September 24, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
Thomas Sowell, the brilliant Black author who has provided sage advice to the country for over six decades, is feature in this segment via excerpts from his book Social Justice Fallacies (2023). Three such excerpts really resonated with me relative to the upcoming election.
Currently, we have a candidate who did not realize the consequences of inflation when casting the deciding votes on the American Rescue Package and Inflation Reduction Act nor were the military and foreign relations consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal recognized. Both occurring despite strong consequence counsel in both situations – indications of linear “cause and effect” thinking.
Sowell also provides wisdom on the question of equity. He says it is a nice concept. but it is impossible to attain. First, you can’t get everyone to start at the same place and if you were able to achieve the same outcomes for everyone the consequences for society would be dire as history has shown for those countries that have tried, e.g., Russia, China, Cuba.
Taking that a step further, progressives support equity as the means to address oppression. Then support the elimination of Capitalism to solve income inequality. This is “cause and effect” thinking of the two independently. When combined the two loops eliminate income incentives which leads to poverty -- proven in Russia, China (by Mao), Cuba and Venezuela. Systems thinking leads to thinking about positive cause and effect loops to solve oppression, e.g., incentives based on merit, income increases and retention based in Capitalism, opportunity based on education and hard work and the individual freedom to excel. The interplay of these cause and effect loops produce income enhancement which has decreased poverty and oppression for those countries applying it.
Sowell provides sage, profound advice. Each time I read the excerpts I garner a new thought.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Thomas Sowell, the brilliant Black author who has provided sage advice to the country for over six decades, is feature in this segment via excerpts from his book Social Justice Fallacies (2023). Three such excerpts really resonated with me relative to the upcoming election.
- Progressives remain impervious to evidence or conclusions contrary to their own beliefs, despite empirical evidence.
- People who imagine that the benefits they receive “free” from government will be paid by others may discover that they themselves end up paying for those benefits, as the result of inflation.
- The intellectual elites see themselves as key possessors of consequential knowledge. Their conception of democracy seems to be equalization of outcomes. This would confer benefits on the less fortunate, at the expense of those whom these surrogates consider less deserving. That is very different from democracy as a political system.
Currently, we have a candidate who did not realize the consequences of inflation when casting the deciding votes on the American Rescue Package and Inflation Reduction Act nor were the military and foreign relations consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal recognized. Both occurring despite strong consequence counsel in both situations – indications of linear “cause and effect” thinking.
Sowell also provides wisdom on the question of equity. He says it is a nice concept. but it is impossible to attain. First, you can’t get everyone to start at the same place and if you were able to achieve the same outcomes for everyone the consequences for society would be dire as history has shown for those countries that have tried, e.g., Russia, China, Cuba.
Taking that a step further, progressives support equity as the means to address oppression. Then support the elimination of Capitalism to solve income inequality. This is “cause and effect” thinking of the two independently. When combined the two loops eliminate income incentives which leads to poverty -- proven in Russia, China (by Mao), Cuba and Venezuela. Systems thinking leads to thinking about positive cause and effect loops to solve oppression, e.g., incentives based on merit, income increases and retention based in Capitalism, opportunity based on education and hard work and the individual freedom to excel. The interplay of these cause and effect loops produce income enhancement which has decreased poverty and oppression for those countries applying it.
Sowell provides sage, profound advice. Each time I read the excerpts I garner a new thought.
Happy Learning,
Harley
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COUNTRY – SEGMENT 15
SOCIAL JUSTICE FALLACIES – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: Social Justice Fallacies reveal how many things that are thought to be true simply cannot stand up to documented facts, which are often the opposite of what is widely believed. However attractive the social justice vision, the crucial question is whether the social justice agenda will get us to the fulfillment of that vision. History shows that the social justice agenda has often led in the opposite direction, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Crusaders with an utter certainty about their mission are often undeterred by obstacles, evidence or even fatal dangers. That is where much of the Western world is today. The question is whether we will continue on heedlessly, past the point of no return.
EQUITY FALLACIES: When American children are raised in different social classes, within different child-rearing practices, the chances of these children growing up with equal capacities in adulthood can be seriously reduced. Can anyone seriously believe that children spending their formative years growing up in homes this different are likely to be the same as others in school, on a job or elsewhere?
The seemingly invincible fallacy at the heart of the social justice vision is that large categories of people – classes, races, nations – would tend to be either equal, or at least comparable, in their outcomes in various endeavors, if it were not for some discriminatory bias that has intervened to produce the large disparities we see around us.
