Discrimination and Disparities

An excellent discussion of the misuse of statistics in current political discourse. This book is essential reading for anyone exposed to current political rhetoric which, of course, is everyone. As an added bonus the book is short. This means anyone who reads it will quickly be able to recognize how ubiquitous misleading statements are. Indeed, misleading statements seem to be the rule rather than the exception these days. After reading this book you will likely think "I knew the situation was bad but it is even worse than I imagined!" Indeed, one even gets to the point of looking at a statement by the media or a politician and thinking "what is the worst case scenario that would make the statement technically true when the reality is close to the opposite of the impression trying to be conveyed." Sowell is excellent at providing examples to show common problems in the presentation of statistics. For instance, crime statistics are often presented as "black people make up 13% of the population but are many times more than 13% of those stopped/arrested/incarcerated. The shows racism at work.". Sowell compares this to concluding that since NBA referees call fouls on black players much more than 13% of the time the reason must be racial prejudice. Sowell shows that it is not nearly that simple. For example the average age of the populations matters since younger people are more likely to engage in crime than older ones. The amount of crime actually being committed matters as well. Sowell mentions, as an example, experiments with radar cameras showing the black people, in fact, are more likely to speed. Sowell's writing is not only concise but also very clear and well organized. For example, to head off any ambiguity he clearly distinguishes three types of discrimination and labels them separately. One type of discrimination is good: discernment between individuals based on their individual characteristics and not race. One type is the bad kind: prejudicial attitudes toward a group based on false beliefs about them. A third type is in between: attitudes towards a group based on things statistically true about some but not all members. Sowell uses the example of criminal background checks to show how not allowing the good type of discrimination leads to some unexpected consequences. Employers will then use the statistical type of discrimination and end up hiring fewer members of the group than if background checks are allowed. Think disparate impact laws can be added to prevent that? Employers will just locate to places where there are fewer members of the group. Similarly, Sowell shows how the presence of a particularly problematic subset of a group can cause businesses to increase the price of their product which is then misinterpreted as a "tax" on the all members of the group including those who do not engage in the behavior. The business may even decide not to do business in certain areas at all. This is highly timely given all the businesses shutting down recently due to increased shoplifting and "smash and grab" attacks. This books contains bits of history which caused me to rethink others books I have read. For example, black incomes did rise after the Civil War until 1900 faster than those of whites. This is not something you are going to hear about in books which treat post-Reconstruction as a virtual reset to slavery. For all its statistical detail The Republic for Which it Stands did not discuss it. Neither did The Black Tax which explicitly counts the period from Reconstruction until the Civil Rights era as equivalent to another 100 years of slavery when figuring how big "the black tax" has been over the years. Sowell also mentions that school desegregation was already happening in the North, was welcome and was being enforced by courts until southern black immigrants who were more prone to crime arrived. Sowell also mentions the rather remarkable phenomena of survey data being used as a key component in decrying wealth inequality. For example asking lower paid worker how many hours they work compared to higher paid workers and treating lower paid workers' self reporting as fact, which then turned out to be false. Although Sowell does not mention it, self reporting statistics are often key in claims about disparate rates of arrest and incarceration during the war of drugs. Beyond racial disparities there is also a good discussion of how statistics regarding income disparities involving "the bottom 20%", "the top 20%" or the "the top 1%" are highly misleading given how fluid who is in these groups is. I could only find a few minor flaws with the book. For example when comparing the United States to other nations when calling Marxists' claims into question Sowell says that other nations are not doing as well as the United States despite all the capitalists there. Any Marxist worth his salt would, of course, instantly point out that perhaps the United States is doing so well because of its capitalists exploitation of the globe. Similarly, attacking the Soviet Union as a Marxist state is a straw-man. Just because the Soviet Union said they were Marxists does not mean they actually were. Finally, Sowell's belief is that the rise in crime starting in the 1960's was due to leftist ideologies being more tolerant of undesirable types of behavior. This is possible but the consensus is that the exact causes are not well known other than there being an explosion of young people, those most likely to be involved in crime, due to the baby boom.

