Links for 9/19/20
Links:
Should Your Kid Be Taking Russian Math? (Boston Magazine): I think this one struck me as unintentionally funny because of how irritated the public school teachers would get and how silly their complaints sounded to anyone whose main goal was educating kids.
How Two British Orthodontists Became Celebrities to Incels (The New York Times Magazine): Best feature on orthodontia I’ve read in years! Title is clickbait. Also I was very angry at the author for most of the article, but he redeemed himself in the last third.
Scholar’s Stage on War in Taiwan, China Watchers, and Xi's Theory of History (Tanner Greer)
Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth (Medium): Good interview with Tyler Cowen and some economist named Jason Furman on broad economic trends over the past 50 years. Touches on immigration, NIMBYs, and China.
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Paul Ford)
Books I’m Reading:
Pakistan: A Hard Country (Anatol Lieven): Started this many months ago when I was overseas.
A Month in Siena (Hisham Matar): I think I saw a review of this book and it mentioned that the author spent an entire day staring at a single picture in Siena, Italy. I was curious what kind of person would do that.
A Book Review:
Some Thoughts on Thomas Sowell’s Discrimination and Disparities
Disclaimer: It’s very long. Sorry. Also, the book mostly accords with my preexisting beliefs, so maybe you should discount my recommendation a little. If you'd just like to read what I didn't like about the book, see the first half of Part I and the entirety of Part IV.
Thomas Sowell—a 90-year-old, conservative, black economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institute—writes in Discrimination and Disparities that he aims to "provide clarification on some major social issues that are too often mired in dogmas and obfuscation." To do so, he looks closely at two assumptions that he claims underlie much of the contemporary discourse on race in the United States. One is that statistical differences in socioeconomic outcomes imply either, on the left, biased treatment or, on the right, genetic deficiencies in the less fortunate. The other is that if individual economic benefits are not due solely to individual merit, then that justifies the government in redistributing those benefits. He says that these two, incorrect, assumptions form the basis of the modern "social justice" vision. I suppose he does actually address both in his book, but I realize in writing my review that most of my highlights and quotes concern the first.
Part I
But first, did you know:
That the first born in a family tend to have higher IQs than their siblings?
That in the 1940s, a psychologist from Stanford followed 1,400 children with IQs greater than 140 and tracked them over 50 years? Would you be surprised that none of the kids in the study won a Nobel Prize but two of the kids that were rejected for being too dumb did? And that even in this rarefied group of the superintelligent about 10% really didn't amount to much and some of them barely completed high school?
That low income families speaks millions fewer words to their children during their childhood compared to higher income families?
That Jews made up less than 1% of the world's population in the second half of the twentieth century but earned 22 percent of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, 32 percent in medicine and 32 percent in physics?
That the first black woman to earn a PhD in the US, the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, and the first black tenured professor at a major national University all graduated from the Dunbar school, a segregated black public high school in Washington D.C.? And that by 1993, long after the school was desegregated, a smaller percentage of graduates went on to college than had done so 60 years before?
I mention all these because Thomas Sowell mentions them. Over and over and over again. He uses them as evidence of two things. One is that it is not unusual and in fact expected for the distribution of success to be unevenly distributed across the population and that this may have nothing to do with discrimination or oppression. This covers the first four. The last is a corollary to this and suggests that one should not consider the educational (or residential) outcomes produced by the sorting of people to be inherently wrong or worthy of condemnation. Nor should we believe that simply unsorting them will solve all the problems we do see.
Thomas Sowell spends the first chapter meticulously going over this idea. But I'm not sure the people really concerned with discrimination in contemporary society would find this line of reasoning persuasive. Someone may understand how unequal outcomes can be no one’s fault at all and still think a particular instance of unequal outcomes is totally because of oppression. Thomas Sowell seems to be addressing some subset of the population who believes that any time you see one person do better than another it must be because somebody got oppressed. Maybe I'm being too charitable, but I'm not sure anyone literally believes this. I think what happens more often is that someone sees people in group A continually do worse than people in group B, can point to numerous egregious examples throughout history where group B really did oppress group A, and rightfully wonder if this might still be going on or if the effect of past injustices really does carry on into the present. So, I don't think the first chapter is particularly persuasive, and it seems tangential to the issues that adherents of the modern “social vision” actually care about.
