years until only one-third were living with both parents in 1995 among black families in poverty eighty-five percent of the children had no father present close quote so it's not the legacy of slavery that destroys the African American it's this bill is the legacy of welfare state and by the way we see legitimacy rates rising among everybody yeah and in other countries and mmm you know the very same thing in England and what's the mechanism why does the welfare state dissolve the family structure for one thing it makes it unnecessary for father's to support their their their offspring and in fact it makes it counterproductive in many cases a very poor man who who but might be able to support his family realize his family will be better off without him but on Eliane someone who strictly irresponsible either the man of the woman or both now pays no price for being irresponsible the taxpayers pay the price and actually the harm done to the taxpayers which is serious still is not not comparable to the harm done to the piet to the families especially the kids yeah Moynihan was was excoriated for pointing this out 1965 in the morning one can report that's one hand report what and and what what is some people that took this as a way of putting but putting down blacks what they don't understand was it one boy and a hand was a scholar who knew that his own group the Irish Americans had that very same problem at the beginning of the 20th century and more importantly one hands-on father deserted the family when he was 10 years old he and his brother were out shining shoes in Times Square in Central Park to try to bring in some a few pennies to help help them keep the house going and so everywhere they'd been living in this wonderful suburban area suddenly they were in a very rough neighborhood and they were shining shoes in Times Square to try to try to make ends meet and so he understood that this was one heck of a problem you that people should be warned about and he was simply excoriated discrimination and disparities much of the social retrogression that took place is traceable to the central tenets of the prevailing social vision that unequal outcomes are due to adverse treatment of the less fortunate yes okay so grant that argument that they're not paying attention they're not they're not squaring up attempting to square up intentions with what emerges yeah but here's the bit that's still baffling to me you mentioned the Moynihan report where his central finding was again the breaking down of the black family and the out of wedlock birth rate then was 25% now it's over 70% by the way it's over 30% among whites now that was more than 50 years ago a half-century of failing to try to align intentions with results what is this willfully why is it that we still have this prevailing social vision that seems not only not at to ask what are the results are our fine intentions actually achieving the ends we wish for but almost refuses to look at the massive evidence to the contrary that it was counterproductive so what's going on quietly what's going on among professional politicians is that it can be the end of a whole career to admit that you were wrong imagine you're president and you send men into battle in a war and they get a wiped out and say you know really didn't have to fight that war that is that is not something you're gonna say it's something you're not likely to say to yourself there'll be a thousand rationalizations and the ability of the human mind to rationalize is just phenomenal all right Marx and the kids the most spectacularly successful political doctrine in the 20th century was Marxism based on the implicit presumption that differences in wealth were due to capitalists growing rich by keeping the workers poor through exploitation and what was wrong with that assumption well it's it's a it sounded good like so many others but everybody can speak as a former Marxist you were more so oh yeah if you consider yourself a Marxist yes during the McCarthy era by the way I am swimming against the stream but but it simply will never put 20 tests now the test I suggest is a simple one but it is a test and and if it's true that that the rich are rich because they're keeping the poor poor then in a country with lots of billionaires usually correspondingly have great amounts of poor people but if you could but if you compare that actual data there are more billionaires in the United States than in Africa and the Middle East put together and yet the standard of living and of the poor in the United States is higher than that of people and then Africa in the Middle East so by that simple standard it just doesn't hold up there are problems of the theory a recent YouGov survey the proportion of baby boomers that's my group who hold favorable views of communism is just 4% the proportion of Millennials that's my kids and your grandkids who hold favorable views of communism is 19% yes roughly one in five young Americans now holds a favorable view of communism what do you do with that datum well I think I I get very pessimistic I know more recently and during the election all this enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders was taking place while people in Venezuela under a socialist government with lots of oil around country I should I'm watching natural resources we see natural resources country was starving they were breaking into in the grocery stores they getting desperate they get food there flooded day they're going into other countries to try to try something to eat and it and the two things never came together and they saw socialism as an idea socialism has always been a wonderful sounding idea it's only when you have put it into practice that you discover their real problems Tom when you were writing your column every so often you would publish a column in which you were you described your column as random thoughts on the passing scene last segment here let's do a few random thoughts on the passage right listen to this list the Thomas soul Reader 2011 intellectuals in race 2013 a new edition of your classic work basic economics in 2014 wealth poverty and politics 2015 and now 2018 discrimination and disparities and do you know what I just did I just listed the books you've published since turning 80 Tom you haven't had anything to prove to anybody for at least three decades what keeps you at it why do you work so hard well I'm happy you do you understand but why do you well I don't work nearly as hard because I psych i just i discontinued the column i i i i did that after spending some time and you know seventy was a couple of photo buddies and I realized that in those four days we hadn't watched a single news program we hadn't seen a single newspaper I said that this is the life I I don't I I don't need to be watching anything there because most of the foolish things that I said on these programs we said 20 and 30 and 40 years ago and refuted 20 and 30 and 40 years ago by you quite often by me but many other people I see this thing about women get only X percent of what men yet for doing the same job and then every studies including studies done by women who who have the courage to do these studies more so than men do showing that no as as you hold various things constant this whatever that percentage is begins to shrink and shrink and in some cases reverse the among academic men and women in the study that I did 40 years ago now if you took never married women in academia they may had a higher income than never married men and they are data from not only from my studies but a number of other studies show that the real difference is between women who are married and who become mothers and everybody else that we're and and men who who get married have higher incomes and men who have same education age and so forth who don't get married and women who get married have lower than women who don't get married and of course this is because of the division of labor within the