Thomas Sowell is a national treasure and one of the top five public intellectuals in America. He began as a Marxist but eventually saw the light and became what most would call 'conservative'; he might simply say 'realist'. In DISCRIMINATION AND DISPARITIES he returns to familiar subjects. His purpose is to dispel what the seventeenth century might have termed 'vulgar errors'—things that are widely believed even if they are not so. His chief instruments are empirical. He offers hard facts and common sense and notes that many accepted dogmas are simply untrue. They continue to exist and even thrive because politicians are invested in them and because they constitute key elements in political/historical narratives that appeal to the politicians' bases. Unless and until we move beyond them and begin our discussions and formulations of policy with that which is actually the case we are unlikely to make much progress. One of the principal ways in which vulgar errors are perpetuated is by casting them in statistical terms which subtly distort reality. One example: 'poverty' is a construct, not a reality. If one divides the citizens of a country into quintiles you will always have 'rich' and 'poor' (if that is the way you seek to categorize them). However, it is possible to have a country of billionaires in which the millionaires in the lowest quintile are still categorized as 'poor'. Hence the phenomenon that, e.g., the 'poor' in the U.S. are comparable to the upper middle class in many other countries. Moreover, when we speak of quintiles we are not speaking about living/breathing human beings. We are speaking of statistical exemplars, because actual human beings rise from the lowest quintile regularly and fall from the highest quintile regularly. If you do not distinguish between salaries and capital gains, e.g., you find individuals with very high 'incomes' who only have those incomes within limited time frames. In the year that a farmer sells the family farm his 'income' is very high, but that does not mean that he is rich in the way that orthopedic surgeons are rich. One very nice extended point in this regard concerns the use of 'household income' rather than individual income. Consider the case of two individuals with incomes of $20,000 each. They share an apartment because they cannot, individually, afford the rent. Statistically they are a 'household' with $40,000 of income. If each takes a new job and gets a promotion to $30,000 and then move out, taking their own apartments, we suddenly have two 'households' with household incomes of $30,000 each rather than one of $40,000. Unless you drill down into the statistics it appears that poverty (as measured by household income) is increasing. In addition to the hard facts/common sense arguments there are a number of simple bludgeons. In the course of discussing the politics and economics of a 'minimum wage', e.g., he reminds us that fast food jobs are not 'dead end jobs'. They are first jobs in which we learn some basic skills and behaviors and prepare ourselves for greater responsibilities and higher incomes. He gives the example of young people working in grocery stores; their average time in such jobs is 97 days. Obviously, these are not 'dead ends'; they are points through which one transitions. Since Dr. Sowell is now 87 years old we should cherish every work that issues from his desk. DISCRIMINATION AND DISPARITIES is a gem. How many writers can open our eyes to persistent economic errors and do so this clearly and lucidly?

Sowell’s central claim is that unequal outcomes among groups often stem from many interacting causes—age structure, family formation, culture, geography, skills, incentives, and risk preferences—rather than from bias alone

Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell is another well researched and put together material by the author. The book outlines two types of discrimination, why people discriminate against their own actions and against others, how others have aimed as a third-party to intervene in a discriminatory process , and the disparities between intended outcomes and the desire for acting for, or against particular kinds of discrimination. The author starts out by defining discrimination in two ways; discrimination 1, is the rational separating of things, circumstances, and individuals based on particular needs or particular outcome needed. For example, choosing between two separate pairs of shoes as to the one that would lead to the best outcome for the purpose of wearing. While discrimination 2, is a more general aggregate characterization of particular circumstances, situation, persons, or things based on group criteria. For example, saying that a particular pair of shoes will not fit your need because the group of shoes that it falls under generally does not. What I find compelling about this book is the fact that the author went into an understanding of why people choose to discriminate or not discriminate against particular groups or individuals. The main thing that he highlighted that may lead to either discrimination one or two when dealing with individuals and society is, The Cost of Discrimination. I find this point to be quite important. If the cost of discriminating is high then there would be less discrimination, whether it is discrimination 1 or 2. The converse is true, if the cost of discrimination is low then they’ll be more discrimination. Examples were given about discriminating against black workers in the south during the Jim Crow era, and how southern companies, given the laws supporting discrimination in choosing white workers, many still defied the laws and hire black workers, when the cost of discrimination was too high. When they had to choose between whites and blacks to hire they end up choosing both when the cost of the process of discrimination was too high. When the government enforce the laws and the cost of not discriminating then became higher than the cost of discriminating through government prosecutions and fines, then they did what cost least, they discriminate. The argument here is that if companies are left on their own , they will discriminate or not discriminate based on the cost. Given the free market society we live in companies will choose not to discriminate, since the cost of discrimination is high. Another major point of the book is that politicians and the media sometimes look at data and interpret and present them in a mistaken way, either deliberately or by accident. They are looking at the same data and coming to different conclusions based on particular agendas. The author highlights the destructive nature of this behavior. I personally believe that this is particularly dangerous as the average person do not read the facts for themselves, or analyze the data thoroughly for themselves. Therefore, they are left to interpret the filtered version given to them by wherever they consume that information. A striking fact but the author touched on in the book is about slavery, and how people have sorted themselves through time in groups in particular organizations. As it relates to slavery the author highlighted that slavery has become in this country an argument of one race enslaving another, while it’s a known fact that slavery has been around for thousands of years and it mainly began with one race and slaving their own. Proving that the fact that slavery was abolished in the west showed that while they engage in this horrendous activity they somehow “saw the light“ and decided that this was no longer something that could continue and lead the charge in abolishing slavery. The other point by the author is that people sort and on sort themselves into groups and societies based on their own needs. They are grouped into communities, Attend schools and provide goods and services to each other based on how they have sorted and on sorted them selves in these groups, communities, and organizations. The most important point about this book, is that individuals should be left alone to sort and on sort themselves in various groups, communities an economic activities, based on their own discrimination (discrimination 1) as they see fit. It is also claiming that the government should stay out of this process. It made some valid points and proved that when people act independently the results are far greater, but when a third-party act for individuals it makes the situation worse, and the intended end of the intervention is never achieved.