We might all agree that “equal chances for all” would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival. Do we want the mixture of students who are going to be trained to do advanced medical research to be representative of the demographic make-up of the population as a whole. Do you want airlines to have pilots chosen for demographic representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly on planes whose pilots were chosen for their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination?
RACIAL FALLACIES: Since the most often discussed disparities in the United States have been disparities between black and white Americans, this is as good a place to begin as any. The question is whether difference between black and white Americans are unusual or are of unusually larger magnitude than difference among other groups in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Median black America family income has been lower than median white American income for generations. How does that particular disparity compare to disparities among other groups in the U.S., or among groups in other countries? Within the U.S., the median per capita income of such Asian ethnic groups as those of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry is more than twice as high as the median per capita income of Mexican Americans. These Asian groups also have higher median per capita incomes than the median per capita income of white Americans. Is this the “white supremacy” we are so often warned about in some quarters? Even among low-income, non-white groups, there is considerable overlap with the incomes of white Americans.
Over a span of more than a quarter of a century since 1994, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent. And in no year in more than a half century since 1959 has the national poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent. If black family poverty is caused by “systemic racism,” do racists make an exception for blacks who are married? Do racists either know or care whether blacks are married? By contrast, single-parent families have much higher poverty rates than married-couple families – whether they are black or white.
There are counties in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky – Clay County and Owsley Country – that are more than 90% white, where the median household income is not only less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole, but also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole. A Census Bureau study found Owsley County to be the lowest-income country in any American state in 2014 and its population was 99% white. These were not just isolated flukes in a particular year. These very same counties had the very same income pattern in five different surveys. People in low-income American hillbilly counties already face zero racism, because these people are virtually all white. Yet they have lower incomes than blacks.
As with other disparities, differences between races are not necessarily racial differences, either in the sense of being caused by genes or being caused by racial discrimination. Some behavioral patterns produce similar outcomes in groups that differ by race, so that these disparities in outcomes can reflect disparities in behavior for whatever reason.
PROGRESSIVISM FALLICIES WITH RACE; In the early decades of the 20th century, when Progressivism was a major new force among American intellectuals and in politics, one of the Progressivism’s central tenets was genetic determinism – the belief that less successful races were genetically inferior. Later, in the closing decades of the 20th century, Progressives with similar views on such other issues as the role of the government, environmental protection and legal philosophy, now took an opposite view on racial issues. Less successful races were now seen as being automatically victims of racism, as they had once been considered automatically inferior. The conclusions were different, but the way evidence was used, and the way contrary views and contrary evidence were disregarded was very similar.
Both sets of Progressives expressed utter certainty in their conclusions – on this and other subjects – and dismissed critics as uninformed at best and confused or dishonest at worst. While these different generations reached opposite conclusions on the reasons for racial differences in economic and social outcomes, they shared very similar views on the role of government in general and judges in particular. They also had similar practices in dealing with empirical evidence. Both remained largely impervious to evidence or conclusions contrary to their own beliefs.
In the new Progressive era, statistical disparities between blacks and whites, in any endeavor, have usually been sufficient to produce a conclusion that racial discrimination was the reason. Often there are also statistical data on Asian Americans in these same endeavors. But these Asian American data are almost invariably omitted, not only by the media, but even by academic scholars in elite universities. Such data would often present a serious challenge to the conclusions reached by latter-day Progressives.
One of the major factors in the housing boom and bust, which produced an economic crisis in the United States, early in the 20th century, was a widespread belief that there was rampant racial discrimination by banks and other lending institutions against blacks applying for mortgage loans. Various statistics from a number of sources showed that, although black and white applicants for conventional mortgage loans were approved, black applicants were turned down at a higher rate than white applicants for the same loans. What was almost universally omitted were statistical data showing that whites were turned down for those same loans more often than Asian Americans. Nor was there any great mystery as to why this was so. The average credit rating of whites was higher than the average credit rating for blacks – and the average credit rating of Asian Americans was higher than the average credit rating of whites. Nor was this the only economically relevant difference.
Nevertheless, there were outraged demands in the media, in academia and in politics that the government should “do something” about racial discrimination by banks and other mortgage lenders. The government responded by doing many things. The net result was that it forced mortgage lenders to lower their lending standards. This made mortgage loans so risky that many people, including the author of this book, warned that the housing market would “collapse like a house of cards.” When it did, the whole economy collapsed. Low-income blacks were among those who suffered the most.
Martin Luther King’s message was equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race. But that agenda, and the wide consensus it had, began eroding in the years that followed. The goal changed from equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race, to equal outcomes for groups, whether these groups were defined by race, sex or otherwise. What now rose to dominance was the social justice agenda, which included equalized outcomes in the present and reparations for the past. This new agenda drew on myths presented as history.
