More Social Justice Fallacies

I was glad that they said what they did. I will wait and see how it'll be applied. I was glad when I read the original Bakke decision because it said we can't have quotas. But in there somewhere there was a little opening. It turns out to mean you can't have quotas if you call them quotas. But if you call them something else, you can. And in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion, he's telling Harvard that you can take race, you can have people write essays and mention race and so forth. Well, then you're offering them another escape hatch, and only time will tell how big that escape hatch will be. For myself, I think Harvard, with tens of billions of dollars in endowments, can afford to hire their own attorney rather than have the Chief Justice of the United States offer them advice on how to evade the decision that's been made.

They're always wonderful words to describe things that are not very wonderful.

There are people who wanted to push this as far as they could. But it's also true in other countries, these programs are not unique to the United States. In India the courts said you can't have these preferences, you have to give everybody an equal chance individually, but they allowed them to take into account various subjective things. So they'd have a five-minute interview with each student, and the students whose scores weren't high enough got high marks on the interview, and the ones at the top got low marks on the interview. And I gather that at Harvard the Asian students always get low ratings on these subjective things, which can't be checked, and others get high ratings. So you can play these word games. When people in the '50s were trying to get rid of racial discrimination, one of the things they did was say you cannot require applicants to submit photographs. When Woodrow Wilson introduced this kind of thing into the federal system, he wanted photographs. So if you can't explicitly give preferences, but you can find out the race and subjectively take it into account, the whole thing will be a farce. There's a wonderful book called Mismatch about the bad effects of affirmative action on college students. I agree with the authors on everything until they say the Supreme Court should take into account this and that. My response is: the last thing we need is nine more politicians in Washington.

Yes, and it did a whole lot of bad. It put many Black students with all the prerequisites for success into places where they were almost guaranteed to fail. Go all the way back to 1965 when I was teaching at Cornell. They suddenly brought in large numbers of Black students under special programs, and in a short time half of them were on academic probation. I went to the administration building and looked up their SAT scores. The average Black student at Cornell at that time was at the 75th percentile, better than three-quarters of other American students who took the SAT. The average student in the Cornell liberal arts college was at the 99th percentile. So you have students who simply do not graduate, and there's no great gain from flunking out of an elite institution.

Making failures out of them. This is not unique to Cornell. At Berkeley they admitted Black and Hispanic kids with test scores just slightly above the national average, the white students far above that, the Asian students above the white students. And the great bulk of those Black students, an absolute majority, failed to graduate. They came on campus, wasted some years of their lives, some opportunities they may have had somewhere else. The other fallacy is the notion you're getting a better education at a higher-rated institution. Universities are rated according to the research output of their faculties, not the teaching quality. Berkeley is one of the great research universities of the world. No one in his right mind thinks the education offered to undergraduates at Berkeley is anything to look up to. So you send them to places where they cannot compete with the other students, and where the faculty don't give much attention to teaching. The California voters voted to end preferential admission to the university system. There were dire complaints that no Black students would be able to get in. The actual data show the number of Black students in the UC system barely changed at all. What happened was they stopped going to Berkeley and UCLA. They went to the other campuses where their proficiency was like that of the other students. And over a four-year period, there were a thousand more minority students graduating from the system than there were under affirmative action. Moreover, even the ones who stay and graduate may come in wanting to become engineers, mathematicians, scientists. They find they cannot make it, so they come out taking sociology, ethnic studies.

From material that'll provide you with a well-paying career to an outcome that will provide you with nothing.

Well, I'm not sure that's a promotion.

If what she said were true, it would have implications. None of it's true. It does have the support of the academic elite, and some people regard that as the same as a documented fact. I'm not one of those people.

I wasn't aware that the University of North Carolina is qualified to grasp forthrightly the burdens of history. I'd like to see some facts. You see a similar pattern in a place like MIT. One study showed that the average Black student at MIT scored in the top 10% on the math portion of the SAT, and in the bottom 10% at MIT. At MIT it's only a question of which part of the 99th percentile you're in. And there have been empirical studies with medical schools and law schools, and in every case, where the Black students are put in places where the other students have similar SAT scores to their own, they learn more. In law and medicine there's an independent test, the bar exam, to see whether you can pass. In one case there was a high-ranked law school and a lower-ranked one; the Black students in both had very similar SAT scores. The Black students in the lower-ranked institution passed the bar exam on the first try 57% of the time, and the ones in the higher-ranked one passed it 30% of the time. You learn more in a place where the professors teach to the level of the students they have. When I taught at Howard University, a Black institution, most of the kids hadn't had the top education, so to explain marginal cost I'd have arithmetic examples. When I taught engineers at Cornell, all of whom had calculus, I'd say marginal cost is the first derivative of total cost. The kid out of the ghetto school doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Not one speck of evidence. Not one speck of evidence.