Fortunately, the rest of the book makes a categorically different argument (emphasis mine):
The undeniable fact that life has never been remotely “fair”—in the sense of presenting equal likelihoods of achieving economic prosperity or other benefits—has led many people to conclude that human biases are the reason. There is no question that human biases have contributed to unfair prospects. But it is a complete non sequitur to say that human biases are the sole, or even primary, causes of unequal prospects, without hard evidence to support that conclusion. When there are major disparities in outcomes among men who are all in the top one percent in IQ, and among siblings raised under the same roof, as well as discriminated-against minorities being more economically successful than those discriminating against them—as has happened in the Ottoman Empire, many Southeast Asian countries, and much of Eastern Europe, for example—the insistence on believing that human biases are the primary cause of disparities in outcomes ignores a vast range of evidence to the contrary.
Life has never been fair, people end up in worse places in life for all sorts of reasons besides discrimination, and it's useful to look closely at the world to determine what is actually going on. Thomas Sowell does that. But first some hypotheticals—some of them made up, all of them silly.
40% of the US population is myopic. But only 20% of baseball players have myopia. In fact, average visual acuity for MLB players is 20/12 with 4% having 20/8—considered the limit of human vision. Does major league baseball have a deep seated animus against the visually challenged?
Women comprise 93% of library science majors but only 56% of college students in the U.S. Are there little boys growing up in homes across America who really enjoy quietly placing books on bookshelves but have mothers who constantly chastise them and tell them to play with trucks or build a tree fort instead? How else could they have cornered the industry on patrolling dusty shelves and shushing people?
The average baby boomers have more wealth than the average Millennial. Did the Baby Boomers steal it from them?
Arizona is hot and dusty. Kids in Arizona spend their free time mountain biking through the desert and learning how to find the nearest building with air conditioning. The lobster industry employs an egregiously low proportion of native Arizonians. Does the US lobster industry really hate people from Arizona?
In an alternate America, there are only two communities. Citizens of Lepidopterus really like collecting butterflies. When they're not catching them or mounting them in small glass, display cases, they like to talk about the decline of monarch butterfly populations or how to make better butterfly nets. Citizens of Derridaville live nearby. They really like postmodernism and enjoy deconstructing Socratic dialogues, identifying implicit power structures, and frequently using the term "always already" in everyday conversation. The Lepidopterans mostly stick to themselves, not because they dislike postmodernists per se, but because they don't have much in common and conversations with them are always hard to follow. When a group of postmodernists move into one of their neighborhoods and try to lobby the school board to replace courses on Butterfly Classification with ones about Michele Foucault, the Lepidopterans have a big problem with this and tell the postmodernists they should just leave. Are they being irrationally hateful and discriminatory?
Part II.
These examples are stupid and seem to confuse oppression with:
statistical correlations between the qualities people do care about and qualities people don't care about (i.e., Baseball scouts want someone who can hit the ball. Good eyesight is correlated with that. But if you were blind and could still hit a 95 mph fastball that would be OK),
differences in preferences,
differences in demographics (Baby boomers are older and have had more time to accumulate wealth),
differences in geography, and
differences in culture or values.
Thomas Sowell talks about all of these in terms of the debate on racism and inequality.
The crucial question is not whether evils exist but whether the evils of the past or present are automatically the cause of major economic, educational and other social disparities today. The bedrock assumption underlying many political or ideological crusades is that socioeconomic disparities are automatically somebody’s fault, so that our choices are either to blame society or to “blame the victim.” Yet whose fault are demographic differences, geographic differences, birth order differences or cultural differences that evolved over the centuries before any of us were born?
