Political Correctness and the Argument from Intimidation | Thomas E. Woods. Jr.

certainly there are some thank yous in order at all these events we have several of our society and club members here today I won't name them all individually you know who you are and these are people who have done so much for the Institute over the years financially but not just financially otherwise I mean it's their time and their energy and their involvement and engagement with us so thank you so much it means quite a bit to us and our host today I will name their class and Anastasia tells mother they live close to locally here but not too close but they are farmers very interested in what the Mises Institute is doing very interested in what it takes to create a freer Society so for hosting us thank you so much and when I say farmers I mean at least in part dairy farmers right so this recalcitrant beasts from whom they must rest a living everyday so thank you so much for having us today and it's been a great venue must say this is our third trip to Texas this year so Texas is a great state for us so thank you our first afternoon speaker it needs little introduction I'm sure for most of you Tom woods do we have some of tom woods show viewers listeners here in the audience night show of hands Wow welcome to all of you this is the heavy Tom woods crowd you know all about his achievements academic and otherwise the books he's written so instead I'll just tout his latest venture which is a joint effort with Bob Murphy also an economist in a new website and a new podcast called contra Krugman they're going to be doing I believe weekly podcasts which are basically debunking mr. Krugman who writes a pop political blog for The New York Times called conscience of a liberal so contra Krugman calm is the website you need to check out and Tom is our after news maker Tom ok ladies and gentlemen time to head off to your safe room don't say I didn't warn you before I get started today and today by the way I'm going to cover all kinds of things that could make people uncomfortable I'm going to talk about the so called gender wage gap and argue that there really isn't one I'm going to talk about all kinds of differences between all kinds of people in all kinds of groups so fasten your seat belts but before I do that I'd like to urge you to see these devices that you have and we haven't hectored you about taking them out and turning them off I'm actually going to heck to you about taking them out and turning them on turn this on now not just so you can tweet things about what I'm saying but primarily because I'm going to give you a free book right now it's called Bernie Sanders is wrong and it will be think I'm this is a real book as a real ebook it's about 150 pages and it covers inequality trade renewable energy should we be like Sweden all these sorts of arguments that you hear it's all in there and I'm giving it to you because it'll actually be helpful for one of the topics I'm discussing today so the way you get this book for free is simply - and it comes in 3 formats if you like Kindle give it give you two that way if you like PDF epub just text to the name Bernie to the number three three four four four so that's three three four four four text the name Bernie and you will get the book Bernie Sanders is wrong amazing what technology makes possible all right I'll tell you in a minute what topic from there is going to be helpful for us this afternoon what I want to talk about today is the narrative of oppression that underlies the whole political correctness movement and this narrative holds certain things to be true true to the point that you're not allowed to question questioning them is not even considered to be a legitimate point of view and if you should be so foolish as to question them you will not be refuted you will simply be hounded out of society we all know what I'm talking about if you make some of the claims that I'll be making here today you will not be met with a careful sober scholarly refutation instead you will be hectored and called names and your motives will be impugned in a way it is reminiscent of Marxism in that Marx would often say that an opponent of his was obviously simply a pawn of the bourgeois class it was not necessary so much to refute this person what we needed to do was unmask his class background because then that we would know that that colored all of his thinking this man belongs to the bourgeois class well likewise it is sufficient to say well so-and-so is a white man of course he will say these things now if it so happens that it's a white woman saying these things or a black woman or a Hispanic man or whatever well those people are not even human from the point of view of the political correctness movement they cannot conceive of why people would want to participate in their own oppression which is the only way they can account for why people might disagree with their conclusions the primary narrative of course as Tom DiLorenzo indicated is that there is an express and oftentimes implicit oppression a campaign of oppression against all groups other than white men throughout Society and coupled with this narrative of oppression is an expectation that in the absence of this oppression we would have equality of economic outcomes in terms of job opportunities and education and incomes and if this equality of outcome is not present then there must be a sinister reason there must be a deliberate attempt to bring about on outcomes somewhere and what follows from this and this is why the Mises Institute would have a particular interested in this is that state policies to rectify the imbalances are thereby proposed we need state policies to overturn this outcome to reverse this outcome to minimize these differences and so on so it's it's not just that we're dealing with toxic and irrational ideas if these are ideas that obviously lend themselves to government