I think it's wonderful when judges are concerned with the effects of the law. What has been tragic in so much social-justice talk is people who think that because they're very well qualified in certain areas, that enables them to make decisions for other people in areas where they lack, and probably do lack, minimal competence. The second-guessing of the police by people with PhDs is incredible, "how many shots did they fire", said by people who probably never had a gun in their hands in their whole lives. Because they may be the world's authority on French literature or Mayan culture, they think they can talk about things they absolutely know nothing about.

If we turn to hard facts, the hard fact is that between 1940 and 1960 practically nobody was paying any attention to Blacks. Walter Williams used to say he was so lucky to be born before White people wanted to be nice to Blacks. He traced his own career to when a White teacher in a Philadelphia ghetto school chewed him out unmercifully; he was very angry, but he traced his progress from that point on. That doesn't happen anymore. From 1940 to 1960 there were no great riots, no great demonstrations. Most intellectuals weren't paying much attention to Blacks, and where they were, the South, they were enforcing discriminatory laws. Under those conditions, Blacks advanced better than under the new conditions beginning in the 1960s, which were supposed to be so favorable.

[in clip] The way anybody else would. You equip yourself with skills that people are willing to pay for.

It's common sense. One of the problems with many of the elites is that the very commonness of common sense does not serve their purposes. It's wonderful to believe that you have some insight that all the vast millions don't have, and that therefore you should be making their decisions for them. The minimum wage laws are a classic example. There are jobs available at wages the Black teenagers are willing to accept and employers are willing to pay, and third parties knowing nothing about the industry or the people themselves pass laws forbidding them from having wages that get them employed. In 1948, Black and white teenagers had virtually identical unemployment rates, and it was a fraction of what teenagers have today. The minimum wage law was passed in 1938 and hadn't been changed in 10 years, and those were 10 years of runaway inflation, so for all practical purposes there was no minimum wage law. Under those conditions you got Black and white teenagers with unemployment rates of 10%, and no difference between them. Now come the wonderful people with the wonderful ideas, keeping the minimum wage ahead of inflation, and for more than two consecutive decades the unemployment rate for Black teenagers never falls below 20%, and in some years it's over 40%. It hit 52% right after Obama was elected. So presumably there was less racism in 1948 than in 2009.

Absolutely. And they never take into account that the kid not only loses the job he could have had, he loses the experience, which is even more valuable than the job itself. They act as if when you take a job at McDonald's you'll be at McDonald's 20 years from now. The hard data say the people working at these hamburger stands on January 1st are very unlikely to be working there on December 31st. But the big institutional problem is the people who make these decisions have great confidence, pay no price for being wrong, no matter how harmful that is to other people.

I got more than that. The minimum wage was 40 cents an hour in 1938. I was paid 65 cents an hour. But 65 cents in 1946, when I went to work, was less in value than the 40 cents in 1938. So I was like Walter Williams, I got the benefit of entering the market when there was effectively no minimum wage.

[in clip] Absolutely. They're a major part of it, because one of the reasons people don't get many of the facts that go against what's believed is that the press doesn't choose to publicize those facts.

These are the people crusading for all kinds of things like social justice, who are trying to preempt the decisions of individuals and substitute what they think of as their higher understanding, when in fact the people making their own decisions know a lot more about their circumstances than these third parties can possibly know.

If you see all the disasters around you, it's not surprising you might think there could be some improvement made.

He was not a disciple of mine. We met as a result of his own change of mind. Someone once gave him a book of mine when he was in his more radical phase, and, as he told me, he simply threw it in the wastebasket.

I met him in 1978. There was a symposium on equality at Washington University in St. Louis, and I was there as a commentator on a paper being given by a professor of law at Columbia University named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I had a few critical things to say, as a matter of fact. On another panel, the main presenter was a professor of law from the University of Chicago named Antonin Scalia. And in the audience was an unknown young Black lawyer named Clarence Thomas. That's where we met. He had already thrown away the stuff he'd believed before, and he was explaining his viewpoint to a friend, and someone said, "There's another guy who said the same thing." So I was not the reason he reached this conclusion. He reached the conclusion himself.

Oh, yes. I was a Marxist. During the McCarthy era.

Facts. As you get more and more facts, especially if you pay attention to them, you realize that this doesn't square with what's being said. I was a summer intern at the Labor Department, still a graduate student, concerned about minimum wages, whether they were causing poor people to get more money, or causing them not to be employed at all. It also means, for teenagers, that if they want money they now have to do things that are illegal, like selling drugs, which has its own hazards. But the people who are for minimum wages think they are doing a wonderful thing for the poor, and it never occurs to them to check what they believe against hard facts.

[reading Thomas] "The Court's opinion sees the university's admissions policies for what they are: race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our nation's equality ideal. In short, they are plainly unconstitutional. While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold that enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law."

Yes.