We need to pay more attention to other dangers besides racism. That is especially so for the younger generation, who need to deal with the problems and dangers actually confronting them, rather than remain fixated on the problems and dangers of the generations before them. If racists cannot prevent today’s minority young people from becoming pilots, the teachers’ unions can – by denying them a decent education, in schools whose top priorities are iron-clad job security for teachers, and billions of dollars in dues for teachers’ unions.
MERIT: Opponents of group preferences, such as affirmative action for hiring or for college admission, often say that each individual should be judged by that individual’s own merit. In most cases, “merit” in this context seems to mean individual capabilities that are relevant to the particular endeavor. Merit in this sense is simply a factual question, and the validity of the answer depends on the predictive validity of the criteria used to compare different applicants’ capabilities. Social justice advocates see not only a factual issue, but also a moral issue. A moral question as to how those capabilities were acquired – whether they were a result of some special personal exertions or were just some “unmerited advantage,” perhaps due to being born into unusually more favorable circumstances than the circumstances of most other people. Merit in this sense, with a moral dimension, raises very different questions which have very different answers.
The advantages that some people have, in a given endeavor, are not just disadvantages to everyone else. These advantages also benefit all the people who pay for the product of service provided by that endeavor. It is not a zero-sum situation. Mutual benefit is the only way the endeavor can continue, in a competitive market, with vast numbers of people free to decide what they are willing to pay for.
A country fighting for its life on the battlefield, cannot afford the luxury of choosing its generals on the basis of demographic representation – “looking like America” – rather than on the basis of military skills, regardless of how those skills were acquired. Not if the country wants to win and survive. That is especially so if the country wants to win its military victories without more losses of soldiers’ lives than necessary. In that case, it cannot put generals in charge of those soldiers when these are not the best generals available.
If some people are creating more wealth than they are receiving as income, then they are not making other people poorer. Arguing as if some people’s high incomes were deducted from some fixed or predestined total income – leaving less for others – may be clever. But cleverness is not wisdom, and artful insinuations are no substitute for factual evidence, if your goal is knowing the facts. But, if your goals are political or ideological, there is no question that one of the most politically successful messages of the 20th century was that the rich have gotten rich by taking from the poor.
The Marxian message of “exploitation” helped sweep communists into power in countries around the world in the 20th century at a pace and on a scale seldom seen in history. There is clearly a political market for that message, and communists are just one of the ideological groups to use it successfully for their own purposes, despite how disastrously that turned out to be for millions of other human beings living under communist dictatorships. The very possibility that poor Americans, for example, are having a rising standard of living because of progress created by people who are getting rich would be an anathema to social justice advocates.
REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH FALLACIES: The confiscation and redistribution of wealth – whether on a moderate or a comprehensive scale – is at the heart of the social justice agenda. While social justice advocates stress what they see as the desirability of such policies, the feasibility of those policies tends to receive far less attention, and the consequences of trying and failing often receive virtually no attention. Politically attractive as confiscation and redistribution of the wealth of “the rich: are conceived as being inert pieces on a chessboard. To the extent that “the rich” can foresee and react to redistributive policies, the actual consequences can be very different from what was intended.
Among the more obvious options available to “the rich” – when they are forewarned of large-scale confiscations of their wealth – include (1) investing their wealth in tax-exempt securities, (2) sending their wealth beyond the taxing jurisdiction, or (3) moving themselves personally beyond the taxing jurisdiction. Liquid assets in today’s globalized economies around the world, vast sums of money can be transferred electronically from country to country, with the click of a computer mouse. This means the actual consequences of raising taxes on “the rich” is a factual question. The outcome is not necessarily predictable, and the potential consequences may or may not make the planned confiscation feasible. Raising the tax rate X percent does not guarantee that the tax revenue will also rise X percent.
In politics, the goal is not truth but votes. If most voters believe what is said, that rhetoric is a success, as far as politicians are concerned. But, from the standpoint of the public, the claim that the cost of government giveaways will be paid for by taxes collected from “millionaires and billionaires” is a proposition that very much requires empirical examination, since “millionaires and billionaires are not always cooperative.
People who imagine that the benefits they receive “free” from government will be paid by others may discover that they themselves end up paying for those benefits, as the result of inflation. Just as tax rates on paper are not necessarily collected, so things that are not taxes and have the same effect as taxes. Inflation is one of those things. When tax revenues to pay for “free” benefits given to various groups fail to cover the expenses of those benefits, the government can get additional money needed to cover the deficit by issuing more government bonds and selling them. To the extent that those bonds are purchased in the market, the cost is passed on, with interest added to the taxpayers of the future. But, if not enough of these bonds are bought in the market to cover the remaining deficit, these bonds are bought by the Federal Reserve System, a federal government agency legally authorized to create money. Then, as this additional money goes into circulation, the result is inflation.
