The Economic Lot of Minorities
An hour with Buckley, a year before the book that made him a household name. Sowell takes apart assumptions everyone else treated as settled.
- Interviewer
- William F. Buckley Jr.
- Program
- Firing Line
- Topics
- Race, Economics
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Thomas Sowell is the closest thing this century has come to on the order of an Emancipation Proclamation. He is a scholar who has devoted his labors to looking behind the cliches of abjection, to sing out not that there is no such thing as racial discrimination, on the contrary, not that there is an instantaneous route to affluence, but that the color of an American's skin is not a birthmark that commits him to substandard life. What is extraordinary is that the labors of Mr. Sowell, far from exciting the kind of enthusiastic reception one would expect, have met in some cases with near-hysterical denunciations, even from some Black leaders. It is as if the head of the Anti-Slavery League had denounced Abraham Lincoln for signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Indeed, that proclamation meant that there would no longer be slavery, but it also meant that there would no longer be an Anti-Slavery League. Thomas Sowell was born in the South, but came North with his family as a boy, entered Stuyvesant High, from which he graduated, going on to the Marines, and then matriculating in Harvard. There, he received a degree in economics, going on to Columbia for his master's and to the University of Chicago for his doctorate. He has taught at Rutgers, at Howard, at Cornell, Brandeis, Amherst, was professor of economics at UCLA. He is now a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He has written a dozen books, including most recently the two both published by Basic Books we will be discussing here today. They are Ethnic America and Markets and Minorities. Our examiner is Mrs. Harriet Pilpel, the well-known attorney, feminist, and scarifier, about whom more in due course. I should like to begin by asking Dr. Sowell whether his findings on, so to speak, the upward mobility of IQs runs counter to such findings as are associated with the work of Coleman Jensen et al.
Certainly, Jensen, - Well, the Jensen and his critics seem to me to operate from a premise that there needs to be some unique, explanation of the Black IQ, and one finds it in environment, one finds it in heredity. what I tried to f-- look at was whether that uniqueness was there in the first place, whether the level of the Black IQ or the pattern of the Black IQ was significantly different from that of any number of other ethnic groups, in the past at a similar stage of their development. What I found was that there was not. Moreover, what I found was that as these various groups began to rise socioeconomically, their IQs also began to rise. one of the most, striking things to me was that as of World War I, Jewish soldiers scored, well below the national average on mental tests in the army. within a decade or so, that had all changed. So that, it seemed to me to indicate that these, IQ levels are not something that are written in stone, even for a large group, and that, as other kinds of developments go on, you expect these kinds of developments also.
Well, your book, didn't make clear to me whether the IQ of someone can change or whether one has to wait a generation for such a change.
That's something that I haven't, looked at the individual level. It does change from, just from one time that you take it to the next, of course, and by significant amounts. The, IQ difference between Blacks and whites, is fifteen points, and there are groups in the United States, Polish Americans come to mind, whose IQs have risen more than twenty points in a period of two generations.
The figures that you cite, I signaled out here the Poles, which in ten years went up to... Blacks went down six. We're talking now about roughly four and a half percent.
hmm.
the Mexicans went up five. Are those, are those, changes insignificant in terms of not being substantial enough to suggest anything?
Well, one of the problems with the, data on Blacks in that study was that, as you came forward, a h- higher percentage of the data turned out to be from Southern schools, where the IQs tend to be lower in general. So that would tend to make that data, much tougher to generalize from.
Well, let's get, Dr. Sowell, if we may, into, some of the, some of the main theses that you propound, in this book, and when I say thesis, I think I should be careful to say finding really rather than- Yes... thesis. It isn't a hypothesis. These are findings, or you assert that they are, d-
Yes. In other words, it is a history book. It is not a political book. It is not, a message book. -
Or speculation.
No. at the end of the book, I have one chapter in which I try to draw some conclusions from what's gone before, but there's less politics in this book, for example, than in many of the reviews of the book that I've read.
Well, let's, start in on the so-called myths of the Anglo-Saxons. It is widely supposed that the Anglo-Saxon is king in America, right?
Yes.
Now, in what sense do you disprove this?
well, in terms just of me- of sheer numbers-... that, Anglo-Saxons are about 15% of the population, so the notion of speaking of an Anglo-Saxon majority and then the various minorities around them, seems a little ludicrous when you call a 15% a majority and you call a 13 or 12% a minority. in terms of income, Anglo-Saxons have about, 5 or 6% higher incomes than the national average, but there are other groups such as the Chinese who have 12% higher, and Japanese who have 32% higher, and Jews are higher than that, so that the notion that the Anglo-Saxons are remarkable is, not borne out by the data.
Well, what about, the Ac- Anglo-Saxon, occupying the select professions? There are, I think you said, 15%, prof- so-called professional, activities, teaching, lawyering, doctoring, so forth. Yes. Now, how do Anglo-Saxons make out, make out on that score?
You have me at a disadvantage. The book does not include a chapter on Anglo-Saxons, and the data don't come to mind that readily.
hmm.
I don't recall anything particularly startling in the numbers as I went through them.
Well, you, you mentioned that, 14 is, is average. West Indians come in at 15.
hmm.
15% of West Indians are lawyers, doctors, or teachers, whereas only 14% of whites are. 18% of Japanese are.
23% of Filipinos are, and 25% of J- of Chinese are. Yes. So, right there, an awful lot of icons have been busted, haven't they?
Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's amazing because the data that I use-... are typically data that have been, in existence for some time and available to anyone who cared to go look it up rather than simply repeat what's been said before. -hmm.
Okay. Now we want to look into some of the causes of, a high reimbursement for one's work and low reimbursement for one's work. it is- Well, it is gen- it is generally, for instance, assumed that the white man makes a lot more than the Black man. You go on to say this is only in part true. Would you elaborate on that?