There has never been a shortage of people eager to draw up blueprints for running other people’s lives. This is about the power to preempt other people’s decisions. Before you go and trade your freedom for equality, read this book. Relating past social-justice visions to their contemporary opposites, Sowell compares the scholarly failure of Eugenics to contemporary Discrimination theories, showing how dangerous it is for society, to incessantly depict outcome differences as evidence or proof of malevolent actions. Dr. Sowell eviscerates a jungle of misinformation and misconceptions by the intelligentsia, government and social-activists with factual evidence. The intellectual group "Leaders" that brought us Eugenics in the 1st half of the twentieth century, which Hitler used as a basis for Mein Kampf and the Holocaust are now at polar opposites but still espousing Social-Justice malinformation with no scientific basis. Against this backdrop, it seems especially important to re-examine these views, lest we become a people easily stampeded by rhetoric. Sowell shows among other things how the Social-Activists have skewed history, particularly with respect to slavery, Social-Activists would have us believe that America was the only country to ever have slavery, yet white European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed. Many of the other social dogmas have also been revealed for their deficiencies and can be liberating, as well as a revelation, for many Americans. Slavery isn't an American or Black issue. That dogma is a liberal agenda which incites racial acrimony and division. Sowell explores such things as Birth Order, I.Q., Athletics, geography, language and parents as influences for success. He reveals several peoples that have excelled under great discrimination, such as the Jews, who received 22% of Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, 32% in medicine and 32% in physics 1950 - 2000. Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Eastern Europe, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Huguenots in France, Germans in Brazil, Japanese in Peru, Chettiars in Burma, Italians in Argentina, and both Jains from India and Hasidic Jews in Antwerp’s diamond industry. Sowell pierces the bubble of Culture that seems to be so taboo for the intelligentsia, political and Social-Justice Leadership. Social Activist attack, ignore, dismiss or demonize opposing views, but in this book, Sowell provides a path of light into their darkness, along the way, revealing the intellectual faults of most all Social-Justice Theories. A given man is not even equal to himself at different stages of life—sometimes not even on different days— so how can we hope to achieve equality across millions or billions of peoples? If you think it's possible, call me about some swampland I want to sale in Arizona.