The net result of inflationary price increases is that everyone’s money – regardless of their income – loses some of its value. It is the same as if a tax had been imposed on everybody, from the poorest to the richest, and with everyone paying the same tax rate on their money as “millionaires and billionaires” pay. The net result of all this is that an inflation “tax” can take a higher percentage of the assets of the poorest people, whose money is likely to be a higher percentage of their total assets.
In short, an inflation “tax” is likely to be a regressive tax, paid whenever buying groceries, gasoline or other consumer goods at higher prices. The illusion of getting “free” benefits from the government may be maintained, so long as the recipients do not see the connection between the higher prices they end up paying for what they buy, after the government gives them “free” things. The biggest beneficiaries of this situation are likely to be politicians, who can attract voters by offering them “free” benefits – “as a right, not a privilege” – which the voters end up paying for in a roundabout way, through inflationary price increases on the things they buy.
KNOWLEDGE FALLACIES: Intellectual elites see themselves as key possessors of consequential knowledge. This same conception of the educational role of crusading intellectual elites was a central feature of the Progressive era, in both the early 20th century and the later 20th century, continuing on into our own times. Their conception of democracy seems to be equalization of outcomes, by intellectual elites. This would confer benefits on the less fortunate, at the expense of those whom these surrogates consider less deserving. That is very different from democracy as a political system, based on free choices by members of the voting public, to determine what laws and policies they want to be governed by – and which individuals they want to put in charge of the government, to administer those laws and policies.
One of the hallmarks of elite intellectuals’ seeking to preempt other people’s decisions is a reliance on unsubstantiated pronouncements, based on elite consensus, treated as if that was equivalent to documented facts. One revealing sign of this is how often the arguments of people with other views are not answered with counterarguments, but with ad hominem assertions instead. This pattern has persisted for more than a century, not only in discussions of social justice issues but also in other issues.
IMPLICATIONS: How we see the distribution of consequential knowledge is crucial for deciding what kinds of decisions make sense through what kinds of policies and institutions. The enormously vast amount of consequential knowledge dispersed among the population of a whole society makes the differences in the amount of such knowledge between some people and other people “comparatively insignificant.” Many intellectuals with high accomplishments seem to assume that those accomplishments confer validity to their notion about a broad swath of issues, ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments. But stepping outside the scope of one’s expertise can be like stepping off a cliff. Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. They have already done that enough times – and in enough different ways – for us to reconsider, before joining their latest stampede, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence.
EDUCATION: A very large issue is why education has so often become indoctrination and for whose benefit. The issue is not even whether what is being indoctrinated is true or false. Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that everything with which students are being indoctrinated today is true, these issues of today are by no means necessarily the same as the issues that are likely to arise during the half-century or more of life that most students ahead of them after they have finished their education.
What they will need is an education that has equipped them with the intellectual skills, knowledge and experience to confront and analyze opposing views – and subject those views to scrutiny and systemic analyses. That is precisely what they do not get when being indoctrinated with whatever is currently in vogue today. Such “education” sets up whole generations to become easy prey for whatever clever demagogues came along, with heady rhetoric that can manipulate people’s emotions.
SOCIAL ENGINEERING FALLACIES – AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Statistical data on the annual rate of poverty among black Americans beginning is 1940 – that is 20 years before the civil rights laws and expanded social welfare state policies of the 1960s – show that poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% over the next two decades. The poverty rate among blacks fell an additional 17 points, to 30% in 1970 – a rate only slightly lower than in the two preceding decades, but certainly not higher. The black poverty rate fell yet again during the 1970s, from 30% in 1970 to 29% in 1980.
At that point affirmative action meant equal opportunity for individuals, not equal outcome for groups. Subsequent Executive Orders by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon made numerical group outcomes the test of affirmative action in by the 1970s. With affirmative action now transformed from equal individual opportunity to equalized group outcomes, many people saw this as a more beneficial policy for blacks and other low-income racial or ethnic groups to whom this principle applied. But the one-percentage point decline in black poverty during the 1970s, after affirmative action meant group preferences or quotas, goes completely counter to the prevailing narrative. Group preference policies in other countries did little for people in poverty, just as affirmative actions did little for black Americans in poverty.