Yes, that, it's true in general. If you then try to find out why is it true, is it true simply because all Blacks or a substantial part of Blacks, regardless of education, cannot get jobs in their professions? The recent data, and this would not necessarily apply 20 or 30 years ago, the recent data indicate, for example, that Black West Indians, earn 94% of the income of the average American. if you take second-generation Black West Indians, they earn higher incomes than Anglo-Saxons. And so it's very hard to make the argument that the, white employer is looking into the genealogy of the Black job applicant. it's very doubtful if he has any interest in it, much less that he's inquiring into it. it's simply that other people who make that inquiry find these kinds of differences, which you then cannot attribute to the employer because he's probably, totally unaware of the whole situation.
And by the same, by the same token, the, employer is in many instances not equipped to discriminate, say, against a Puerto Rican, even if he wanted to, right? Because there are no visual differences between-
Well, Puerto Ricans- Or
Mexicans, or Mexicans, right...
there, there would be with some and with others there would not
be. With some, others, yeah.
Yeah. But, again, it's quite easy to tell that Black West Indians are Black, and yet that doesn't seem to have the income effect that you would expect on the basis of the prevailing theories.
Or that Chinese are colored or different from white.
Yes. Yes.
And, and now there, you go into some subsections. you ma- you, you point out that depending on where you come from in a foreign country also makes a considerable difference because you carry your ethos on your back, don't you?
Yes, that if you look at the Chinese who came to the United States, let's say before World War II, a very large percentage of those came from one district in one province in southern China. they brought with them a whole tradition which has existed in the United States perhaps more so than it does in China itself today- The people who've come in since World War II have largely not come from that same area. They've come in with a different set of, experiences and backgrounds and values. Many of them are the poverty-stricken Chinese that you see in the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco working the very long hours, getting the very low pay, living in the slums, packed into the rooms, you know, s- several people to a room, and so on. Again, it would be hard to make the argument that this is simply a matter of the way the American employer sees it. The American employer is probably totally unaware that there are two different kinds of Chinese. It's only the people who work with the data who make those separations and find this drastic difference. But the argument that this must derive from the employer, simply won't stand up to the facts.
And the implications of that statement alone have, of course, to do with the sensitivity of the market, right?
Yes.
The market mechanism, as I understand it, is most reluctant to discriminate because it isn't interested in the color of a person's skin or his background, but is very much interested in what he will perform.
Well, the m- the market puts a price on discrimination. Yeah, that's right. There are people who will pay that price and continue to discriminate. Yeah. But, even in South Africa, if you look at the history of discrimination in South Africa, you find that there was less of it, let us say, around 1920, 1910, than there has been in recent decades. One of the reasons being that before the Nationalist power f- Party first came to power in the 1920s, market forces had much more effect in South Africa than they do today. And it's been necessary in South Africa for the Nationalist Party to maintain its apartheid policies, to engage in a massive government intervention in the market, repeatedly tightening up loopholes and so forth, because the employers tend to look for the loopholes. If there are Blacks available at a lower price, it's to the employer's advantage to find the loophole. And in South Africa, ironically, there is, there is a quota system for whites, so that the employer has a certain minimum number of whites he must hire, and the employers do everything they can to evade those, quotas. In that direct
sense, they are paying for discrimination.
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
But the employers tend, if they can get away with it, to hire more Blacks rather than less.
Now, you mentioned that, characteristically, it has been government that has enforced discrimination. We know that's true, of course, in the Oriental societies, and we know it was true here right through and including Jim Crow. Yes. It was here w- for the Navy. You pointed out that, 25% of John Paul Jones' Navy was Black, but none of the, none of the people in World War II in certain ways
were Black. Well, in 19, 1930, there were no Blacks at all in the Navy, but in 1812, -... John Paul Jones had a crew that was 25% Black.
Yes.
so it was a tremendous retrogression in that respect.
Yeah. Well, now, I... It's easy enough, it's easy enough to understand that an agent that exercises coercive power, could be driven to these rather nefarious purposes. Less easy to understand why it is that- colleges and, foundations should be guilty of such behavior, yet this exactly was your finding, wasn't it?
Yes. The, that, let's say the period past, prior to World War II, discrimination in the non-profit sector, was even greater than in the profit sector, and the government being part of the non-profit sector would be part of that. of course, the, non-profit sector, lacks the same incentive, to hire people from, minority backgrounds. it is the fact that the opportunity to make more profit by hiring, with less regard to those things, that is the dr- driving factor that tends to erode this. when you have an agency that is non-profit, of course they have no incentive. They, they may choose to hire only Scandinavians, even if that means a 20% higher, pay scale to get all their jobs filled with Scandinavians, because if, for example, they're a public utility, that means they simply pass that on to the customers. We have no choice but to pay it.
Well, you maintained, or you, you said an extraordinary figure, that there were only three PhDs in the 1930s, where- whereas by contrast, there were 300 practicing chemists.
Yes,
among
Blacks, yes.
And did you mean, did you mean three PhDs in chemistry departments?
No, I meant three PhDs, three Black PhDs- Yeah... teaching in non-Black colleges in the 1930s. While the same- In,
in any field?
In any field. And, the fir- the first Black, professor at a major university, was hired in 1940, at the University of Chicago. so that, this is... And Jews also were, excluded from many, top colleges and universities during the same era. again, non-profit organizations can afford to do this. when there's profit, the cost of doing it is much higher. It would be very hard, for example, for a, basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks.
hmm. They would soon tire- As you showed in the case of the Washington Redskins.
Yes, because there they had, they had a policy of trying to keep Blacks off the team for a long time, and it so happened that almost all the leading running backs of that era were Black. And of course, as the Washington Redskins began to lose more and more games, it wasn't very long before they decided they had better get, Bobby Mitchell, from Cleveland and put him in the lineup as they, as they, as they did.