He calls this the invincible fallacy. The belief that people tend to have comparable outcomes in the absence of biased treatment. In order to describe more cleanly the ways one can get unequal outcomes without oppression and bias, he divides discrimination into three different forms.
Discrimination 1: The ability to discern differences in the qualities of individuals and make decisions based on those differences. This is further subdivided into:
Discrimination 1a: By judging each person as an individual. For instance, your friend of 15 years, while generous, charismatic, and funny, has never, ever shown up to anything on time and does most things at the last minute. You wisely decide not to make him your wedding planner.
Discrimination 1b: By weighting empirical evidence about groups against costs of discernment. Sowell gives the example of taxi drivers refusing to drive into high-crime neighborhoods or businesses choosing not to open up shop in high-crime neighborhoods. While most in the neighborhood are not criminals, the costs to business owners and taxi drivers of individually sorting the population can be high.
Discrimination 2: The more common way of defining discrimination. I.e., treating someone negatively based on aversions to race or sex or some other group characteristic.
He then uses these to describe other potential causes of unequal outcomes.
Sowell on statistical correlations: Here he makes a subtler point on the costs of discrimination, which he says are ignored by those who worry about discrimination but are definitely not ignored by the discriminators:
In short, one of the differences between the applicability of Discrimination I and Discrimination II is cost—and this is not always a small cost, nor a cost measured solely in money. Everyone might agree that Discrimination I is preferable, other things being equal. Nevertheless, one may still be aware that other things are not always equal, and sometimes other things are very far from being equal.
Where there is a difference in costs when choosing between Discrimination I and Discrimination II, much may depend on how high those costs are, and especially on who pays those costs. People who would never walk through a particular neighborhood at night, or perhaps not even in broad daylight, may nevertheless be indignant at banks that engage in “redlining”—that is, putting a whole neighborhood off-limits as a place to invest their depositors’ money. The observers’ own “redlining” in their choices of where to walk may never be seen by them as a different example of the same principle.
In short, Discrimination I can have prohibitive costs in some situations, especially when it is applied at the individual level. However, Discrimination II—the arbitrary or antipathy-based bias against a group, is not the only other option. Another way of making decisions is by weighing empirical evidence about groups as a whole or about the interactions of different groups with one another.
To take an extreme example, for the sake of illustration, if 30 percent of the people in Group X are alcoholics and 2 percent of the people in Group Y are alcoholics, an employer may well prefer to hire people from Group Y for work where an alcoholic would be not only ineffective but dangerous. This would mean that a majority of the people in Group X—70 percent—would be more likely to be denied employment, even though they are not alcoholics. What matters, crucially, to the employer is the cost of determining which individual is or is not an alcoholic, when job applicants all show up sober on the day when they are seeking employment.
This also matters to the customers who buy the employer’s products and to society as a whole. If alcoholics produce a higher proportion of products that turn out to be defective, that is a cost to customers, whether the customer gets the defective product or whether the number of products that have to be discarded at the factory because they are defective means higher prices for the products that are sold, because the costs of defective products that are screened out at the factory must be covered by the prices charged for the good quality products that emerge from that process and are sold.
To the extent that alcoholics are not only less competent but dangerous, the costs of those dangers are paid by either fellow employees or by the customers who buy dangerously defective products, or both. In short, there are serious costs inherent in the situation, so that either 70 percent of the people in Group X or employers or customers—or all three—are going to end up paying the cost of the alcoholism of 30 percent of the people in Group X.
He also cites a number of historical examples from the American South and South Africa where (1) railroad and bus operators lobbied against forced segregation on buses and railroad cars because it would have been more expensive for them or (2) employers found ways to hire black workers despite laws against doing so, because the labor was cheaper.