CONCLUSION: Where, fundamentally, did the social justice vision go wrong? The painful reality is that no human being has either the vast range of consequential knowledge, or the overwhelming power, required to make the social justice ideal become a reality. Some fortunate societies have seen enough favorable factors come together to create basic prosperity and common decency among free people. But that is not enough for many social justice crusaders.
The history of totalitarian dictatorships that arose in the 20th century and were responsible for the deaths of millions of their own people in peacetime, should be an urgent warning against putting too much power in the hands of any human beings. That some of these disastrous regimes were established with the help of many sincere and earnest people, seeking high ideals and a better life for the less fortunate, should be an especially relevant warning to people seeking social justice, in disregard of the dangers.
It is hard to think of any power exercised by human beings over other human beings that has not been abused. Yet we must have laws and governments, because anarchy is worse. But we cannot just keep surrendering more and more of our freedoms to politicians, bureaucrats, and judges – who are what elected governments basically consist of – in exchange for plausible-sounding rhetoric that we do not bother to subject to the test of facts. Among the many facts that need to be checked is the actual track record of crusading intellectuals on a range of issues extending from social justice to foreign policies and military conflict.
There have been many examples and places around the world that lifted themselves out of poverty in the second half of the 20th century. These would include Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the huge nations of India and China had vast millions of poor people rise out of poverty. The common denominator in all these places was that their rise out of poverty began after government micro-managing of the economy was reduced. This was especially ironic in the case of China, with a communist government.
With social justice advocates supposedly concerned with the fate of the poor, it may seem strange that they seem to have paid remarkably little attention to places where the poor have risen out of poverty at a dramatic rate and on a massive scale. That at least raises the question whether the social justice advocates’ priorities are the poor themselves or their own vision of the world and their own role in that vision.
Source: Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (2023)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
SOCIAL JUSTICE FALLACIES – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: Social Justice Fallacies reveal how many things that are thought to be true simply cannot stand up to documented facts, which are often the opposite of what is widely believed. However attractive the social justice vision, the crucial question is whether the social justice agenda will get us to the fulfillment of that vision. History shows that the social justice agenda has often led in the opposite direction, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Crusaders with an utter certainty about their mission are often undeterred by obstacles, evidence or even fatal dangers. That is where much of the Western world is today. The question is whether we will continue on heedlessly, past the point of no return.
EQUITY FALLACIES: When American children are raised in different social classes, within different child-rearing practices, the chances of these children growing up with equal capacities in adulthood can be seriously reduced. Can anyone seriously believe that children spending their formative years growing up in homes this different are likely to be the same as others in school, on a job or elsewhere?
The seemingly invincible fallacy at the heart of the social justice vision is that large categories of people – classes, races, nations – would tend to be either equal, or at least comparable, in their outcomes in various endeavors, if it were not for some discriminatory bias that has intervened to produce the large disparities we see around us.
We might all agree that “equal chances for all” would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival. Do we want the mixture of students who are going to be trained to do advanced medical research to be representative of the demographic make-up of the population as a whole. Do you want airlines to have pilots chosen for demographic representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly on planes whose pilots were chosen for their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination?
RACIAL FALLACIES: Since the most often discussed disparities in the United States have been disparities between black and white Americans, this is as good a place to begin as any. The question is whether difference between black and white Americans are unusual or are of unusually larger magnitude than difference among other groups in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Median black America family income has been lower than median white American income for generations. How does that particular disparity compare to disparities among other groups in the U.S., or among groups in other countries? Within the U.S., the median per capita income of such Asian ethnic groups as those of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry is more than twice as high as the median per capita income of Mexican Americans. These Asian groups also have higher median per capita incomes than the median per capita income of white Americans. Is this the “white supremacy” we are so often warned about in some quarters? Even among low-income, non-white groups, there is considerable overlap with the incomes of white Americans.
Over a span of more than a quarter of a century since 1994, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent. And in no year in more than a half century since 1959 has the national poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent. If black family poverty is caused by “systemic racism,” do racists make an exception for blacks who are married? Do racists either know or care whether blacks are married? By contrast, single-parent families have much higher poverty rates than married-couple families – whether they are black or white.
There are counties in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky – Clay County and Owsley Country – that are more than 90% white, where the median household income is not only less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole, but also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole. A Census Bureau study found Owsley County to be the lowest-income country in any American state in 2014 and its population was 99% white. These were not just isolated flukes in a particular year. These very same counties had the very same income pattern in five different surveys. People in low-income American hillbilly counties already face zero racism, because these people are virtually all white. Yet they have lower incomes than blacks.