I-I-I, you grant, don't you, that discrimination, racial discrimination is, in a sense, pandemic. You find it everywhere. Yes. You compared it to oxygen at one point.
Yes.
Now, can you tell me using the non-market argument why it is that the, fellows and professors of, Harvard and, Yale and Princeton and Cornell should have systematically excluded, Blacks or, for that matter, Jews during the '30s?
I guess the, again, part of the general antipathy you find among peoples around the world, but at a very low cost.
hmm.
It didn't cost them really anything to do that. but, you know, a commitment- Because
it was a biased market, you mean?
No, I mean in the sense that they're a non-profit organization. They would get no higher or lower incomes whether they excluded Blacks or did not exclu-exclude Blacks.
hmm.
the institution might end up paying more money because there might be some Blacks who were available to fill some posts they had to fill completely with whites and had to drive up the market by competition. But of course, that was no, that was no money out of their pocket. But a, but if someone in a, in an employment situation, if an employer has that situation, then he loses money. -hmm. and no matter how biased he is, at some point or other, he has to figure out whether he can really afford, to be quite as, biased as he wants to be.
Th-this was, if I remember, the reason for the subterranean enthusiasm by the merchandisers of Atlanta for passing the civil rights law, which forbade refusal of service to Blacks because they wanted the business.
Yes, and this gave them an out.
They wanted the business, but they didn't want it to be clear they wanted the business because this would've gotten them in trouble socially.
Yes.
That would be another clear example of-
Yes. In fact, one of, one of the problems, is that the government itself has engaged in so much discrimination that it's difficult even at this late date to measure employer discrimination. That is, if the government has provided substandard education, for example, you know, for 12 years, whatever number of years someone's in school, and then he goes into the labor market with this substandard education, it's very hard then to compare him to someone who's gotten a better education in the same number of years to figure out how much of the differential is due to the quality of the education. -hmm. That's a tou- That's a, that's a tough problem. I think there's some indication of this in the fact that the older Blacks earn a lower percentage of the income of whites of their own age than do the younger Blacks, indicating in part the fact that the older Blacks were educated in an era when the education was poorer in the, in the, in the Black schools, and also where the job opportunities were lower, and therefore, they had less experience.
So that there would be a greater differential between, say, the 45-year-old Black and the 45-year-old Jew than between the 20-year-old Black and the 20-year-old Jew? Yes,
yes.
And un- and with other groups as well. With Puerto Ricans, for example, Puerto Ricans around 18 to 24 earn about 3% higher than the national average, but Puerto Ricans around 50 earn substantially less.
hmm. what would be the legitimate and what would be the illegitimate deductions that an observer might make from the fact that America's, roughly speaking, 50% q- women, feminine- And there, yet there's only a single woman senator in Congress. What would be a legitimate, what would be an illegitimate deduction to make from that-
Well, as I look at numbers- paradox... from various places around the world, I don't find anything faintly resembling an even representation of people in any institution anywhere in the world, broken down by any way. There's been a recent study of military forces around the world in which they can find no country in which the military force represents even approximately the ethnic composition of the society. Sometimes the poorer groups are overrepresented, sometimes underrepresented. there are all kinds of factors there. What's amazing to me is that this notion that people would be evenly represented except for these institutional policies, that notion has had such momentum behind it without a speck of evidence being asked or presented.
Well, what about s- let's, let's say you find 11% of a country, is, Indian-
but only 1% vote, but 50% is white and 40% vote. Do you draw any deductions from that disparity?
I find that some people have different, views on the importance of voting.
hmm.
But I find that throughout the world. If you look at, Malaysia, for example, the Chinese are the large minority there, about a third or more of the Malaysian population. They're evenly represented in the colleges. The Chinese, outnumber three to one by the Malays in liberal arts. They outnumber the Malays eight to one in science and 15 to one in engineering. If you look at, Asians in the United States who get PhDs, and here we're talking about a select group, you find that they're outnumbered about three to one by Hispanics who get PhDs in history, but they outnumber the Hispanics 10 to one in chemistry, that nowhere do I find this even spread of people that you look for, and I think the reason is very simple, that human beings are not random events.
Well,
are they- That we all have histories, and there are values that come out of those histories- -hmm... and we have things that we wanna do and things that we don't wanna do.
Well, would th- are these genetic implications or purely cultural implications?
I would think, I would, I would think cultural. I know myself when, I was, struggling, in late teens looking for work, it never occurred to me to become a policeman It never occurred to me to become a policeman. There are other people I'm sure who it would occur to immediately. I never thought of that. That was not something that I did. I, now I knew there were Black policemen. I, delivered groceries to one, so I knew that there were jobs there. It just was not something that I was led towards.
Well, I think it's one thing for us all to accept individual inclinations, but to accept group, inclinations is, or should be a little bit more difficult, shouldn't it? For you to say, "I, Tom Sowell, was not interested in being a policeman," is very different from saying, "Blacks on the whole are uninterested in being a policeman."
It's tou- it's tougher to, it's tougher to demonstrate in the case of a group, but what I'm saying is the contrary thesis. -huh. Namely, that all groups would be evenly represented everywhere, if allowed to follow their own bent without any institutional barriers. That is what I find amazing because even if you look at activities totally within their own control, which television programs to watch and so on, there's a whole, sub-industry of, studying the demographic composition of television audiences, simply because they found that the people, you know, who watch, NFL, Monday Night Football are not the same people who watch, Meet the Press or MacNeil/Lehrer. and the f- and the advertisers wanna know who are those people because they don't, they don't wanna be selling, lingerie to the people who are watching Monday Night Football. they don't- It's the
wrong market,
yeah... and they, and they don't wanna waste their product dollar, their advertising dollar, and they find there are very substantial differences even in things that are totally within the control of the individual.