This turns out to have other real world implications. If you misdiagnose the basis for discrimination, you can actually do more harm. Suppose a pre-school really doesn't want to hire criminals to teach their children. They run background checks and because African Americans are more likely to have a criminal record, they get the job less often than white people for the same qualifications. If you look at this situation (more whites and fewer blacks hired) and diagnose this as an instance of using background checks as a proxy for racial discrimination, you might be inclined to keep employers from conducting background checks. But this has unintended consequences. Now, not only are blacks with criminal records not getting the job, blacks without criminal records aren't getting the jobs either. Thomas Sowell mentions this problem in particular, but Jennifer Doleac, in her review of Thomas Sowell's book in the Journal of Economic Literature, provides a little more detail. (Below BTB stands for "Ban the Box" referring to the instructions on many employment applications asking you to check a box if you've ever been convicted of a crime):
Sowell cites research showing that employers' access to criminal records was associated with increased hiring of black men (Holzer, Raphael and Stoll, 2006); this suggests that statistical discrimination based on race is used in the absence of criminal record information. More recent research shows that, as economic theory predicts, BTB made this problem worse: when employers cannot ask about criminal records, they increase statistical discrimination based on race, and net employment of young, low-skilled, black men falls (Agan and Starr, 2018; Doleac and Hansen, 2018). Other recent research shows that BTB is not helping people with records get jobs (see for example, Rose, 2017, and Jackson and Zhao, 2017), likely because the policy does not address the reasons for employers' initial reluctance to hire people from this group.3 (These candidates can still be rejected when their criminal record is checked at the end of the hiring process.) Two studies find that BTB increases crime and recidivism among black and Hispanic men, presumably because the policy makes it more difficult for them to find work (Sabia et al., 2019; Sherrard, 2020). There is also evidence that BTB incentivizes some applicants without records to get an occupational license that is off-limits to people with certain convictions, as a way to "buy back the box" that legislators banned (Blair and Chung, 2018; Marchingiglio, 2019). These findings highlight the complex interactions of information within labor markets, and how important it is to consider the likely behavioral responses to any policy change.
Sowell on demographics:
Ethnic and other social groups differ in median ages by as much as two decades or more. In the United States, for example, the median age of Japanese Americans is 51 and the median age of Mexican Americans is 27. How likely is it that these two groups—or others—would have the same proportions of their populations equally represented in occupations, institutions or activities requiring long years of education and/or long years of job experience? Is it surprising if Hispanic Americans are not as well represented as Japanese Americans in the professions, or in managerial careers, for which long years of education and experience are usually required? How many 27-year-olds of any ethnic background meet the requirements for being CEOs in civilian life or generals and admirals in the military?
Sowell on cultural differences:
One of the things that sometimes seems to threaten to puncture the verbally sealed bubble of the prevailing vision is the presence of some poor immigrant group with a culture very different from that of domestic low-income groups. Cuban refugees to the United States have been one of a number of such groups, who have initially been at least as poor as domestic groups living at the official poverty level. But when the newcomers have been unencumbered by the welfare state vision and its values, such groups have often risen socioeconomically above the domestic poor, and sometimes above the native population as a whole, as the descendants of the Cuban refugees have. The children of some very poor immigrant groups have risen educationally in the schools, not only above the level of native-born children from families at the same income level, but even above the educational level of the children from the native population as a whole. In New York City, for example, while students who pass the demanding tests to get into the most elite public high schools tend to be from high-income neighborhoods, an exception are students from low-income neighborhoods with concentrations of immigrants from Fujian province in China.23 Such groups represent a threat to the prevailing social vision. Among the ways of meeting that threat are
(1) ignoring such social results that are so discordant with the assumptions of that vision,
(2) making statements attributing the newcomers’ success to “privilege,” using the word in the redefined sense that turns this into a circular argument, and
(3) stigmatizing the making of comparisons between successful ethnic groups and unsuccessful ones as manifestations of implicit racism against such groups as blacks in the United States.
