Tidbits from Tom Sowell

Things that didn’t make it into my review of Discrimination and Disparities

This post contains quotes from Thomas Sowell that didn’t fit into my review of Discrimination and Disparities. Many are from the book Discrimination and Disparities, but some are from other Sowell books as well, or books about him.

Sowell’s Background

Sowell wrote a memoir, A Personal Odyssey, that was published in 2000. Here’s a passage from it that describes his childhood:

The first house I remember our living in was a wooden house at 1121 East Hill Street in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was near the bottom of a tall hill on an unpaved street, like most of the streets in the black neighborhoods. Daddy put a paved walkway in our yard and made a little window in the kitchen door in the back. Both were marks of distinction in which we took pride.

Like most of the houses in the area, ours had no such frills as electricity, central heating, or hot running water. There was a living room, a kitchen and two bedrooms. In the kitchen there was a wood-burning stove, with the brand name “Perfection” on it. They said it was the first word I spelled. The toilet was a little shed on the back porch. To take a bath, you heated water on the kitchen stove and poured it into a big metal portable tub. For heat in the winter, we had the stove, a fireplace in the living room, and a kerosene heater. For light at night, we had kerosene lamps.

It never occurred to me that we were living in poverty, and in fact these were some of the happiest times of my life. We had everything that people around us had, except for a few who had electricity and one lady who had a telephone. Once I tagged along with Ruth when she went to her job as a maid in the home of some white people. When I saw two faucets in their kitchen, I was baffled and said:

“They sure must drink a lot of water around here.”

When Ruth showed me that there was hot water coming out of one of the faucets, I thought it was the most amazing thing.

We grew flowers in our front yard, but there was no back yard, just an alleyway. On the side of the house, however, there was a space fenced in, where we kept chickens. I can still remember the shock of seeing a chicken’s head chopped off and watching the headless body running frantically around the yard, until it collapsed in the convulsions of death. But all that was forgotten when it reappeared hours later at dinner, completely transformed into beautiful and delicious pieces of Southern fried chicken.

Here and there I encountered white people—usually grocers, peddlers, or occasionally policemen. But white people were almost hypothetical to me as a small child. They were one of the things that grown-ups talked about, but they had no significant role in my daily life. That remained largely true until after we left Charlotte, when I was almost nine years old, and moved to New York. Then it came as a shock to me to be told that most of the people in the United States were white. Most of the people I had seen were black, everywhere I went. In reading the Sunday comics, I was not bothered by the fact that the characters were almost always white, but I could not understand why some of these characters had yellow hair. I had never seen anybody with yellow hair, and doubted that there were any such people.

Sowell started out as a Marxist and remained so even while pursuing his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. It was working for a summer in the government that cured him. There he also started questioning the assumption of bureaucrats as disinterested parties:

My work at the Labor Department made a lasting difference in the way I thought. After being immersed in theory at the University of Chicago, this was my first experience with the application of economics to public policy issues. My work involved studying the sugar industry of Puerto Rico, where the Labor Department ran a program setting minimum wages on an industry-by-industry basis. At that point, I was a supporter of the idea of minimum wages, as a way of helping low-paid workers to earn a decent living. In the course of going through the history and statistics of the Puerto Rican sugar industry, however, I was confronted by the fact that employment was going down as the minimum wage rates were being pushed up. Some economists, including Stigler, had warned that minimum wages caused unemployment and now that warning was hard to ignore.

Union representatives and employer representatives on the boards that set minimum wages had very different explanations as to why employment was going down in the Puerto Rican sugar industry. Employers said that the minimum wage level made it too expensive to produce as much sugar as before, given the natural difficulties of producing sugar in Puerto Rico and the relatively low productivity of the labor there. The union officials said that sugar production was down, and employment with it, because a series of hurricanes had passed through Puerto Rico in each of the past several years, destroying part of the crop.