Now, th- those... Are those differences value-free on the whole or not value-free?
I'm not sure what you mean by value-free.
Well, nobody can blame a man for being uninterested in wearing lingerie.
hmm.
But you could blame a man, let us say, who would not permit, or would not invite a woman to share, the experience of a football game on the grounds that it's, it's not appropriate.
I suppose so. I'd never really thought of it.
hmm.
no, I-I'm not, I'm not sure why it's, there's a value problem involved at all if you're talking about what people choose to do themselves- Because I'm
leading
back-... as distinguished from what they try to prevent other people from doing.
See, I'm, I'm leading back now to the question of why is there a single woman in the Senate, although half of Americans are women, and I guess I'm asking you whether there, whether the, whether this is a transcription of implicit anti-feminine values in this society.
Well, in a country where I think just over half the people are women, that if they wanted to fill the Senate with women, they could very well do it.
hmm. Well, it may very well be that they take on the prejudices of men.
You see- That m- all sorts of things are possible. It's also possible that there are other reasons why women don't choose to get into positions like politics because they have- Yeah a set of demands which are very tough for most women to meet in the s- and at the same time, do the other things that most women do, such as raise children and so on.
That's what I was inviting you to speculate on.
Yes. I kn- I know that from, just from my own case, I've been invited to be involved in politics and electorally and otherwise, and given the values that I have, it ju- there is just simply no way that those two things can go together. that what I would have to give up in terms of my personal life, would just not be worth it to me. I suspect that's probably true for a lot of women. When I did a study of academic women, I found that, women who do follow academic careers, get their PhDs and so on, have much lower rates of marriage than either non-academic women or academic men, and much higher rates of divorce among the few who do get married. Apparently, there must be a great deal of stress in that. And just from people that I know, I can see where there is a great deal of stress in trying to have two people following their career when one is expected around the home to provide all the housewifely services in addition to writing those articles and books. It gets to be a little much.
So you would dismiss as thoughtless any complaint against a society that had only, one woman in the Senate or only 11% Blacks in Congress or only, 6% Jews or whatever, or,
or- I wouldn't dismiss it. I would simply say, if there is evidence that you have, let us see that evidence. Hmm. What I think is really tragic is that assertions have been made not only without evidence being offered, but without anyone even asking for evidence.
hmm.
It's as if these are self-evident truths that have been brought down from the mountainside.
So the, the thing to do is to look for non-invidious explanations
No, the thing to do is look for whatever seems to be the most reasonable explanation in the circumstance. And I'm saying that the people who have made the case the other way, or who've, who've acted as if they made the case, typically have not felt a necessity even to bring evidence. They say there's one woman in the Senate, therefore... Or they say that women make X percent of the income of men, without bothering to find out what percentage of those women are working part-time, what percentage of them are re-entering the labor force after 20 years of having children, et cetera. Rather than saying, "Let us compare now women who chose to stay in the labor force continuously since high school, on into their 30s, let's say, compared to men who did, and see how do they compare." And there, these great differences tend to disappear. In some cases, the women make more.
Well, but you seem, you seem substantially to have eliminated invidious explanations. For instance, when you write, "How far have we come in removing discriminatory pay differences among individuals with the same qualifications and different racial or ethnic backgrounds? Among the youn- younger generation, we have just about all the way." This is you.
Yes.
Now, this would suggest that you have satisfied yourself that there are no invidious standards that inhibit minority ethnics from-
No, the, you'll, you'll never reach the point where there are no- when they're young... where there are no invidious standards because there will always-
But they affect, they critically affect.
Oh, I'm saying that if you're trying to explain pay differences-... that will not, that's not an explanation that will stand up to a closer look at the data.
hmm.
And that's true not only in the United States, as an alias, also true in other parts of the world, that if you look at, again, go back to Chinese and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the Malays are the dominant force, not only numerically, but politically. They control the government, and so on. In
fact, they have anti-Chinese laws, don't they?
Oh, they do. Yeah. Yeah. So there's no question whether Chinese are discriminated against in Malay- Malaysia. I mean, all you have to do is read the, read the books, the statute books, and they tell you. There's no, no two ways about it. The fact of the matter is, the Chinese make double the income of the average Malay. So the question is not whether people are discriminated against. The question is, how effective is that discrimination, and to what extent does ex- explain income differences? Because many of the groups that are above the average income of, in the United States and in other countries, are groups that have demonstrably been discriminated against in various ways. The Jews, for instance. The Jews, be classic. Yeah. The Japanese also.
Yeah.
and the Japanese make almost one-third higher income than the average American. So the question is not whether there's been this, interracial friction and so on. That's existed everywhere and down through history. The question is, how much can you explain the income differences that way?
Well, as- assuming then that, you can't explain them in terms of discrimination, then they have got to be explained in some other way.
Now, what ways suggest themselves to you as, un- as subsidizing the principal residual differences?
Oh, I would think, differences in skill and experience. -
Or may I give the figures you give- Yeah just as a background here for the audience. If the average American makes 100, Dr. Sowell points out the Jews make 170, Irish 103, West Indians 94, Blacks 62, and Indians 60. Now, did you factor into that age differentials or not?
no, those were gross figures.
Those were gross figures.
Yes.
So therefore they would, they would come together a lot more-
Yes,
yes if
you took out the
age.
In fact, I had... I did one, set of numbers some years ago of 30-year-old males only, and there the differentials began to shrank, shrink, as you, as you look at, other things like that. The more things you hold constant, the more these numbers tend to shrink. Unfortunately, after all this time, no one has bothered, that I know of, to try to eliminate differences of age, differences of education, and particularly qualitative differences in education, and try to see how much is left after you've done all of that. It begins to fall away qu- pretty rapidly, though, with some of those things.
