Inequities

Surely, the world needed Thomas Sowell’s new book about the scam called social justice. I have not read the book, but I am happy to report Hannah Gal’s summary in a Quillette review.

As I understand it, Sowell makes two salient points. 

First, that the basis for social justice politics is warped. The notion that all groups should have equal representation at all levels of society and at all levels of success is idealistic mumbo jumbo. It has never happened. It will never happen. 

Second, Sowell argues that the effort to pretend that we must grant degrees, hire and promote in order to make the world correspond to our idealistic vision has merely caused trouble.

Inequality and inequity are built into the system. Railing against them is a fool’s game. 

Gal summarizes Sowell:

“Whatever the condition of human beings at the beginning of the species,” writes Thomas Sowell in his new book Social Justice Fallacies, “scores of millennia had already come and gone before anyone coined the phrase social justice.” And during those vast expanses of time, “different peoples evolved differently in very different settings around the world, developing different talents that created reciprocal inequalities of achievements in different endeavors.” They did so “without necessarily creating equality, or even comparability, in any of those endeavors.”

Those who refuse to accept that people have disparate talents and disparate goals see all inequities as a function of bigotry and oppression.

In large parts of society, it has instilled the notion that human disparities are entirely the result of oppression, exploitation, and discrimination, and that a remedial equality of outcome must therefore be pursued at all costs. But the attractive vision of an equitable future can only be constructed by ignoring evidence and repeating a litany of fallacies.

Gal continues:

“In the real world” he points out, “there is seldom anything resembling the equal outcomes that might be expected if all factors affecting outcomes were the same for everyone.”

It is not just that people have different talents and interests. Different people choose to live their lives differently:

After all, “people from different backgrounds do not necessarily want to do the same things, much less invest their time and energies into developing the same kinds of skills and talents.” He invites us to consider the example of US sports, where “blacks are overrepresented in professional basketball, whites in professional tennis, and Hispanics in Major League Baseball.”

Of course, for decades now we have a multitude of programs designed to overcome the legacy of slavery and segregation. They have all been based, Sowell contends, on the notion that blacks are incapable of competing in the marketplace, and thus, need special consideration and even government charity. These programs have failed. Just because we feel especially virtuous about our proposed solutions does not mean that the solutions are going to produce the desired outcomes.

Gal summarizes a point that Sowell has been making for decades now. 

One of the most persistent social-justice fallacies concerns the legacy of slavery, and the reflexive tendency to hold it responsible for any misfortune that befalls any black person. Sowell objects to this causal reasoning, and argues that welfare policies introduced in the 1960s must shoulder much of the blame for social problems faced by American blacks, particularly the collapse of the family. Although activists seldom acknowledge it, black Americans made striking progress in the decades before the 1960s until “demonstrable harm” was inflicted upon them by the introduction of social-justice policies.

And also,

 “For more than a hundred years after the end of slavery,” he reminds us, “most black children were born to women who were married, and the children were raised in two-parent homes.” In 1963, 23.6 percent of black children were born to single mothers. By the end of the 20th century, that figure stood at 68.7 percent.

As for the pursuit of justice, it too has been an error. Thinking that if white people feel sufficiently guilty for the legacy of slavery black people will naturally begin to overperform is absurd. This singular obsession with a singular solution leads people to overlook the solutions that do work… as in charter schools in minority neighborhoods.

The singleminded pursuit of justice at all costs is not justice at all, Sowell argues, and will often result in injustice. The results sought by social-justice activists are what Hayek used to call “cosmic justice,” and they are not attainable “when there are differences in human fates for which clearly no human agency is responsible.” Sowell agrees that “we cannot demand justice from the cosmos,” and that “no human beings, either singly or collectively, can control the cosmos, that is, the whole universe of circumstances surrounding us and affecting everyone’s chances in life.”

Life is complicated. At times it is even complex. Thinking that there is a singular solution, a magic potion that will right all wrongs and make our world into an ideal, is a very bad idea indeed.