There was no obvious way to determine which of these two theories was correct. However, we had been taught at Chicago that if there are two different theories, there should be some empirical fact that would be different if one theory were correct, rather than the other. I spent much of the summer trying in vain to come up with something that would tell us which theory was right. As for the permanent Labor Department people, they were reluctant to believe that the minimum wage program was costing workers their jobs. And they left it at that.

Toward the end of the summer, I came in one morning and announced that I had a way of determining which theory was correct. 

“What we need,” I said, “are statistics on the amount of sugar cane standing in the field before the hurricanes came through Puerto Rico.”

There was a stunned silence, as if they were afraid I had stumbled onto something that could turn out to be embarrassing for the Labor Department.

“Well, it’s not that easy,” one of the Labor Department economists said. “We don’t have those statistics.”

“I’ll bet the Department of Agriculture has them,” I said.

“That’s still not the same as if we had them in the Department of Labor,” I was told.

“Why can’t we get them from the Department of Agriculture?” I asked.

“That’s easier said than done. First of all, we would have to make a request, going all the way up through channels to the Secretary of Labor. Then he would have to seek approval from the Secretary of Agriculture, who would then have to forward the request down the chain of command in the Department of Agriculture, to see if the data are available and can be released.” 

“Well,” I said, “John F. Kennedy says that a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Let me file the request.” 

That was 1960. I have yet to receive an official reply to my request.

This was more than an isolated incident. It forced me to realize that government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of the interests of those for whom a program has been set up. Administration of the minimum wage law was a major part of the Labor Department’s budget and employed a significant fraction of all the people who worked there. Whether or not minimum wages benefitted workers may have been my overriding question, but it was clearly not theirs. They had reasons to want to believe that it did, but no real incentive to probe too deeply to find out.

This realization began to make me want to re-think the larger question of the role of government in general. It was the beginning of the erosion of my faith in government programs. The more other government programs I looked into, over the years, the harder I found it to believe that they were a net benefit to society. I had remained a Marxist, despite being at the University of Chicago, but now my experience in Washington began a process of changing my mind completely as to how to deal with social problems. Fortunately, it was a gradual process, so that I was spared the traumatic conversions which some other Marxists have suffered.

Quotes on Discrimination and Disparities

Sowell had other quotes about discrimination and disparities that didn’t make it into the book review:

A disparity does not equal discrimination the same way correlation does not equal causation.

He deems the assumption that disparities imply discrimination to be the “invincible fallacy”:

At the heart of many discussions of disparities among individuals, groups and nations is the seemingly invincible fallacy that outcomes in human endeavors would be equal, or at least comparable or random, if there were no biased interventions, on the one hand, nor genetic deficiencies, on the other. This preconception, which spans the ideological spectrum, is in utter defiance of both logic and empirical evidence from around the world, and over millennia of recorded history.

And again here:

Here the seemingly invincible fallacy of assuming an even or random distribution of outcomes as something to expect, in the absence of such complicating causes as genes or discrimination, can make many statistics that show very disparate outcomes be seen as indicating something fundamentally wrong in the real world, rather than something fundamentally wrong with the assumptions behind the norms to which those outcomes are being compared.

Change over Time

He also provided examples of countries and peoples who have gone from backwardness to leading in achievement. Here he mentions the Scots:

Scotland was for centuries one of the poorest, most economically and educationally lagging nations on the outer fringes of European civilization. There was said to be no fourteenth-century Scottish baron who could write his own name. And yet, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a disproportionate number of the leading intellectual figures in Britain were of Scottish ancestry—including James Watt in engineering, Adam Smith in economics, David Hume in philosophy, Joseph Black in chemistry, Sir Walter Scott in literature, and James Mill and John Stuart Mill in economic and political writings.

And here the Jews:

As a distinguished economic historian put it: “Despite their vast advantage in literacy and human capital for many centuries, Jews played an almost negligible role in the history of science and technology before and during the early Industrial Revolution” and “the great advances in science and mathematics between 1600 and 1750 do not include work associated with Jewish names.”

[...]

From 1870 to 1950, Jews were greatly over-represented among prominent figures in the arts and sciences, relative to their proportion of the population in various European countries and in the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century, with Jews being less than one percent of the world’s population, they received 22 percent of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, 32 percent in medicine and 32 percent in physics.