Okay, but nevertheless, you... nevertheless, certain significant differences remain.
Major differences. Yeah. And I don't wanna be optimistic because if you're poor for reason X rather than for reason Y, that is no enormous consolation. I mean, that will not impress the landlord or the people at the supermarket. the fact is they wanna know how much money do you have. and you wanna know how much money you're gonna get, too. So the... These are major differences, and things need to be done about them. Unfortunately, politics involves telling people what they wanna hear, and what people wanna hear is that a certain kind of villainy can explain almost all of it. Now, there's no such thing as a lack of villainy among human beings. anytime you take any large group of people, you have an almost inexhaustible source of sins, and if you want to look into all those sins, you can go on forever looking into them. The question is whether those sins explain the numbers you're talking about.
hmm. -hmm. -hmm. All right. Let's, let's grant that they don't-
hmm...
and go on to say, what is it that does account for them? Because we've eliminated genetic inclinations. -hmm. We've elim- eliminated invidious, social factors, so we're left with what? For instance, region, where you come from, right?
Region makes a big difference.
Yeah. Okay.
p- people who come from the South tend to have lower incomes- Okay... whether they're Black or white.
Okay. Let's say, let's say then we're- History
There would still be a, there would still be a difference. history would be one big one.
History, by... What do you mean by history? Oh,
all right.
Jews came- The history of the race or the history of the personal history of when they got here or what?
The history of the group in the United States.
hmm.
That, for example, the Jews who came here came here with all sorts of urban skills. They were in clothing industries, -
Garment workers.
Yes, that sort of thing. the Germans came here with all sorts of skill in beer-making, piano-making, machinery k- kinds of things. Blacks, of course, emerging from slavery had enormous, disadvantages, even as compared to people emerging from slavery in other parts of the Western Hemisphere. Because for one thing, in the United States, the Blacks were not allowed to have any responsibility under slavery, that the, one of the key ways of holding Blacks in slavery at low cost was to keep the people dependent as much as possible. Now, people tried to do that in other parts of the Western Hemisphere. It wasn't as possible, say, in the West Indies, 'cause there weren't enough whites, for example, in the West Indies to matter. So if Blacks were gonna be fed in the West Indies, they had to be fed by growing their own food.
Like Angolan and, like the Portuguese colonies compared to, say, f- South Africa.
Yes. And so therefore, the Blacks, say, in the West Indies had all sorts of experience growing their own food, selling the surplus in the market, and in fact, being responsible for budgeting what they, what they had. Blacks in the United States were deliberately kept from having that. Dependence was seen as the key to, to holding the slaves down. It's ironic that same principle comes up in the welfare state a, you know, a hundred years later.
Well, I was gonna ask you, that. you've anticipated me. to what extent do you, do you find that then that the welfare state is trying to preserve, an ethos which precisely, I understand you to say we need to liberate ourselves from?
Yes. The politics really involves getting people to vote for you, and they get... And people vote for you when they think that they can depend on you, when they are dependent on you. To the extent that people become self-reliant and can feel they're perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, to that extent do you lose your hold on their votes.
that's kind of a harsh, generality, isn't it? Because a lot of people who really are philanthropically-minded are in favor of the kind of thing that is generally understood as a charitable intercession, isn't it?
Yes. There are people who are professional politicians who simply look at the bottom line of- Yeah where the votes go. There are other people who sincerely believe that if they will hand out things here and there, that this will in fact benefit people. Again, looking at, - Your
point is it doesn't.
It doesn't. I haven't been able to find, I haven't been able to find a single country in the world where the policies that are being advocated for Blacks in the United States have lifted any people out of poverty. I've seen many examples around the world of people who began in poverty and ended in affluence. Not one of them has followed any pattern at all like what is being advocated for Blacks in the United States. many groups have remained in poverty for a very long time trying to follow those patterns.
These sort of permanent indigent classes.
That's right. Within the Blacks there's a very diverse movement, though. On the one hand, you have Blacks who are getting more education, who are going to college, and so on. their incomes are rising, not only absolutely, but relative to that of whites of the same description. it's those Blacks who have not had, say, nine years of schooling, who have not had, six years of experience in the job market, their incomes are declining relative to the incomes of Bl- incomes of whites if over the very same span of time, so it can't be a matter of the business cycle or something like that. It's that those Blacks who have the advantages relative to others have now still more advantages, but those who had the very difficult poverty to deal with, that is becoming more difficult. A higher percentage of all Black income is going to the top twenty percent of Blacks over time.
Well, is it your... Is, do I understand you to say that the government has exacerbated the plight of these poor Blacks?
Yes.
How?
A number of ways. One, they've made it difficult to get jobs, to get started in the job market. Minimum wage law would be one of those things, but only one. the terrible schooling would be a major factor, that if you're trying to turn out kids who are forty percent, functionally illiterate upon graduation from high school, then you're gonna have very serious problems in the job market.
And the government is responsible for that?
The government runs the schools. Through the public schools. Yes. State and lo- state as well as federal. they're doing many things to make it much tougher for the person at the bottom to get started, and they're also making it, less necessary to get started by having various subsidy programs, food stamps, welfare, and so on, which, reduce the difference between working and not working, so that the n- the general tendency of what they're doing is to make it harder to rise, but of course, if you're lucky enough to have started to rise before these programs began, then you're in great shape.
Well, now you point out in your book that one of the popular misconceptions is that Blacks, Black families are headed by women as the result of, as the result of, the, of sundering families during the slave-owning, era.. You say that's, that's incorrect, that traditionally there was a mother and a father in situ, where Black families existed. Then you make the following statement, "The current large and rising numbers of female-headed families among Blacks is a modern phenomenon stemming from the era of the welfare state when the government began to subsidize desertion and teenage pregnancy."
