Social Justice Fallacies

We'd be killing each other.

They want everybody to have equal outcomes, or as close as they can get to it. Unfortunately, you don't have the preconditions for that, even in the same family. One example I use in the book: among five-child families, the National Merit Finalist is the firstborn just over half the time, more often than the other four siblings combined. The fifth-born, 6% of the time. So even where you have almost ideal conditions, born to the same parents, raised under the same roof, they are not the same.

Because the implicit assumption is that in a world where everyone was treated fairly, things would be representative of the demographics as a whole in all these activities. Imagine a Black kid born in Harlem with a body identical to that of Rudolf Nureyev, the great ballet dancer. The odds are 1,000 to one that he'll become a ballet dancer. He'd be looked at strangely by all his friends in the neighborhood if he even wanted to. Chances are he wouldn't even think about it.

Actually, I was trying out for first base, and the real reason I messed up was that my position was center field, but to be a good center fielder I needed hours of practice, and it was a very bad spring. So I figured at least I won't make an idiot of myself in center field, so I made an idiot of myself at first base.

Adam Smith had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who imagine they can control a whole society with the ease with which one puts chess pieces where you want them on a chessboard. There's this notion of an inert mass of people down there, and the wonderfully brilliant people at the top who ought to be telling them what to do. And there's no thought that those at the top don't even know the people's individual conditions, which are very different from their own. When they try to help, they can make things disastrous.

If you're going to get some result, you have to specify through what mechanism you expect to get it. Different mechanisms, government, the market, the Red Cross, have their own things they're good at and not so good at. You can't get the social justice result you want unless you have the kind of institution likely to produce it. Politics is not that kind of institution.

Yes. One of the real problems is that you have people making decisions for which they pay no price when they're wrong, no matter how high a price other people pay. Right now the homicide rates are beyond anything around prior to 1960. I mention 1960 because that's when the Supreme Court remade the criminal law, they discovered rights in the Constitution that no one had noticed for over a century, and they were impervious to evidence.

People are astonished when I tell them I grew up in Harlem and can't remember ever hearing a gunshot. I've checked with relatives who grew up in similar neighborhoods in Washington and North Carolina, they never heard a gunshot growing up. I remember going back to Harlem to do research at a high school, and I mentioned that as a kid I'd walk my dog in the park nearby, and looks of horror came over the students' faces. People have no idea how much has retrogressed in the Black community, and how much of the progress that was made was not made by politicians or charismatic leaders. One thing that drives me crazy is people who cite trends over time without deciding where to start the time period. A man said all sorts of wonderful things happened in the 1960s, especially for minorities and the poor. But if you start the data in 1960, you don't know how much was a result of that and how much of other things. Same with Ralph Nader, he wrote a book in 1965 on automobile safety, laws followed, and death rates went down, which is true, but the death rate went down at a far higher rate before he wrote the book. It was the continuation of a trend going back 20 or 30 years.

When you kill off your customers, chances are you won't sell as many cars.

Oh, yes.

Yes, and should be eliminated.

Even before that orphans study, which wasn't done until 1976, as of World War I the data showed Black soldiers scored below white soldiers. And this is one reason you need people with contrary opinions free to attack things. The people who believed it was genetically determined said, "That's the answer," and moved on. Others said, "Let's look more closely." And they discovered that Black soldiers from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio scored higher than white soldiers from Mississippi, Alabama, and so on. And as I mention in the book, people's genes do not change when they cross a state line. The problem is when people crusading for an idea find data that fits what they believe, that's the end of the story for them, which is fine if there are other people with contrary ideas who will look closer.

The genetic determinists thought the national IQ would go down over time because poorer people had more children than richer people. But you have to understand how an IQ score is arrived at. Whatever number of questions answered correctly is the average at a given time is given the number 100. You compare all the six-year-olds, and however many questions they answer correctly becomes 100 for that age, and similarly for other ages. That sounds innocent, but what happens when people start answering more questions correctly than before? The next generation answers more, so the tests are re-normed. Having an IQ of 100 in 1925 is not the same as 100 in 1935 or 1950. Once Jim Flynn went back to the raw data, not just the IQs but how many questions, he discovered the number answered correctly was increasing by large amounts, roughly one standard deviation from one generation to the next. Blacks answering questions to score an IQ of 85 around 2000 would have scored 104 back in 1947. So instead of the national IQ going down, it was going up. The whole group is rising.