Other Examples of Disparities

He also provides other examples of disparities in the natural world:

Among other highly skewed outcomes in nature is that some geographic settings produce many times more species than others. The Amazon region of South America is one such setting [here, Sowell quotes from Bradley C. Bennett, Plants and People of the Amazonian Rainforests]:

South America’s Amazon Basin contains the world’s largest expanse of tropical rainforest. Its diversity is renowned. On a single Peruvian tree, Wilson (1988) found 43 species of ants, comparable to the entire ant fauna of the British Isles.

Similar gross disparities have also been found between the number of species of fish in the Amazon region of South America, compared to the number in Europe [quoting from Ronald Fraser, “The Amazon,” Great Rivers of the World]: “Eight times as many species of fish have been caught in an Amazonian pond the size of a tennis court as exist in all the rivers of Europe.”

He also provides examples of disparities between European countries:

The real per capita income that Britain reached in 1880 was not reached by Spain until 1960, and by Portugal until 1970—and, at these latter dates, the real per capita income in both Spain and Portugal was not quite half that in contemporary Britain.

And in professional accomplishments:

Most professional golfers have never won a single PGA tournament in their entire lives, while just three golfers—Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods—won more than 200 PGA tournaments between them.

Although he doesn’t use the term, he’s saying that we shouldn’t be surprised when we see power law distributions around us.

He also notes large disparities between groups that most people can’t visually distinguish, such as different types of Asians (e.g. Chinese vs Laotians) and different kinds of Africans (e.g. Nigerians vs Nigeriens).

Slavery

Sowell treats the question of the impact of slavery as he does everything else—as an empirical claim to be tested. He says that the modern understanding of slavery has been distorted:

If longevity and universality are criteria, then slavery must be among the leading candidates for the most appalling of all human institutions, for it existed on every inhabited continent for thousands of years, as far back as the history of the human species goes. Yet its full scope is often grossly underestimated today, when slavery is so often discussed as if it were confined to one race enslaving another race, when in fact slavery existed virtually wherever it was feasible for some human beings to enslave other human beings—including in many, if not most, cases people of their own race. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before Europeans brought the first African slaves—purchased from other Africans who had enslaved them—to the Western Hemisphere. Nor was it unknown for Europeans to be enslaved by non-Europeans. Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed. But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.

The claim about higher numbers of European slaves surprised me, so I looked it up. He gets the number of European slaves from Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800, which says “Between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.” 

For the number carried in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, historians have compiled all 36,150 Trans-Atlantic slave trading voyages in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, showing that between 10.5 and 12.5 million slaves were transported in total. Of these, about 388,000 Africans were brought to North America, a relatively small portion of the overall Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This number is the basis for Sowell’s comparison.

Significantly more Africans were transported to South America and the Caribbean, with Brazil receiving about 4-5 million enslaved Africans and the Caribbean as a whole receiving a similar number.

Sowell as a White Guy

I came across a review of Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society by the London School of Economics Review of Books objecting to his views on slavery, saying they were “easy for a rich white man to say.” This is a surprising comment in an era of Google Image search. It makes me wonder how many other people thought the same thing before taking the five seconds required to verify that before clicking “publish”.

It’s interesting because it means the reviewer’s model of the world is so rigid that he can’t comprehend a black person believing what Sowell believes. It reminds me of Joe Biden’s saying “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” 

Self Sorting

Sowell has an entire chapter on how people sort themselves, but I omitted it from the review for reasons of length and relevance. He notes that we find similar people clustered together throughout that world. They have been, in Sowell’s words, “sorted”. Sorting can happen through compulsion, such as for enslaved people or Jews being forced into ghettos, or voluntarily. This sorting, voluntarily or involuntarily, is another source of disparity between populations. As he says:

Much empirical evidence suggests that human beings do not interact randomly—nor as frequently or as intensely—with all other human beings as with selected sub-sets of people like themselves. In short, people sort themselves out, both in where they choose to live and with whom they choose to interact most often and most closely. It is worth examining some of that empirical evidence as to self-sorting, before going on to consider the consequences of third-party sorting or unsorting of other people. The crucial point here is that, when people spontaneously sort themselves, the results are seldom even or random, and are often quite skewed.