Yes.
In what way is the government subsidizing teenage pregnancy?
Oh, the AFDC program
you're concluding that there would be less of that pregnancy if there were less of that program?
I'm saying that historically, there was a lot less of it before there was s- were such programs-
hmm...
in general. I'm citing there, for example, a study by Herbert Gutman, which took, more than a decade, I believe. Again, it's, what's striking to me is how long people repeated the statement that the female-headed Black family was a legacy of slavery- -hmm... without ever bringing forth a single piece of evidence. Gutman spent twen- more than 10 years looking into this. He went with exactly the opposite conclusion, that it was rare, particularly for teenage Black women, to have, children with no man, in the, in the, in the house, through the period that he covered, which is up to 1925, that, those Black women who were, had no husband typically were either widows or divor- or deserted or what have you. They were not teenage girls in most cases. I think in one period, 3% of the Black families were headed by teenage girls.
And that figure is now over 50%.
I don't know what the teenage girl percentage is, but it's an awful lot- Oh, teenage girl, yeah, right, yeah... it's an awful lot higher than that.
Yeah. well, Doctor, let's hear from our examiner. We have with us, Mrs. Harriet, Pilpel, who's well known to this, viewers of this program. Mrs. Pilpel is, an attorney with Greenbaum, Wolfe & Ernst, a graduate of Vassar and of the Columbia Law School, and very active in a number of liberal and feminist, movements. Mrs. Pilpel.
I would like to ask both of you, if I may, the same question. both of you seem agreed that in the 1950s, Harvard and Yale excluded Blacks and Jews and were- '30s, '
30s. '
30s? '
Yeah.
Excluded Blacks and Jews, and in fact, in another program- To the contrary... Bill, you said that you think it's the other way today, that Harvard and Yale discriminate against Anglo-Saxons. Well,
to the extent that they believe in affirmative action, they would necessarily have to discriminate in some way.
I would like to know what you think changed this attitude from discrimination against Blacks and Jews to, in Bill's opinion anyway, the opposite extreme.
May I, -
Yes...
I don't see it as a change of attitude. I see it as a change of who, whose ox is gored, and the change is simply a political change in the larger society It's, it's, it's cheaper for non-profit organizations to discriminate, no matter who they discriminate against. Therefore, you would expect them to be in the forefront of discrimination, whether it is direct discrimination or reverse discrimination, and that's largely what you find.
Well, you're saying that it was to their advantage to discriminate against Blacks and Jews before- No...
and now it's the other way. It was never, it was never, it was never to their advantage to do so, except insofar as they simply had prejudices which they were able to indulge. I'm saying that whatever they do, discrimination costs them a lot less than it costs someone in a competitive industry. Highly competitive industries, for example, sports and entertainment, have typically been much more open than much more closed-in kinds of, non-competitive things like public utilities and non-profit organizations, foundations, universities, hospitals, and so on.
What would you do to help those Blacks who are still in a very low economic condition in terms of education, for example? How... There are, as you said, many Blacks today who are still being given totally inadequate education- Yes... cannot be expected to get very far for that reason. What would be your remedy for that?
I know. Oh, I would... Oh, that's, very easy. I would allow their parents to have a choice of where to send them to school, whether that choice is called a voucher scheme, open enrollment, tuition tax credit, any kind of scheme of that sort that would put that power in the hands of their parents, mainly because that would mean that the schools would have to be responsive to them. As it is now, the school is a monopoly. They need not be responsive. I have relatives right here in New York, whom I've had to intervene for because the schools would not even treat them decently, much less give them access to the information they wanted that they were entitled to under the law.
If you put it in the hands of the parents, and the parents are themselves uneducated-
hmm
and not really aware of what the various potentials are, what makes you think that they would decide more intelligently than the present system?
I think, again, history. Blacks, as Blacks emerged from slavery, oh, an minute percentage could read or write, and yet in half a century, over half the Black population was literate. an economic historian has called that one of the most remarkable things in history. If you look back to the era prior to the Civil War, when there were free Blacks, about, half a million in the United States, they not only were not allowed in the public schools, they were in some states forbidden even to send their children to private schools and had to do so clandestinely, and yet the census of 1850 showed that most free Blacks could read and write. So I don't think that, the fact that people have little education means that they are in any way, poorer judges Than distant bureaucrats who have their own axes to grind in running the public school system.
But you yourself said that you thought one of the reasons why Blacks were still in an underprivileged position, those who still are- was because they had not been given a proper education. Yes. And we are now talking about people who had not been given a proper education making decisions for their children as to what is a proper education, and you're saying that they, if that was put up to them-
hmm...
they would make a wiser choice than the present efforts to integrate the schools.
Let me, let me, say that if they would not make a very different choice, it would be hard to understand the hysterical opposition of teachers unions to giving them that opportunity
Well, I have no comment on that, but I would like to know how Bill feels about improving educational opportunities.
Oh, I, I believe with Dr. Sowell that, the voucher system, obviously encourages parents to use the ca- same kind of selectivity that's available to chil- to parents who have enough money to send their children to private schools, and that to give the, a mo- to give a versatility of choice, a flexibility of choice to parents of poor children, the same versatility that is given to parents of wealthier children, is obviously desirable.
And you think that their ability to make the decision is equal?
No, but I think, I think it, it may be equal, may be less equal, may be more equal. I think that the phenomenon of the, of poor and, and uneducated, parent who seeks for hi- his chil- his or her children what he himself has never achieved for himself is much more commonplace-
Oh, God, yes
tha- than the, than the, than the kind of sated, self-satisfied parent who typically neglects the education of his child.
I think you'd have, very few Blacks who finished college, including myself, if they had to have college-educated parents to send them there. I, you know, the, there was no one in my family that went to college before me, and I, and among the Blacks that I know of my generation, I would say that's the rule rather than the exception. Sure.