intervention we need government intervention to reverse all these outcomes that we're told are unnatural it would not occur spontaneously but the presumption that we would have equal outcomes for all groups is based in and extremely well I don't know how to say this here I childish that juvenile let's say a an approach to society that is so simplistic as to be juvenile because the different racial and ethnic groups in the United States differ in all sorts of ways all sorts of ways that are completely benign they differ in average age for example they differ in their geographical distribution across the country they differ in their educational levels and they differ in their culture and their cultural values and they differ in these ways that are so extraordinary that it would be astonishing if there were equal outcomes among groups even assuming absolutely pure motives on the part of everybody involved let's take a quick example to illustrate what I mean Japanese American women are only only 10% of them are married by age 18 but 50% of Mexican American women are married by age 18 that difference alone is going to have a lot to do with educational opportunities job placement and so on because when people get married it has an impact on these other aspects of their lives that's just one cultural difference between two groups that right off the bat will in a totally benign way account for many of the differences between them but now we're told that if there are income differences between groups this must mean discrimination and if one group let's say earns more than another then that group is suffering from less discrimination than the other and then a group above them is suffering from still less discrimination so the fact for example that Jewish people in the United States earn more on average than Hispanics is taken to mean that anti-semitism must be of lower intensity than anti-hispanic feeling that's the explanation for why there are these differences in incomes well then how do we explain the much greater incomes of Jewish people in Hispanic countries good question the answer is the question is not to be posed if you pose the question you're obviously a spokesman of the oppressor class and so on and on so in other words you can't even make an argument the making of an argument is an act of hostility or let's take we're sometimes told that black Americans have higher infant mortality rates presumably because they are deprived of prenatal care they're deprived of access to prenatal care but Chinese Americans have even lower infant mortality than whites even though they have less prenatal care so there are disparities everywhere in American society and around the world and there would and will be such disparities as long as human beings roam the earth and there is no reason to expect otherwise they give you a few examples in 2012 out of the 100 top ranked marathon runners 68 were Kenyans the National Spelling Bee has had an indian-american as the winner for seven consecutive years despite being greatly outnumbered by black Americans and slightly outnumbered by black Americans in terms of earning bachelor's degrees Asian Americans received more than twice as many bachelor degrees in engineering as blacks moreover Asians outnumber blacks despite the fact that they are vastly outnumbered by blacks in the general population they outnumber them at MIT three to one tend to one at Harvey Mudd College and forty to one at Caltech but even this as Thomas solo points out was not as great as the disparity between Chinese and Malays in earning engineering degrees in Malaysia in the 1960s students from the Chinese minority in Malaysia maybe 5% of the population earned over 100 times as many engineering degrees as students from the Malay majority and this is in a country where Malays dominate the government and they dominate university policy so as Seoul says there are grossly uneven and non-random outcomes from all sorts of purposeful human endeavors moreover serious laws and policies are based on these assumptions that we should expect everything to be equal in defiance of the facts the Malaysians have never or I beg your pardon is minority in Malaysia Indonesia the Philippines Vietnam and Thailand have never operated under an equal playing field and yet most of those nations total industry total investments in key industries are held by this Chinese minority the Chinese minority has had twice the average income of the Malay majority despite the fact that they are officially they've been officially discriminated against the italians in argentina have outperformed native Argentines despite discrimination the same could be said for Jews Armenians East Indians and more in the United States Japanese Americans were so discriminated against that some of them were put into special camps during World War two and yet - in spite of the temptation to use this as an excuse for poor performance by 1959 Japanese American households had equaled white households in income and by 1969 were earning 1/3 more so there are a lot of disparities and there are disparities that are the opposite of what you would expect if the narrative of political correctness were true that discrimination and oppression must have these sorts of outcomes sometimes we have exactly the opposite outcomes because human beings are widely variable and they are in many many different sorts of circumstances there are many factors that contribute to various outcomes it is not in other words a comic book the world is not a comic book in which there is one factor at work and in which everything would be equal if we could just get this one factor just right now what about the what about the so called gender pay gap we're told that women earn 77 percent of what men earn that is not true it's true in the most trivial irrelevant sense imaginable but it is not generally true now when I was arguing this on equal pay day they