As with other disparities, differences between races are not necessarily racial differences, either in the sense of being caused by genes or being caused by racial discrimination. Some behavioral patterns produce similar outcomes in groups that differ by race, so that these disparities in outcomes can reflect disparities in behavior for whatever reason.
PROGRESSIVISM FALLICIES WITH RACE; In the early decades of the 20th century, when Progressivism was a major new force among American intellectuals and in politics, one of the Progressivism’s central tenets was genetic determinism – the belief that less successful races were genetically inferior. Later, in the closing decades of the 20th century, Progressives with similar views on such other issues as the role of the government, environmental protection and legal philosophy, now took an opposite view on racial issues. Less successful races were now seen as being automatically victims of racism, as they had once been considered automatically inferior. The conclusions were different, but the way evidence was used, and the way contrary views and contrary evidence were disregarded was very similar.
Both sets of Progressives expressed utter certainty in their conclusions – on this and other subjects – and dismissed critics as uninformed at best and confused or dishonest at worst. While these different generations reached opposite conclusions on the reasons for racial differences in economic and social outcomes, they shared very similar views on the role of government in general and judges in particular. They also had similar practices in dealing with empirical evidence. Both remained largely impervious to evidence or conclusions contrary to their own beliefs.
In the new Progressive era, statistical disparities between blacks and whites, in any endeavor, have usually been sufficient to produce a conclusion that racial discrimination was the reason. Often there are also statistical data on Asian Americans in these same endeavors. But these Asian American data are almost invariably omitted, not only by the media, but even by academic scholars in elite universities. Such data would often present a serious challenge to the conclusions reached by latter-day Progressives.
One of the major factors in the housing boom and bust, which produced an economic crisis in the United States, early in the 20th century, was a widespread belief that there was rampant racial discrimination by banks and other lending institutions against blacks applying for mortgage loans. Various statistics from a number of sources showed that, although black and white applicants for conventional mortgage loans were approved, black applicants were turned down at a higher rate than white applicants for the same loans. What was almost universally omitted were statistical data showing that whites were turned down for those same loans more often than Asian Americans. Nor was there any great mystery as to why this was so. The average credit rating of whites was higher than the average credit rating for blacks – and the average credit rating of Asian Americans was higher than the average credit rating of whites. Nor was this the only economically relevant difference.
Nevertheless, there were outraged demands in the media, in academia and in politics that the government should “do something” about racial discrimination by banks and other mortgage lenders. The government responded by doing many things. The net result was that it forced mortgage lenders to lower their lending standards. This made mortgage loans so risky that many people, including the author of this book, warned that the housing market would “collapse like a house of cards.” When it did, the whole economy collapsed. Low-income blacks were among those who suffered the most.
Martin Luther King’s message was equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race. But that agenda, and the wide consensus it had, began eroding in the years that followed. The goal changed from equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race, to equal outcomes for groups, whether these groups were defined by race, sex or otherwise. What now rose to dominance was the social justice agenda, which included equalized outcomes in the present and reparations for the past. This new agenda drew on myths presented as history.
We need to pay more attention to other dangers besides racism. That is especially so for the younger generation, who need to deal with the problems and dangers actually confronting them, rather than remain fixated on the problems and dangers of the generations before them. If racists cannot prevent today’s minority young people from becoming pilots, the teachers’ unions can – by denying them a decent education, in schools whose top priorities are iron-clad job security for teachers, and billions of dollars in dues for teachers’ unions.
MERIT: Opponents of group preferences, such as affirmative action for hiring or for college admission, often say that each individual should be judged by that individual’s own merit. In most cases, “merit” in this context seems to mean individual capabilities that are relevant to the particular endeavor. Merit in this sense is simply a factual question, and the validity of the answer depends on the predictive validity of the criteria used to compare different applicants’ capabilities. Social justice advocates see not only a factual issue, but also a moral issue. A moral question as to how those capabilities were acquired – whether they were a result of some special personal exertions or were just some “unmerited advantage,” perhaps due to being born into unusually more favorable circumstances than the circumstances of most other people. Merit in this sense, with a moral dimension, raises very different questions which have very different answers.
The advantages that some people have, in a given endeavor, are not just disadvantages to everyone else. These advantages also benefit all the people who pay for the product of service provided by that endeavor. It is not a zero-sum situation. Mutual benefit is the only way the endeavor can continue, in a competitive market, with vast numbers of people free to decide what they are willing to pay for.
A country fighting for its life on the battlefield, cannot afford the luxury of choosing its generals on the basis of demographic representation – “looking like America” – rather than on the basis of military skills, regardless of how those skills were acquired. Not if the country wants to win and survive. That is especially so if the country wants to win its military victories without more losses of soldiers’ lives than necessary. In that case, it cannot put generals in charge of those soldiers when these are not the best generals available.