However politically effective this third tactic may be within the United States, it is not nearly so effective in countries where the underclass is predominantly white, and the poverty-stricken newcomers who succeed in the schools and in the economy include groups that are non-white. In England, for example, among children whose families’ incomes were low enough to qualify for free lunch programs, the children of immigrants from Africa and Bangladesh met educational test standards nearly 60 percent of the time, while white, native-born children from families at the same low economic level met the standards only 30 percent of the time.24 Viewed in racial terms, these educational results in England might seem to be very different from those in the United States. But viewed in terms of low-income, native-born children, raised in a culture long steeped in the welfare state vision and its values, as compared to those low-income immigrant children who have been spared that culture and those values, the results are remarkably similar on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sowell on differences in preferences:
When black students in affluent Shaker Heights spent less time on their school work than their white high school classmates did, and spent more time watching television, that was their revealed preference. Data from other sources show even greater differences between the time devoted to school work by black Americans and by Asian Americans in high school.39 Nor are such differences peculiar to blacks or to the United States. In Australia, for example, Chinese students spent more than twice as much time on their homework as white students did. How surprised should we be that Asian students in general tend to do better academically than white students in general, in predominantly white societies such as Australia, Britain or the United States? The same pattern can be seen among whole nations, as such Asian countries as Japan, South Korea and Singapore likewise show patterns of hard work by their students and academic results on international tests that place these countries above most Western nations.
Sowell also talks about geographical differences but I didn't find these particularly relevant since they were about indigenous tribes in the mountains being more impoverished than tribes by a river.
Part III.
So what's the takeaway? I think the kindest version (Thomas Sowell words things more truculently) is that discussions about discrimination and equality lack important qualifications, ignore some aspects of reality, and encode a number of implied assumptions about how society works or should work that are worth discussing explicitly. It turns out these qualifications are important, empirical evidence suggests a more sophisticated model of discrimination is needed, and that some of these assumptions are wrong. Broadly, we need to try harder to understand the causes of the discrimination we see.
I also think that his use of cross-country and cross-regional data makes a persuasive case for coming up with a better model of inequality than "society is racist" (In the sense of Discrimination 2). The model should explain not just why blacks are approved at lower rates for mortgages than whites but why asians and native Hawaiians are approved at higher rates than whites. It should explain why historically oppressed groups like Jews have done relatively well while historically oppressed groups like African Americans continue to do worse. It should explain why both blacks and Appalachian whites are often charged higher rates for loans. It should explain why low income blacks in the US have poor educational outcomes compared to low income Asians and Cubans and why low income whites in England have poor educational outcomes compared to low income African and Bangladeshi immigrants.
Perhaps the most persuasive argument in favor of trying to determine the real causes of discrimination (and sorting) rather than rounding it down to "you're racist" is that the latter claim implies much different policies. If people are just racist, then maybe you spend a lot of money on sensitivity training and creating diversity round-tables and doing listening tours. But if its because daycare centers don't want to hire criminals to take care of their kids, then maybe you can just let them do a background check (See the "Ban the Box" discussion above). It also implies that the actions we take may not have the effects we seek and that we should not be surprised by this. Sowell gives another historical example to illustrate this. I’ll quote it in full first and discuss some reservations I have with it and the rest of the book:
In nineteenth-century Detroit, blacks were not allowed to vote in 1850, but they were voting in the 1880s, and in the 1890s blacks were being elected to statewide offices in Michigan by a predominantly white electorate. The 1880 census showed that, in Detroit, it was not uncommon for blacks and whites to live next door to each other.55 The black upper class had regular social interactions with upper-class whites, and their children attended high schools and colleges with the children of their white counterparts.56
Writing in 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois noted “a growing liberal spirit toward the Negro in Philadelphia,” in which the larger community had begun to “brush away petty hindrances and to soften the harshness of race prejudice”—leading, among other things, to blacks being able to live in white neighborhoods.57 Both contemporary and later writers commented on similar developments in other Northern communities.58 While black children in most Northern communities had long been educated in racially segregated schools during the first half of the nineteenth century, if they were allowed to attend public schools at all, this changed during the second half of that century:
By 1870, those northern states that had excluded blacks from public schools had reversed course. Moreover, during the quarter century following the end of the Civil War, most northern states enacted legislation that prohibited racial segregation in public education. Most northern courts, when called upon to enforce this newly enacted antisegregation legislation, did so, ordering the admission of black children into white schools.59
These were not just coincidental mood swings among whites across the North. The behavior of blacks themselves had changed.