My son the doctor syndrome.
Absolutely.
Well, I think that in f- insofar as your own experience is concerned, you are clearly an exceptional person, and it is somewhat reminiscent of what the minister for women's affairs said in France when she was asked whether there was gonna continue to be a Ministry of Women's Affairs now that women had achieved such great strides forward. Her answer was, "As long as the average woman does not have the same opportunities as the average man, we need to have a government office which will try to get them some sort of equal opportunity."
But it's precisely the government which is denying it in this case. It's the government which has been running these schools from which the kids graduate semi-literate. And f- for years, Black parents have been sending their kids, not just me, but a whole generation of Blacks, to college, to high school, whatever. If you look at the history of Black education in the United States, that has been largely, at the beginning, an effort by the Blacks themselves. It was 1916 before there were as many Blacks attending public high school as were attending private high schools, so there's a very long history of Blacks trying to get their kids educated. I might say from my experience, again, not my own story- But at Black colleges, the parents who work nights and drive- fathers drive cabs and mothers who scrub floors to see that their kid gets an education, if there weren't such people, you wouldn't see half as many Blacks with, college degrees today.
And they're beating down the doors of Catholic parochial schools- That's-... even non-Catholic Blacks to get in there.
Yes.
What percentage would you say of the total number of Blacks were in private schools or beating down the doors of parochial schools? Would it not be a considerably less than half percentage?
That's right, because they don't have the money, and you could have made exactly the same argument against the GI Bill, that why should you have a GI Bill for people to go to college when the rich, when only the rich go to college? Well, the reason the rich that were the only ones going to college at that time was because there was no GI Bill. The whole point of this is to put this choice within their hands. It is hard for me to understand what harm is gonna be done by allowing parents to have a choice as compared to having self-interested bureaucrats have a monopoly.
Well, I think that your notion of parents having a choice overlooks the tremendous degree of family disorientation which exists in all communities, including the Black community.
Single-mother families, a single mother has the same incentive to send her kid to the best school she can get him into as any other parent.
There are, of course, many children, particularly of high school age, who are totally disassociated from their parents.
That's true. I think, I think that would be a considerably less than half, too, to use your phrase.
I would like to, for a moment, ask you some questions about the economics of job-getting in terms of the Blacks versus the whites. The statistics I was able to pull together indicate that at the present time, white males make $17,427 on an average basis for the year. Black males make 12,738. White females make 10,244, and Black females make 9,476. It is clear from these figures, as indeed I think it's clear to most of us from what we see, that there is a discrimination against Blacks and against women in our present system. Since not all Blacks will be superior, how would you try to even that out so that there would be some equality of job opportunities?
I'm sorry you missed the earlier part of the program when I pointed out that, where you find, people not represented evenly, that does not show the institutional effect because almost nowhere in human affairs do you find people evenly represented.
Friedman- If
you, if you compare comparable people with respect to age, with respect to education, et cetera, you get a totally different picture both with respect to Blacks and women. Now, the figures that I saw, for example, show, more recently that if you take Black pe- Families where the husband and wife are both college-educated and compare them to white family where the husband and wife are both college-educated, the Black family is now earning $2,000 a year more. The problem is not- the problem is that very few Blacks fall in that category, that when you compare category for category- Then we're talking about getting people a decent education. I'm saying that you cannot say that numbers collected at the employer's place of business reflect simply the re- employer's policies. Those nu- those numbers reflect underlying conditions in the whole society, just as numbers collected at a hospital do not show you that the people are sick because they're in the hospital.
No, I would agree with that, but you would also have to agree that generally speaking, women are paid less, for example, for the same jobs as men.
No, I would not. I would not agree with that. If you're talking about women with the same number of years of experience, with the same- I am... continuous service, et cetera, et cetera, then when I look at that, I don't find that disparity. I find, for example, in many cases, the women are making more, depending on how you break the data down. The difference with women is between unmarri- is between married women and everybody else. That's the real difference.
Well, even as to single women, the Census Bureau statistics, the most recent ones I could find, 1978, say that single men are earning $11,100 and single women are l- earning $9,300.
Yes, I li- I love the word single that is used. When I did my study, I didn't use single. I used never married. You see, a woman who is single at age 40, having spent 10 or 20 years raising children, is really not quite the same as a man of age 40 who's been working continuously for 20 years. A-
a- and the differential she cited is not that great, so it could easily be, accounted for by, by the few ways-
Yes, because when I break them down the other way, I di- I did this for the academic world, and there I found the, women who are never married, which is the term the way I take it, there they were earning s- more than the men. And similarly, when the government did data some years ago on women who had been working continuously since high school into the thir- into their 30s, there you found that they were making slightly more than men of the same description. So the difference is between married women and everybody else, and married men get an extra bonus because their wives take care of many things that enable them to put more time into their careers.
I'm sure you're aware of the fact that there are approximately 15% of all homes in which there is only one wage earner, so that when you talk about women being able to take care of things for their married mate wage earner, the fact is that in the overwhelming majority of American homes, the women also work. And therefore, I don't think your explanation that women have other responsibilities and that's why
they are- Work can mean part-time work or full-time work. Women do not work full-time to the same extent that men. Part-time workers make less than full-time workers
May I ask a question about unemployment? the latest figures I saw indicated that of Black youth, something like 46% of those who wanted jobs were unable to get jobs. I really would like this time to ask both of you to respond to what would you do in that situation if you would assume for a moment that these are people who do want jobs and are unable to find work?
I would, first of all, repeal the minimum wage law because if you go back to, say, 1950, 1948, '49, '50, you find that at that time, the unemployment rate among Black teenagers was a fraction of what it is today, and there certainly wasn't any less racism then than there is today. what was different was that at that time, the minimum wage law was a decade old, it was a decade of inflation, and the law hadn't been changed. So for all practical purposes, it didn't exist.