have an equal pay day every year I was trying to argue this with somebody and the person actually believes that what's being complained about is that women are earning 77 percent of what men are and for doing the same work that is actually not the claim that the gender pay gap people are making but like with the war in Iraq where they were glad to let people think Saddam had had a hand in 9/11 even though they didn't have to and say that the gender pay gap people are quite happy for people to believe that the issue is women are earning 77% of what men are earning for doing the same work that is not the claim because in fact the Equal Pay Act of 1963 already made it illegal for women to earn less for doing the same work that's not the issue what they're saying is that if you if you add up all the hours that women work in all different occupations and you add up all the hours at men work and you divide the one into the other the answer is 77% so you might ask yourself well what kind of jobs do they have might that have a little to do with the difference do they have different kinds of jobs in general what are their degrees in are women getting degrees in engineering more often than men are they getting degrees in education more often than men which one pays better how many hours are they working can you believe that's not factored in that's not even factored in they say well we're dealing with full-time workers that's an equivocation full-time according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics means you work in the vicinity of 40 to 41 hours plus or no I pick a part it's 35 hours now they now say 35 hours plus means you're working full-time well let's disaggregate those statistics let's see how many of those people are working just 35 to 39 hours 12 percent of women are earning 35 to 39 hours per week and 5% of men are working 35 to 39 how many are working 41 hours plus 26 percent of men are working for 41 hours plus only 14 percent of women are working 41 hours plus so when you factor in the number of hours worked the so-called 23% pay gap drops immediately to 12% just with that one adjustment now how could they not know that right that's an obvious lie are they that pathetic and uninformed they don't even know the difference in hours were they're going to make a big federal case out of this whole thing and they're not even measuring hoursworked no I don't believe that they're obviously lying because they don't care about the facts they honestly do not care I remember when I was in academia year after year I would say gosh man I've got all the facts and statistics what do they care what they care about is power they don't care about these statistics now what's interesting is we still have a 12% pay gap to account for but you know what institution in the United States a very prominent institution also has a 12% gender pay gap the Obama White House now they're going to go around and harass private employers all day long about having a 12% pay gap so it was raised to Jay Carney well hey I mean you guys have a 12% pay gap how do you account for that and you know what the answer was well you know I mean women have different jobs in the White House than men you don't say that's the point all right well where's the 12 per second again there are many possible reasons but one of them of course is the difference in effects on men and women of marriage marriage and childbearing if a woman expects to be out of the labor force for an extended period of time to raise a family this automatically rules out certain high paying occupations where your knowledge would be simply out-of-date by the time you return so there are some high paying types of careers that are immediately ruled out moreover there are other careers where there are a lot of people packing the I into them because they're so desirable from the point of view of a woman with children like education or being a secretary where you can make hours that are very friendly and family friendly so this is entirely benign these are the this is these are the ways people sort themselves out in these these particular jobs tend to have lower salaries but this is not any sinister plot to keep women down obviously if women were only earning 70% seventeen percent of what men earn every business you know how how razor-thin profit margins are these days they would drop every man on the payroll in a second and hire women to get a 23% advantage over your competitors it's so funny how these same people spend all their time talking about how greedy the private sector is and they don't stop to realize if they were that greedy and there really were a 23% pay gap there'd be no male employees it would all have been fired hello so I cover this in that Bernie Sanders is wrong book so there's all these statistics and much more analyzing that is all in there it's important by the way to disaggregate statistics to understand what's really going on it's not enough to say well there must be some discrimination because white PhDs are earning more than black PhDs or Asian PhDs or any more well the question would be what are the PhDs in are the PhDs in chemistry in mathematics and in engineering as most of the Asian PhDs are which these are very high-paying fields or at least 50% of black PhDs are in education which is a notoriously low-paying field might this account for the disparity we're seeing what would that be a better way to try to think about this than to assume there's a deliberate hate-filled campaign against black PhDs in the United States why would that be your automatic default position to assume the absolute worst of your fellow human beings educational differences can also account for later outcomes in life and here we have an enormous amount of material that we can cover so I'll keep it as limited as I can there was a study in the late 1990s it was the NAEP I think was a National Assessment of Educational Progress