If some people are creating more wealth than they are receiving as income, then they are not making other people poorer. Arguing as if some people’s high incomes were deducted from some fixed or predestined total income – leaving less for others – may be clever. But cleverness is not wisdom, and artful insinuations are no substitute for factual evidence, if your goal is knowing the facts. But, if your goals are political or ideological, there is no question that one of the most politically successful messages of the 20th century was that the rich have gotten rich by taking from the poor.
The Marxian message of “exploitation” helped sweep communists into power in countries around the world in the 20th century at a pace and on a scale seldom seen in history. There is clearly a political market for that message, and communists are just one of the ideological groups to use it successfully for their own purposes, despite how disastrously that turned out to be for millions of other human beings living under communist dictatorships. The very possibility that poor Americans, for example, are having a rising standard of living because of progress created by people who are getting rich would be an anathema to social justice advocates.
REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH FALLACIES: The confiscation and redistribution of wealth – whether on a moderate or a comprehensive scale – is at the heart of the social justice agenda. While social justice advocates stress what they see as the desirability of such policies, the feasibility of those policies tends to receive far less attention, and the consequences of trying and failing often receive virtually no attention. Politically attractive as confiscation and redistribution of the wealth of “the rich: are conceived as being inert pieces on a chessboard. To the extent that “the rich” can foresee and react to redistributive policies, the actual consequences can be very different from what was intended.
Among the more obvious options available to “the rich” – when they are forewarned of large-scale confiscations of their wealth – include (1) investing their wealth in tax-exempt securities, (2) sending their wealth beyond the taxing jurisdiction, or (3) moving themselves personally beyond the taxing jurisdiction. Liquid assets in today’s globalized economies around the world, vast sums of money can be transferred electronically from country to country, with the click of a computer mouse. This means the actual consequences of raising taxes on “the rich” is a factual question. The outcome is not necessarily predictable, and the potential consequences may or may not make the planned confiscation feasible. Raising the tax rate X percent does not guarantee that the tax revenue will also rise X percent.
In politics, the goal is not truth but votes. If most voters believe what is said, that rhetoric is a success, as far as politicians are concerned. But, from the standpoint of the public, the claim that the cost of government giveaways will be paid for by taxes collected from “millionaires and billionaires” is a proposition that very much requires empirical examination, since “millionaires and billionaires are not always cooperative.
People who imagine that the benefits they receive “free” from government will be paid by others may discover that they themselves end up paying for those benefits, as the result of inflation. Just as tax rates on paper are not necessarily collected, so things that are not taxes and have the same effect as taxes. Inflation is one of those things. When tax revenues to pay for “free” benefits given to various groups fail to cover the expenses of those benefits, the government can get additional money needed to cover the deficit by issuing more government bonds and selling them. To the extent that those bonds are purchased in the market, the cost is passed on, with interest added to the taxpayers of the future. But, if not enough of these bonds are bought in the market to cover the remaining deficit, these bonds are bought by the Federal Reserve System, a federal government agency legally authorized to create money. Then, as this additional money goes into circulation, the result is inflation.
The net result of inflationary price increases is that everyone’s money – regardless of their income – loses some of its value. It is the same as if a tax had been imposed on everybody, from the poorest to the richest, and with everyone paying the same tax rate on their money as “millionaires and billionaires” pay. The net result of all this is that an inflation “tax” can take a higher percentage of the assets of the poorest people, whose money is likely to be a higher percentage of their total assets.
In short, an inflation “tax” is likely to be a regressive tax, paid whenever buying groceries, gasoline or other consumer goods at higher prices. The illusion of getting “free” benefits from the government may be maintained, so long as the recipients do not see the connection between the higher prices they end up paying for what they buy, after the government gives them “free” things. The biggest beneficiaries of this situation are likely to be politicians, who can attract voters by offering them “free” benefits – “as a right, not a privilege” – which the voters end up paying for in a roundabout way, through inflationary price increases on the things they buy.
KNOWLEDGE FALLACIES: Intellectual elites see themselves as key possessors of consequential knowledge. This same conception of the educational role of crusading intellectual elites was a central feature of the Progressive era, in both the early 20th century and the later 20th century, continuing on into our own times. Their conception of democracy seems to be equalization of outcomes, by intellectual elites. This would confer benefits on the less fortunate, at the expense of those whom these surrogates consider less deserving. That is very different from democracy as a political system, based on free choices by members of the voting public, to determine what laws and policies they want to be governed by – and which individuals they want to put in charge of the government, to administer those laws and policies.