He gives one such example of that demonstrates the effect of self-sorting:

In the Australian city of Griffith, in the years from 1920 to 1933, 90 percent of Italian men who had emigrated from Venice and gotten married in Australia married Italian women who had also emigrated from Venice. Another five percent married Italian women from other parts of Italy, the same percentage as married “British-Australian” women.

Unsorting

Furthermore, Sowell observes that when the government enforces integration in communities and schools, it often inadvertently leads to a decline in performance for all involved.

In an attempt to reduce disparities, the government has tried to unsort people. Although he was initially supportive of such efforts, he now thinks that, in general, most of these efforts have failed and made everyone worse off:

More generally, government programs to transfer people en masse from bad environments to better environments, in order to improve their prospects in life, ignore vast amounts of empirical evidence that this simply does not work on any scale commensurate with its negative consequences to people into whose midst they are thrust. Moreover, those who promote such programs usually refuse to consider the possibility—even as a testable hypothesis—that it is precisely the presence of people with bad behavior patterns that makes bad environments bad, and a dearth of such people elsewhere that makes better environments better.

When people make decisions of where to live, either by sorting or unsorting themselves, they pay whatever the costs and receive whatever the benefits. That makes them more likely to carefully weigh that decision. But when politicians make those decisions, they pay no costs and receive no benefits. They might get their own benefit of being able to say they integrated society, but they don’t pay any costs if that integration doesn’t go well.

In general, he advocates for the autonomy of individuals in their decision-making processes, as they are the ones who directly bear the costs and enjoy the benefits. In contrast, government bureaucrats are typically insulated from these direct impacts

He also thinks that unsorting incurs costs that get ignored:

It would be wrong to say that there have been literally no benefits at all to anyone from government-subsidized or government-enforced unsorting of people. While some studies have found some benefits to some segments of the low-income groups placed into middle-class neighborhoods by the government, these have seldom, if ever, been of the scope or magnitude envisioned when these programs were instituted.

More fundamentally, negative consequences to the pre-existing residents of the communities into which they have been placed are seldom, if ever, mentioned—much less measured—in these studies. It is as if any benefit, however small, to the new residents automatically outweighs any costs, however large, to the pre-existing residents.

The Cost of Crime

He also talks about the costs of crime on the community:

All this hurts law-abiding people in high-crime neighborhoods, who are, in effect, paying a price for what other people are doing. In addition to being the principal victims of criminals in their midst, they also literally pay a price in hard cash for the behavior of others, in the higher prices usually charged for goods sold in neighborhoods where there are higher costs of doing business, due to higher levels of shoplifting, vandalism, burglary, pilferage and robbery—and higher business insurance premiums because of these and other neighborhood disorders.

[...]

Those local residents who created none of those costs may be victims of those who did, rather than being victims of those who charged the resulting higher prices. This is not just an abstract philosophical point or a matter of semantics. The difference between understanding the source of the higher prices and mistakenly blaming those who charged those prices—which is especially likely when most of the local businesses are owned by people who are ethnically different from the people living in the neighborhood—is the difference between doing things to lessen the problem and doing things likely to make the problem worse by driving more much-needed businesses out of the neighborhood.

The Costs of Discriminating and Not Discriminating

Sowell provided more thoughts around the situation of sociologist William Julius Wilson being treated differently depending on how he was dressed, quoting Walter E. Williams:

A very different view of such situations was taken by another black scholar, Professor Walter E. Williams, an economist at George Mason University:

Information is not costless... People therefore seek to economize on information cost. In doing so, they tend to substitute less expensive forms of information for more expensive forms. Physical attributes are “cheap” to observe. If a particular physical attribute is perceived as correlated with a more costly-to-observe one, the observer might use that attribute as an estimator or proxy for the costly-to-observe attribute.