big thing fully funded and what it found that after billions of dollars had been spent on busing programs and so on and on they found that the average black student who is about to complete his senior year of high school was slightly lower in reading and u.s. history than the average white 8th grader and was far below the average white 8th grader in math and geography they saw that the progress between 1977 and 19 99 among black students in science was they went from the eighth percentile to the tenth percentile in the year 2001 they found that the math SAT on the math SAT the number of black students scoring 700 or above in the entire country was 700 whereas Asians vastly outnumbered by black students had over 16,000 such students it was found that even in the early years beginning in kindergarten there are disparities so this is long before the there could be other sorts of influences so for example the National Center for Educational statistics found that black students entering kindergarten were already disproportionately testing in the bottom quarter of students in reading math and general knowledge that between 1/3 and 1/2 of black students were testing that low but only 1/6 of whites they also noted behavioural disparities requiring discipline also evident that early age and this is sometimes been attributed to racist white teachers who just arbitrarily pick out the black students but to the contrary they found that black teachers are even tougher on the black students than the white ones are this gap persists even when social class is accounted for yes obviously people who are raised in a wealthier environment do better but that's true of whites also so the gap is still basically the same it's only marginally different and there is a study done of an affluent Cleveland suburb called Shaker Heights Ohio this is where the high school spends about 50% more than the national average and the town's black residents have only slightly below the hourly slightly below the white residents in terms of Education and income levels in this school anybody can take advanced placement classes you can take any class you want so there was a special effort to get the black students to take the advanced placement classes 30% of them do but 87% of the white students do 2/3 of the city's black students were failing at least one of the ohio state proficiency test this was true only of 1/6 of whites over half of whites passed the test with honors this was true of 4% of black students and as Stefan Thernstrom points out he was my professor at Harvard that number 4% is no higher than the statewide average for blacks despite the fact that income and educational levels of black families in Shaker Heights were far above those for Ohio as a whole and children attending integrated school they were attending integrated schools that were regarded among the best in the state well these are facts you know as I say you're entitled to your opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts so therefore we need political action is the remedy that's proposed by the political politically correct movement obviously we need state action to deal with problems like this to deal with disparities to deal with income disparities do weather whatever we need we need state action but one thing so Lowell has pointed out as he has studied groups ethnic groups all over the world is that actually it's the most successful minority F ethnic and racial groups that are not involved in politics at all he said for example if you look in the United States look at the groups that got a hit they didn't get involved in politics till after they got ahead but look at the groups that lagged behind the most the Irish for example the Irish had political machines they did everything to get involved in politics and they were the slowest to advance in Detroit you had you had blacks elected at every single conceivable level of government a lot of good it did them how about the Chinese in the United States only after they became affluent did the Chinese begin to get involved in politics and even then they campaigned on on platforms of advancing the general welfare not being obsessed with their their race this is true also of the Chinese in Southeast Asia and in the Caribbean it's true of the Germans in the United States it's true of the Germans in Brazil and it's true of the Germans in Australia English immigrants in Argentina have been very prosperous but played next to no role in Argentine politics for a very long time Italians were notorious for not participating in American politics and even for choosing non-italians over Italians in fact in 1940 the best-known elected official Italian elected official in the u.s. Fiorello LaGuardia lost the Italian vote to his his Irish competitor now even when government has gotten involved in the United States the outcomes of course as you can predict have been terrible in 1948 when the minimum wage was it hadn't been adjusted for inflation so it was basically lower than typical wage everybody was earning anyway so it really was not even a factor they may as well have been no minimum wage in 1948 black teen unemployment was under 10% then they started increasing the minimum wage that was the last time black teen unemployment would ever be below 20 percent by the 1970s it was around 47% and it tracks the increase in the minimum wage very closely or of course there's been a lot talked about how the welfare state encourages all kinds of pathological behavior and all kinds of unhealthy behavior it encourages the opposite of the sorts of virtues we would want to see encourage and people say yeah yeah I sort of accept that but the fact is in the 1920s in New York you know the percentage of families black families headed by a single woman 3% so much for the legacy of slavery argument how could the legacy of slavery be worse the farther away in time you get from slavery from 1940 to 