One of the hallmarks of elite intellectuals’ seeking to preempt other people’s decisions is a reliance on unsubstantiated pronouncements, based on elite consensus, treated as if that was equivalent to documented facts. One revealing sign of this is how often the arguments of people with other views are not answered with counterarguments, but with ad hominem assertions instead. This pattern has persisted for more than a century, not only in discussions of social justice issues but also in other issues.
IMPLICATIONS: How we see the distribution of consequential knowledge is crucial for deciding what kinds of decisions make sense through what kinds of policies and institutions. The enormously vast amount of consequential knowledge dispersed among the population of a whole society makes the differences in the amount of such knowledge between some people and other people “comparatively insignificant.” Many intellectuals with high accomplishments seem to assume that those accomplishments confer validity to their notion about a broad swath of issues, ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments. But stepping outside the scope of one’s expertise can be like stepping off a cliff. Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. They have already done that enough times – and in enough different ways – for us to reconsider, before joining their latest stampede, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence.
EDUCATION: A very large issue is why education has so often become indoctrination and for whose benefit. The issue is not even whether what is being indoctrinated is true or false. Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that everything with which students are being indoctrinated today is true, these issues of today are by no means necessarily the same as the issues that are likely to arise during the half-century or more of life that most students ahead of them after they have finished their education.
What they will need is an education that has equipped them with the intellectual skills, knowledge and experience to confront and analyze opposing views – and subject those views to scrutiny and systemic analyses. That is precisely what they do not get when being indoctrinated with whatever is currently in vogue today. Such “education” sets up whole generations to become easy prey for whatever clever demagogues came along, with heady rhetoric that can manipulate people’s emotions.
SOCIAL ENGINEERING FALLACIES – AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Statistical data on the annual rate of poverty among black Americans beginning is 1940 – that is 20 years before the civil rights laws and expanded social welfare state policies of the 1960s – show that poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% over the next two decades. The poverty rate among blacks fell an additional 17 points, to 30% in 1970 – a rate only slightly lower than in the two preceding decades, but certainly not higher. The black poverty rate fell yet again during the 1970s, from 30% in 1970 to 29% in 1980.
At that point affirmative action meant equal opportunity for individuals, not equal outcome for groups. Subsequent Executive Orders by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon made numerical group outcomes the test of affirmative action in by the 1970s. With affirmative action now transformed from equal individual opportunity to equalized group outcomes, many people saw this as a more beneficial policy for blacks and other low-income racial or ethnic groups to whom this principle applied. But the one-percentage point decline in black poverty during the 1970s, after affirmative action meant group preferences or quotas, goes completely counter to the prevailing narrative. Group preference policies in other countries did little for people in poverty, just as affirmative actions did little for black Americans in poverty.
CONCLUSION: Where, fundamentally, did the social justice vision go wrong? The painful reality is that no human being has either the vast range of consequential knowledge, or the overwhelming power, required to make the social justice ideal become a reality. Some fortunate societies have seen enough favorable factors come together to create basic prosperity and common decency among free people. But that is not enough for many social justice crusaders.
The history of totalitarian dictatorships that arose in the 20th century and were responsible for the deaths of millions of their own people in peacetime, should be an urgent warning against putting too much power in the hands of any human beings. That some of these disastrous regimes were established with the help of many sincere and earnest people, seeking high ideals and a better life for the less fortunate, should be an especially relevant warning to people seeking social justice, in disregard of the dangers.
It is hard to think of any power exercised by human beings over other human beings that has not been abused. Yet we must have laws and governments, because anarchy is worse. But we cannot just keep surrendering more and more of our freedoms to politicians, bureaucrats, and judges – who are what elected governments basically consist of – in exchange for plausible-sounding rhetoric that we do not bother to subject to the test of facts. Among the many facts that need to be checked is the actual track record of crusading intellectuals on a range of issues extending from social justice to foreign policies and military conflict.
There have been many examples and places around the world that lifted themselves out of poverty in the second half of the 20th century. These would include Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the huge nations of India and China had vast millions of poor people rise out of poverty. The common denominator in all these places was that their rise out of poverty began after government micro-managing of the economy was reduced. This was especially ironic in the case of China, with a communist government.
With social justice advocates supposedly concerned with the fate of the poor, it may seem strange that they seem to have paid remarkably little attention to places where the poor have risen out of poverty at a dramatic rate and on a massive scale. That at least raises the question whether the social justice advocates’ priorities are the poor themselves or their own vision of the world and their own role in that vision.
Source: Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (2023)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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