And I would be- Well, don't you think that was als- also a decade of expansion in which there were a lot of jobs, whereas today our economy is in a recession- If you look-... and there are not that many jobs
available... if you look at the most prosperous years of the '60s and '70s, you don't find Black teenage unemployment as low as it was in the recession year of 1949.
Well, I don't know what the job situation was then, but it's only recently that we have reached this point.
I do. I was a Black teenager in 1949. Did you get a job? It was a recession year, and after considerable looking, I found a job. But the point is, the kid who was l- living where I lived then, who's living there now, he has a hell of a lot harder time finding that job because there are so many good people who have tried to do good for him and priced him right out of the market.
Well, facing the situation as it presently exists, what would you do for that 46%?
If the situation is gonna remain as it presently exists, the results will remain
as they presently exist. No, I'm saying now, today, what would you do to help this 46%?
I would repeal those things which in democracy-
But that isn't gonna help these 46%, is it?
Nothing, if- Something has to be done about it... do you want, do you wanna change it or you wanna leave it the same? If you wanna leave it the same, everything will continue the same. If you wanna change it'll change.
No, I think that your suggestions of change contemplate that in the future, the situation will be different. But I'm asking you about the 46% of Black youths who are now unemployed, who probably would not be affected by changing the law this year.
You can say that all you want, but the evidence is totally against you.
S- may I add at this datum, I, this out of respect to Mr. George Keller, who was the assistant to the president of the University of Maryland, who writes in The New York Times, 28 January 1981, quote, "In fact, overwhelming numbers of young Blacks are in high school, college, at work, in the military, or at home taking care of babies. The percentage of Blacks between 16 and 19 looking for a full-time job and unable to find one is actually 7.8%."
Well, I can't just resolve. Perhaps you can.
According to calculations based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
There's, a similar figure was, printed some years ago in Wattenberg's book, The Real America. A lot of those big numbers come from looking f- looking at kids who would like to have a job after school, which is fine, and I think it'd be better if they had more jobs after school. But those n- those numbers don't relate to what we're talking about when we talk about adult unemployment.
Well, what would you say about the s- Present 8% overall unemployment figure, that also is a lot of people who are looking for part-time jobs, or is that a general figure that indicates that we have a great many unemployed in this country?
Because I- There are a great many unemployed, and one of the reasons being that we've had the kind of economy we've had for some time now, and all attempts to, get the inflation out of it are likely to have these adverse effects. It's, it's tragic. However- Should
we
warn,
should we warn her that you wrote a book about Say's Law?
Well, I sh- no.
No, I am concerned about what we do for people who are presently in a very disadvantaged position because of what's happened
on the economic front. We try to remove as many of the barriers as possible that have put them in that position.
And y- you think the barriers that have put them in that position are, for example, the minimum wage law?
Minimum wage laws, labor unions, occupational licensing-
Would you abolish labor unions? Huh? Would you
abolish labor unions? You don't have to abolish labor unions. I'm saying that w- that if you're asking me what are some of the things that have done it, I'm giving you some of the things that have done it. Blacks were well-represented in many occupations, skilled occupations, in the South two or three generations ago to a greater extent than today because two or three generations ago, those industries were not unionized. Construction, railroads, just classic examples. When we have the so-called Philadelphia plans to get Blacks into the construction industry, I mean, it's, it would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. Blacks were heavily into the construction industry before it was unionized.
Well, again, I come back to the here and now. Assuming that they are not heavily in the construction industry now, what would you do to cure it? Because I do think that- I would
do away with... I would mi- do away with or otherwise mitigate the effects of those things that are keeping Blacks out of those industries.
Forg- forgive me, but he has said that three times.
Well, he has not taken up the cause of those people who would not be immediately affected by changing those laws. In addition to which- The
acoustics must be very bad in here.
He can't, he ac- he can't create employ... as he's e- elsewhere pointed out, to say, to say that somebody should receive more money than he is now making and to pass a law to that effect is not, in fact, to give him a job for more money. But it may very well be to cause unemployment.
I gather that there are many instances where the minimum wage provisions have been waived or do not apply, where the employers have nonetheless not taken advantage of it. So I don't know what empirical proof- I'm
not sure of that at all. I know that there are provisions of the law under which if you're willing to go through enough red tape, you can get certain exemptions. particularly for the person who's hiring one or two people, he may decide that it's just not worth his while
Would it be your feeling that if all the affirmative action programs were discontinued, women and minorities would go ahead much faster than they have under the affirmative action programs?
Yes. The, it's not my, not, it's not my opinion. the data indicate that, for example, Puerto Ricans had a higher percentage of the national average income before quotas than after. So did Mexican Americans. Blacks had about the same. So there's, again, there's a marvelous putting of the burden on other people. You're saying, "Here's this mag- this massive program that has existed now for a decade."
That's not what I- "And you're not, and
you're unable to show me-"
The things are gonna go
up "... the benefits that have come from all this enormous controversy."
Well, I certainly has been a revolution insofar as women's participation in the labor force- Not
really
and as professionals, et cetera.
Not really. No, it hasn't. No, it
hasn't. I know that of my own knowledge.
No, you don't know it of your own knowledge because I've also looked at the same thing, and in the past, you found women over-represented in many professional occupations, much more so than today, and you find that decline in those occupations much more highly correlated with a lower age of marriage for college women and with more childbearing. And as those two things, those two demographic factors have changed, women have also changed in their representation. So, there's this whole myth that's been created that this is all a function of political developments of the past, decade or so, just will not stand up.
Thank you very much, Mrs. Pilpel, and thank you very much, Dr. Thomas Sowell, author of Ethnic America: A History and Markets and Minorities, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
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