1960 the black poverty rate declined eighty seven percent to forty seven percent how did it do that forty percentage points that's before there was a war on poverty as before there was a Great Society as before any of these things it was migration black migration that was what solved it now it's true that you do see a continued eighteen percent decline the poverty rate that's not in Anne Shiell later on but this is an already-existing trend and if I had a little more time I would tell you about already existing trends in black employment before the 1964 Civil Rights Act already existing we see greater gains in employment in the 1950s and 40s then in the 1960s no one tells you that because that would undermine the narrative we can't have that so the argument just becomes that black so everything they have to the government these are already existing trends everything you can think of was an already existing trend all right now what I do want to leave you with a all right we're bombarded with falsehoods that are easily refuted and we got to figure out what to do about it before I do that I do want to point out one little thing though that I forgot to mention just because it was so big when I was in school when I was in college a big issue on campus was faculty diversity and we were told and we heard this over and over again the fact we don't have more black professors at Harvard is an indication of a deep-seated racism at the university so they don't they don't hesitate to accuse people the basest motives imaginable just immediately automatically assume that so I wrote an article about this at the time and I pointed out that I don't think it's because Harvard doesn't want more black perfect Harvard would you tell every Harvard administrator would step over his own grandmother putting his boot right in her face to get more black faculty you insane the reason we haven't got it is that you just look at the numbers in 1988 because I entered in 1990 the number of people awarded PhDs in math and computers was six hundred six hundred and eight to be precise of those two were black how many of those is Harvard going to be able to hire how many in and we can go into a lot of other scientific fields where the number is also extremely low even in US history five and that includes african-american history five how many colleges and universities are there do the math and it goes on and then there are entire fields dozen them with zero black PhDs at all now you can say this is because they didn't have adequate opportunity whatever the explanation for that is this is not the moment to deal with it deal with it earlier but it certainly to go around saying that you are bad because you just don't want different people here at the university is just morally wrong and despicable and disgusting to basically use career destroying smears to try to advance your so-called argument which has as usual zero statistics behind it all right so what do we do well it's true as Tom DiLorenzo says we can ridicule these people that's easy because they're so ridiculously wrong on everything and then they just double down they're really wrong and then they just they go out of their way we can't have anyone come to campus to talk about how wrong we are we'll all sit as Tom DiLorenzo says about Brown University we'll sit in our safe room with our pillow and blanket and our coloring book and if people watching on YouTube that's actually what they have at Brown University look they have coloring books they have cookies in there to make you feel better well I sure I would need that too if I were being demolished so badly in a debate give me my pillow and blanket but we can do more than this first of all anytime there's any article pushing the PC agenda this is the only time I ever recommend you read the comments section in the internet the only time it's ever going to make you feel better no one's buying no one's buying it they've been playing this tune for too long but there are two other practical things because I want to say what a practical things we can do one is of course the thing that I've had the chance to work on for a couple of years and that's Ron Paul's home school program Ron Paul home school com is something I devoted two years of my life to and if people are exposed to a have a chance to hear an alternative they hear the standard worldview and a different one like namely hours which is what they'll also get a chance to hear in this curriculum they'll be less likely to be swept away by political correctness they won't buy into it because they'll have the analytical tools and the knowledge to know where it goes wrong that'll help and secondly of course the Mises Institute which is utterly fearless which is smeared by everybody you would want it to be smeared by attacked by everybody whose attacks are medals on its chest every time it's attacked you say ah my donation to the Mises Institute is secure would never dream of doing anything other than help the Mises Institute more because that's what we need is not people who go scurrying for the exits because the new york times call them a name if the New York Times is inviting you to write a column for them that means you're their lap dog the Mises Institute isn't anybody's lap dog it believes in truth it'll follow that truth wherever it takes us and that's why I commend it to you so strongly and I'm so proud to say that I've been connected with the Mises Institute as a student and now in my present career capacity for over 20 years and I invite you to join me thank you very much you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 32,753

Rating: 4.8910193 out of 5

Keywords: PC, Tom Woods, Ludwig Von Mises Institute (Organization), Murray Rothbard (Author), Logic, Argument, Politics, Freedom, Peace, Intimidation, Fallacy, Truth, Coercion

Id: RX-T7Cg9nzg

Length: 34min 41sec (2081 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2015