Documented Facts
A Mini-Review of 'Social Justice Fallacies'
What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
(Thomas Sowell)
When I was a teenager I loved to be right, especially when others were wrong. It was not an attractive quality and it led to a great deal of trouble with teachers and classmates. As I got older I learned the value of others’ perspectives and the limitations of knowledge learned in books. I noticed that the people with impressive educational credentials were often naive or enamored of motivated reasoning and possessed by foolish notions. But that was later… in high school I imagined that most relevant knowledge about the world could be learned by reading books and I loved profound and original and contrarian writers. I enjoyed erudite thinkers who wrote clearly. I loved the sense that I was closing in on a fulsome picture of the world and probably imagined I was quickly closing in on this prize… before realizing that this vision was a ridiculous mirage.
Needless to say, I LOVED Thomas Sowell. I quickly learned the dynamics of popular economic fallacies and unjust historical simplifications and quickly absorbed his withering take-downs of values that we would now label ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’.
There is no idea I will not examine. The idea of avoiding books and essays because they fit uneasily with my worldview is anathema to me. If I’m wrong I want to understand how.
Yet people on the Left do not read Sowell. Ever. Despite him being a brilliant and accomplished economist and historian his careful analyses and clearly-written, exhaustively-researched pages thoroughly puncture dozens of the most emotionally satisfying beliefs of the elite. Sowell mentions these inclinations by referencing the F.A. Hayek label ‘the Fatal Conceit’: the idea that well-meaning educated people can improve society by taking money and agency away from vast swathes of society and devoting them to their cherished projects. Sowell’s work forever deflates the illusions that federal programs work as intended, that minimum wage laws don’t cause massive black unemployment, that racial disparities are chiefly due to ‘systemic’ factors or injustice, that nations’ fortunes can be explained by concepts like colonialism or imperialism or exploitation.
His are not ideas which are contentious or debated. Rather, they are suppressed and studiously ignored. There is NO writer more damning to the ambitions of the modern progressive than Sowell. I read this well-done biopic as I looked for opening quotes for this brief piece: The Immortal Sowell.
In his latest book, ‘Social Justice Fallacies’, Sowell seems to have abandoned thematic development or narrative in favor of a sequence of short topics, each including a list of illuminating statistical examples. The dust jacket of the book is just several of these statistics (apparently chosen at random) in bold font.
Here are some statistical claims, just from the book’s opening 30 pages, each entailing implications which puncture some treasured narrative or another:
“As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since leaving school were earning slightly more than men of the same description.”
“In Malaysia during the 1960’s, members of the Chinese minority received 408 engineering degrees, while members of the Malay majority received just 4.”
“…more than half the National Merit Scholarship finalists were a first-born child, even in five-child families, as well as in two-child families, as well as in two-child, three-child and four-child families.”
He returns to a familiar theme: the fortunes of groups are strongly mediated by values and culture and are never imposed… even in the context of racism and other social barriers.
“Studies of boys raised without a father present have found them very much over-represented among people with pathologies ranging from truancy to murder.”
He explains the fallacies of comparing ‘families’ which contain twice as many adults or groups with radically different dispositions and age profiles…
“Japanese Americans have a median age of 52 and Mexican Americans have a median age of 28…”
“There are whole nations whose populations have a median age over 40 (Germany, Italy, Japan), and other nations whose median ages are under 20 (Nigeria, Afghanistan, Angola).”
He explains how trust and honesty and work ethic are all cultural values cultivated in different ways and different amounts by different groups…
“…honesty is one of the many factors that cannot be assumed to equally present in all places or among all peoples. Nor does empirical evidence suggest an equality in this factor, any more than in many other factors.”
(He then goes on to describe fascinating social science experiments involving wallets returned, or the national disparities in U.N. diplomats paying their parking tickets.
He explains the massive value of legal systems and human capital in developing national wealth.
“…the industrial revolution in England was aided by investments from foreign countries, whose investors were able to rely on the reputation of British law for honesty and impartiality.”
He punctures basically every victim narrative on offer…
“Median black American family income has been lower than median white American family income for generations. As regards the magnitude of the difference, official government data going back as far as 1947 show that the disparity has not been as large as 2:1 in any of those years.”
“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.”
“2020 census data show more than 9 million black Americans with higher incomes then the median 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.”
“If black family poverty is caused by ‘systemic racism’, do racists make an exception for blacks who are married?”
“White, female-headed, single-parent families have had a poverty rate more than double the poverty rate of black married-couple families in every year from 1994 to 2020.”
He explains the effects of discipline and incentives in promoting academic success…
“When black and Hispanic students in both kinds of schools took the same statewide test in mathematics, the charter school students achieved the official ‘proficient’ level in mathematics more than 6 times as often as children of the same ethnicities in traditional public schools housed in the very same buildings.”
“Similarly, a 1930s study of the black community in Chicago found that the delinquency rate within that community ranged from more than 40 percent in some black neighborhoods to less than 2 percent in some other black neighborhoods.”
“In 1851, for example, when the white population of the South was about half as large as the white population in other regions, only 8 percent of the patents issued in the United States went to residents of the Southern States.”
He does all of this in the first thirty pages. I would LOVE to see Sowell debate a prominent progressive… but that will never happen. He’s an old man and his ideas are simply too dangerous. Much better to use their institutional control to bury and suppress these ideas.
Nevertheless, his written words will survive, edifying new generations of skeptics and contrarians and eroding the narratives of control which leverage power and emotion to leave all of us poorer and less free. I highly recommend this book.
Sowell is a breath of fresh air.