In a sense, Professor Wilson’s reactions were similar to those of people who blame store owners for the high prices charged in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods, rather than blame those whose behavior raised the costs that the stores’ prices have to cover. There was a time when ordinary blacks, with far less education than Professor Wilson, saw clearly that the misbehavior of a black underclass would cause other blacks to be burdened with a backlash.

Groups Can Be Different

Sowell also notes that people from different groups can just be different:

People from different social backgrounds may also have different goals and priorities—a possibility paid little or no attention in many studies that measure how much opportunity there is by how much upward movement takes place, as if everyone is equally striving to move up.

Minimum Wage

Sowell on the minimum wage:

In the United States, the last administration with no federal minimum wage law at any time was the Coolidge administration in the 1920s. During President Coolidge’s last four years in office, the annual unemployment rate ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent. Yet discussions of minimum wage laws, even by academic scholars, are often based on the intentions and presumed effects of these laws, rather than being based on empirical evidence as to their actual consequences.

Sowell on Writing and Academia

I mentioned that Sowell doesn’t interact much with the formal academic system of writing in scholarly journals. He provides some of his thoughts on academia in the essay “Some Thoughts About Writing”:

Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech. Others love to document the obvious and arbitrarily assume what is crucial. A typical work of this genre might read something like this:

As surely as the world is round (Columbus, 1492), and as surely as what goes up must come down (Newton, 1687), when Ronald Reagan was elected President (Cronkite, 1980) and then re-elected (Rather, 1984), it signaled a change in the political climate (Brinkley, 1980–88). Since then, we have seen exploitation (Marx, 1867) and sexism (Steinem, 1981) on the rise.

But no attempt to parody academic writing can match an actual sample from a scholarly journal:

Transnationalization further fragmented the industrial sector. If the dominant position of immigrant enterprises is held to have reduced the political impact of an expanding industrial entrepreneurate, the arrival of multinational corporations possibly neutralized the consolidation of sectoral homogeneity anticipated in the demise of the artisanate.

You can’t make that up.

It is funny to contrast academic writing with his writing. His writing is so clear, notable only in its lack of pretension. The most straightforward arguments in the most straightforward way. You’re almost left wondering, “Don’t you need to throw in some fancy words to show that you’re better than me?”

Narrative Creation in the Media

Given some of the points Sowell makes, you might not be surprised to hear that he has his qualms with the media. He sees lots of examples of selective reporting. Here’s one such example:

In the year 2000, for example, data from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that 44.6 percent of black applicants were turned down for those mortgages, while only 22.3 percent of white applicants were turned down. These and similar statistics from other sources set off widespread denunciations of mortgage lenders, and demands that the government “do something” to stop rampant racial discrimination in mortgage lending institutions.

The very same report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which showed that blacks were turned down for conventional mortgages at twice the rate for whites, contained other statistics showing that whites were turned down for those same mortgages at a rate nearly twice that for “Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians.”

While the rejection rate for white applicants was 22.3 percent, the rejection rate for Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians was 12.4 percent. But such data seldom, if ever, saw the light of day in most newspapers or on most television news programs, for which the black-white difference was enough to convince those journalists that racial discrimination was the reason.

Politics

In my conclusion, I touched on how his vision doesn’t translate into great politics. He’s very much aware of this:

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

More on politics:

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

How to Help People

He does think it’s possible to help groups, but it starts with getting the facts right:

This is not to say that all attempts to help lagging individuals or groups are futile. On the contrary, many dramatic rises from poverty to prosperity, and even rises to the forefront of human achievements, have occurred at various times in countries around the world. But seldom, if ever, has this been a result of policies based on the fallacy of assuming equal outcomes in the absence of group discrimination or on the basis of an assumption of a fictitious sameness among peoples.

Sowell’s Three Questions

Sowell has three questions he likes to ask when considering an argument: 

• Compared to what? 

• At what cost? 

• What hard evidence do you have?

Sowell on Life

In a sense, life is a relay race, and each of us receives the baton at a time and place over which we have no control.