No shady dealings are at work in most economic disparities between people, nor especially between groups. Thomas Sowell explores the impact of prerequisites on probabilities: meeting only 4 out of 5 prerequisites generally means failure. And, we can’t always determine what the prerequisites are in the present time; it requires a look-back. He gives a good example in golf, but examples abound in peak achievements across many fields. Many people participate, but very few people win a PGA tournament. He also points out that people (or societies) may turn away from a prerequisite, rejecting it for political or moral reasons, which can have consequences for generations to come. As humans, we have a flawed perception of probabilities. This is the source of the desire of some people to ”fix” perceived disparities. Sowell guides the reader through the statistical disparities that apply to birth order within the exact same family. Birth order differences are large even among siblings with the same parents and the same home environment. There is no statistical basis for comparing children raised in differing circumstances or whose parents have differing goals and priorities. Sowell’s next example demonstrates the folly of complaining that different areas around the planet have developed different economies: compare the diversity of species in the Amazon rain forest to that of the British Isles. Now do timber or iron or rain. Environmental resources are not distributed equally around the planet, and people raised where an environmental prerequisite does not exist are not going to have the same outcomes. Another major theme of the book is that present political agendas distort our knowledge of the past. One obvious example is the history of slavery and the history of its abolition in the West (221-222). “Social Justice” is a divisive tactic for reviving social dissensions and animosity. Sowell gives some examples of word substitutions that are used to mask reality: “Change” = change our betters like “Diversity” = balkanized “the Homeless” = vagrants “Privilege” = achievement (ex ante/ex post fallacies) “Public” = government “Social Justice” = using force to preempt personal choice “Violence” = social problems – justifies lawlessness and social disorder “Youths” = exultant thugs Read also: David Greenberg’s book on Coolidge; Walter Williams’ “South Africa’s War Against Capitalism”

Throughout his long and distinguished career Thomas Sowell has been a consistent stickler for truth. In this book he takes empirical aim at the truth about outcomes. In short, social scholars and economists inevitably over-simplify cause and effect and fail to accept that “grossly unequal distributions of outcomes are common, both in nature and among people, in circumstances where neither genes nor discrimination are involved.” The book is short, to the point, and very clearly written. You don’t need a degree in sociology or economics to follow. The arguments are steeped in common sense, which is where we often lose sight of the truth in our admirable but misguided desire to do the “right” thing. The problem is actually much bigger than the areas of social justice addressed in the book. It is a problem that is quickly eroding the value of all of our political, social, educational, and economic discourse. Type “This is what science says about …” into Google and you’ll get close to 1.5 billion hits. News outlets and social commentators use the heading daily. In reality, however, “science”, which is an empirical methodology, not a body of knowledge, probably says nothing about the topic, and whatever apparent “facts” the author includes probably say even less in the larger context of truth and meaning. Technology, of course, is making the problem worse. Technology gives a voice to every would-be opinion-maker, reinforcing the false perception, in all of its 1’s and 0’s, that math and statistics are inevitably and inherently “true.” It’s a ruse. To the extent it is true it is typically so only in the one dimension in which the writer of the article used it to advance his or her point. That’s not the multi-dimensional and dynamic world, however, where most important reality, like opportunity, compassion, and fairness actually lives. My only complaint is that the electronic book is over-priced for what it is. The author doesn’t typically set the price and Mr. Sowell is a premium intellect that deserves a premium price tag on his thoughts. It is, nonetheless, an empirically supported conclusion, so I’m hopeful Mr. Sowell will forgive me that.

"Why are there such disparities? In some cases, we can trace the reasons, but in other cases we cannot. A more fundamental question, however, is: Why should anyone have ever expected equality in the first place? Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that not only every racial or ethnic group, but even every single individual in the entire world, has identical genetic potential. If it is possible to be even more extreme, let us assume that we all behave like saints toward one another. Would that produce equality of results? Of course not. Real income consists of output and output depends on inputs. These inputs are almost never equal-- or even close to being equal." Race, Culture and Equality by Thomas Sowell One of the biggest issues of our time across nearly every discipline and/or political/social issue is that of presupposing a cause based solely on statistical outcomes or polls. It turns out these presuppositions are massively unreliable and can result in agendas and policy decisions that hurt the very people who are trying to be helped. "Potential" and "opportunity" do not result in outcomes. They only provide the ABILITY for an outcome to be achieved not a guarantee of an outcome itself. I appreciate the books candor and the author's detachment from the emotion of these issues. You can see that he is genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of the disparities that plague our society. The evidence is sweeping and nearly universal across nature, history, countries, races, religions, and any other group you can define. To expect "equality" in outcome is to not expect any semblance of reality. To gain the most from this book you will need to approach it with humility. There is something to be learned from both sides of many of these issues. With that can come cooperation and true change that will genuinely help people. It far too easy to victimize people or create groups and labels without any regard to what is REALLY going on. What we ought to work to address is what is really going on behind the issues not just the superficial headline driven outcomes.