As Jacob Riis put it in 1890, “There is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.”60 By the late nineteenth century, most blacks in New York state had been born in New York state, and grew up with values and behavior patterns similar to those of the vastly larger white population around them.
However, in this as in other things, a major retrogression set in later, in Northern cities, with the arrival of large masses of black migrants from the South in the early twentieth century, concentrated within a relatively few years and arriving in numbers sufficient to prevent their becoming as acculturated to the norms of the larger society, either as quickly or as much as the small nineteenth-century black populations had in the North. The same retrogressions in race relations seen in other aspects of life likewise occurred in Northern schools:
… with the migration of hundreds of thousands of southern blacks into northern communities during the first half of the twentieth century, northern school segregation dramatically increased. Indeed, by 1940, northern school segregation was more extensive than it had been at any time since Reconstruction.61
In most cases, this was de facto racial segregation in the North, as distinguished from the explicit racial segregation by law in Southern schools. But similar end results were achieved in the North by gerrymandering school districts and by other means. Among the reasons cited for this resurgence of racial segregation in the Northern schools were both educational and behavioral problems of black children.62 However, as regards educational problems, surveys in both Chicago and Detroit indicated that these were primarily problems with black children whose families had migrated from the South,63 where educational standards were lower.
Neither eras of progress in race relations nor eras of retrogression were simply inexplicable mood swings among whites. Both represented responses to demonstrable changes in local black populations. These responses were complicated by the inherent problems of white third parties trying to sort out differences among black children, even though sorting out black children in general from white children in general required nothing more than eyesight. It was very low-cost Discrimination IB.
[...]
The residential and other outcomes produced by the sorting of people became, in the second half of the twentieth century, widely condemned as wrong in itself, and as creating other social wrongs against the less fortunate groups. This might be considered a special case of the more general assumption that outcomes would tend to be even, or random, in the absence of malign interventions.
But, whatever it was based on, the view became axiomatic among many Americans in the second half of the twentieth century that unsorting people was a high priority, especially in schools, but also in residential neighborhoods [and that this unsorting led to little or no educational improvement for most and worse educational outcomes for some.]
I would first like to note how surprising the above passage is to me. If I had to give my three sentence summary of everything I’ve learned about race in America it might be that: Slavery in America was a terrible injustice. There may have been a few free blacks in the North that led relatively normal lives, but overall America was pretty racist and life was really awful for a lot of people. And that since the Civil War it has been a long, slow, entirely monotonic, uphill battle for blacks to win the rights that were granted to them, should have been granted to them all along, and still don’t entirely have today. So passages like this were quite revealing.
But should I believe them?
Part IV.
Thomas Sowell harps a lot on empiricism, examining whether our experiences from the real world accord with the theoretical models we have in our head about how the world works. And in some ways, his analysis is quite empirical. His 7 chapter book has 644 references. And yet many of these are news articles, opinion pieces, and sometimes books without—in one case—any citations themselves. When he does cite empirical research papers, I don't think he always does justice to them. I found the quote above quite surprising. It seems to describe a historical reality than the one I knew. Is he cherry picking historical events? Are the examples he's using unusual and not reflective of more common experience? Some of the books he cites are from the 1890's and the 1940's. No one has looked at this historical phenomenon since then?
A few other examples:
In one section of the book, Sowell describes the frequent desire to relocate minority, low-income families into higher income, less crime-ridden ones in the hopes that being surrounded by the more prosperous will make those low-income families more prosperous as well. He cites the Moving to Opportunity experiment where hundreds of low-income families were randomly given vouchers so that they could relocated to higher income neighborhoods. He cites several studies that show no effect of this intervention and makes an interesting point about the potential costs, which often go unmeasured, to the receiving neighborhoods.