whole and there are so many statistical mess-ups among when they do these comparisons I can't even get into the ball but you're happier when you're not reading the news absolutely but at the same time you're also happier when you're working on a book yes when I can go out there and get the hard data and find out what's really happening got it got it this is the mandatory subject Donald Trump during the presidential campaign you wrote a column this is when you were still had your column that appeared under under the headline choose Trump he'd be easier to impeach and you wrote that voters faced a choice between I'm quoting you two out-of-control people one of whom is going to be President and you said since Hillary Clinton would be the first woman chief executive she'd be very difficult to impeach but Trump would be easier to kick out so vote for Trump ah now that he's been in office for a year what do you make of him well if oh gosh you know let me say that the just recently Walter Williams yeah a video of Donald Trump in his mid-30s being interviewed uh and so I've had to back off on one of the things I've said which is that Trump is someone who has simply never grown up he was very grown up in his mid 30s thinking of retrogression and it's scary because how many people are more mature in their mid-30s than they are at age 70 all right and and given the trendline how optimistic should we be about his becoming more grown-up as time goes on all right all right in terms of the people he's put a surround himself with I think on the whole they're a better bunch than either the last two presidents had so he has very good people I think you have a madethe at second fence you know but I put up with other people around him and their question is is he gonna listen to them all right let me play you a brief excerpt of Donald Trump himself this is from the State of the Union address this past January this will be my first time it is something I'm very proud of african-american unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded [Applause] [Laughter] okay oh he he he produces this that maybe the statistic isn't quite right either maybe it is yeah and there you see a shot you see Republicans standing and applauding and there you should see a shot of Democrats who are sitting on their hands including many members of the Black Caucus yes in Congress what do you make of that that as with so many other groups around the world the leaders of groups that are lagging are often themselves the one of the biggest handicaps of those groups because they have to depict the problems in ways it will allow them to play the role of rescuers and so there'll be no talk about how you can do this or that for yourself you'll be talking about what we can get the government to deliver for you and usually that's a lot of words and things that have bad effects and that's true not only with blacks in the United States it's true of people in the lower-income people in England and elsewhere so it's actually dangerous for people for less fortunate people to turn to politics oh yes as a form of redress there's no question about it if you look in the United States or around the world you think of spectacularly successful people you can almost never name any prominent leader to whom that success can be attributed I mean who has made the aive what Asian leader has led has may have made a ages successful well well the answer would be Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore yes yeah you do with that example that's the outlier okay but he didn't do that by by championing their cause in Malaysia he did it by taking charge of Singapore itself independently and creating free markets that's right but what do you mean he never had to tell them that their problems were all caused by somebody else and that's the first thing that quote leader has to do if he wants to remain a leader of some group that's lagging and you look I'm always amazed at countries that the part where the the poorest part of the country is the plot that wants to split apart I mean the slow lacks are the ones who who then wanted to break away from Czechoslovakia in in Pakistan it was the East Pakistanis who were poorer than the West Pakistanis who broke off the file to form a Bangladesh and all of that helps the leaders it does not help the people that they're leading all right so politics actually provides perverse incentives yes particularly for the for the less fortunate yes absolutely Tom reparations we began by talking about disparate impact the idea that discrimination is so deeply embedded in the American experience that it can take place even in the absence of an intention to discriminate so this argument which is that there's something some basic flaw or sin that's still with us comes up in the case for reparations long as quotation but it's it sets something up but from tah nahi see Coates in an article in the Atlantic entitled the case for reparations white supremacy is not merely the world work of hot-headed demagogues but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it and so we must imagine a new country reparations is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely the wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution what I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustice is what I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal close quote and Tom's soul makes what of that I explained it tells me now I mean I've made the right decision not to read it Atlantic for decades slavery is a very big subject I have in my home an entire book case of nothing things books about slavery in various parts of the world various times of history and it's a fact is that slavery has been a universal institution for thousands of years as far back as you can trace human history and what we're looking at is if slavery is something that happened to one race of people in one country when in fact the the the spread of it was around the world at night and 1776 which is when Adam Smith's published the wealth of nation as well as when the United States got started he said that Western Europe is the only place in the world where there is no slavery uh and even in Western even the Western Europeans had vast numbers of slaves in the Western Hemisphere yes but not in Western Europe itself and so if you're gonna have reparations for slavery it's gonna be the greatest transfer of wealth back and forth and between and-and-and cross hauling as they say in the railroads because the the number of whites for example who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies before that put together I know but nobody is going to North Africa to ask for reparations because nobody is gonna be fool enough to give it to them here if we have we have intellectuals who can met who can imagine a different history from the rest of the world even though it's so similar to the rest of the world Tom would you close our program by reading a passage from your marvelous new book discrimination and disparities it's about people who want to redress the past the only times over which we have any degree of influence at all or the present and the future both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead who are far beyond our power to help or punish or any serious consideration of the world as it is today 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 dr. Thomas sole author of discrimination and disparities thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge and the Hoover Institution I'm Peter Robinson [Music] I'd love to keep you for but you need to go home and start your next book Tom [Laughter]

Channel: Hoover Institution

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Keywords: Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, race relations, United States, disparate impact, economics, law

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Length: 40min 25sec (2425 seconds)

Published: Thu May 03 2018