What struck me was that while he cited many studies that didn't find an effect prominently with the name of the journal and quotations, he didn't cite the more recent study that did find large, positive effects on the children of those families. While the author of this last paper, Raj Chetty, is known for finding amazing results from studies like these after many have failed to, he is also known for the rigor of his empirical analysis. When Thomas Sowell does eventually get around to citing the Chetty paper, it’s not in the context of the Moving to Opportunity experiment or in close proximity to the null results he originally reported, but as an aside at the end of the chapter that "some studies have found some benefits." This is one instance of 644, but it was the one case where I was familiar with the underlying literature, and it made me wonder if this occurs in other areas I'm less familiar with.
Another:
Perhaps the most often cited positive achievements of the 1960s in the United States were the civil rights laws and policies that put an end to racially discriminatory laws and policies in the South, especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Although this has often been credited to the social vision of the political left, in reality a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans than of Congressional Democrats voted for these landmark laws.114
This seems to be so obviously an example of the genetic fallacy, that I question whether this could have been by accident. It looks at the name of something (the Democratic party) and ignores the huge demographic changes that have occurred within the party (See: The "Solid South" and Dixiecrats). The Democratic Party in 1960 is much different than the Democratic Party in 2020.
Also, despite his frequent reference to them in his book, no one is quite sure whether birth order effects are even a thing (Birth order effects on personality, birth order effects on intelligence) or whether word gaps really matter. Maybe it doesn’t? Maybe it does? (NPR, Brookings)
Finally, a more philosophical point. Thomas Sowell talks a lot about the moral neutrality of luck.
Morally neutral factors such as crop failures, birth order, geographic settings, or demographic and cultural differences are among the many reasons why economic and social outcomes so often fail to fit the preconception of equal or comparable outcomes. Yet morally neutral factors seem to attract far less attention than other causal factors which stir moral outrage, such as discrimination or exploitation. But our personal responses tell us nothing about the causal weight of different factors, however much those responses may shape political crusades and government policies.
In another section:
None of this denies that there may well have been other people who were born with potentialities very much like those of Bill Gates, but who never had the same combination of prerequisites that Gates had. Bound up with issues involving moral merit is the reality of luck as a factor in socioeconomic outcomes, beginning with the luck involved in being born in one set of circumstances rather than another. But, although luck is beyond our control, we can nevertheless learn from examining what that luck consisted of. The luck of being an only child, or the first-born, can make us aware of the great importance of parental attention to all children in their earliest years of development, and lead to more attention to children in general, regardless of their particular birth order. Examining other lucky or unlucky influences can also provide clues to what kinds of behavior or policies to embrace or avoid. If we could somehow determine what specifically are the prerequisites that can develop special individual potentialities into great achievements, that could benefit society as a whole in many ways, whether in technological advancements or by discovering cures or preventatives for devastating diseases. But our education system is too often oriented in the opposite direction, fiercely opposing differing levels and kinds of education for those individuals whose demonstrated capabilities exceed the demonstrated capabilities of others.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. I think many on the left definitely understand luck. And if you thought it was luck that someone got stuck in a high-crime neighborhood because their parents couldn’t afford anything better, policies like letting them move to a wealthier, lower-crime neighborhood seems like a plausible thing to try. Also, one mark of civilization's progress might be construed as the extent to which we can take things from the 'luck' bin and put them in the 'things we can control' bin. If we could do something, and don't, how morally culpable should we feel? It's not obvious to me that it's exactly 0. I think the left recognizes both oppression and bad luck as a source of bad outcomes, and it's not the failure to recognize the latter that leads to policies that make things worse instead of better.
Overall, I thought the book was good. Thomas Sowell writes extremely clearly and without jargon. He brings up a number of theoretical and empirical results that should confound our ideas about how discrimination works and what its effects are. It's almost a bit of a primer on clear thinking—You can't look at outcomes and infer cause. Discrimination doesn't occur where the statistics are collected—But for someone who likes to harp on empiricism, I sometimes wondered about his evidence and if he was trying to make it fit a narrative rather than the other way around.