A lot of people arrived at the same conclusion, and they had high IQs and PhDs, and that was the end of the story for many people. A high IQ and low information is a very dangerous combination.

I don't think it's willful. People don't look for certain evidence, so they don't find it, and on the basis of what they know it may seem very plausible. What you really need are other people with a different orientation, skeptical, who will look for things and find things very different. One thing I found interesting: various counties in the United States are among the poorest in the country, and six of those counties have a population that ranges from 90% to 100% white, the hillbilly communities. There's that great book, Hillbilly Elegy, on the bestseller list for more than a year, J.D. Vance, now Senator Vance. These are people who have faced zero racism. Back in the '30s, when they did IQ studies, their IQs were not only at the same level as Blacks, they had the same pattern: young people, whether Black or hillbilly, would have an IQ close to the national average at age six, but by their teens it kept going down and down, relative to their age group. Clearly not biological, it was social. And these hillbilly counties had incomes lower than the national average and lower than the average of Black incomes for half a century. So obviously there must be other things that cause people to be poor, other than racism.

That's a much larger book than this. In terms of public policy, what does not pay off is having charismatic leaders and depending on government. Look at what happened to Blacks before and after the massive government effort. The poverty rate among Blacks, if you start in 1940 instead of 1960, because 1960 is the magic number for people saying the government did all these wonderful things, was 87% in 1940, down to 47% by 1960. From 1960 to 1970 it went down to 30%, and by 1970 affirmative action was in place, and it went to 29%. So in the 20 years prior to 1960 the Black poverty rate went down by 40 points, and in the 20 years after 1960 it went down by 18 points. You start in 1960, you miss all of that.

Not only do people take credit for things that were not their doing, they overlook the negative things that came after the 1960s as a result of policy. In 1940, 17% of Black children were raised in single-parent homes. After these wonderful reforms were put in, that quadrupled to 68%. There's a whole literature on the bad things that happen to kids raised by single parents, Black or white, American or British, the studies show the same. One study said fatherlessness has a bigger effect than even race and poverty. I think back to my own life, how fortunate I was. My biological father died before I was born, and I was adopted into a family where I was the only child among four adults. These were not people out having an active social life; the life was there in the home. Years later, when I became a parent, I asked the lone surviving member of the family that raised me, "How old was I when I started to walk?" She said, "Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you." And part of the rise of Blacks before was because of things done by Blacks. A kid who grew up in Harlem the same time I did, two blocks from me, we met years later by accident in San Francisco. He'd become wealthy, lived overseas with servants. One thing he mentioned: he could remember times growing up when his father would sit at the dinner table watching the children eat and not eat anything himself. Now the father isn't even there. Those kinds of things are what do it.

Yes. And the other thing: the Civil Rights Act was not what got Blacks into professional occupations. In the decade prior to 1964, the number of Blacks in professional occupations doubled. So this is not a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It is amazing the things people can focus on. It may seem a big issue to The New York Times. I suspect the people being murdered in these big cities like New York and Chicago may have a somewhat different view of the importance of what is capitalized and not capitalized.

Think of the catastrophes of the 20th century. The genetic determinists drew the conclusion that you had to put an end to certain races, they called it eugenics, later called genocide. That idea originated with the progressives, and there was a progressive who wrote a book with that theme, translated into German, and Hitler called it his Bible. And so this Holocaust comes out.

He drew the line. He wrote a fan letter to the author of that book saying it was his Bible, and we see what that led to. During the 1920s, in reaction to World War I, the idea arose among the intellectual elites that the way to prevent war was to stop arming, disarmament was the way to avoid a war. No evidence made the slightest impression on them, and they blundered the West into a war that probably would never have happened, because the totalitarian dictatorships that started it were well aware that the United States, Britain, and France had greater industrial capacity than theirs. You wouldn't ordinarily attack countries with greater industrial capacity unless you thought they were gutless and foolish enough not to remain armed. For three years the Axis won every single battle. In 1942 Churchill made a speech saying, "We have a new experience. We have victory", El Alamein was the first battle won by the Western democracies in a war already three years old. Today, people who say we need to disarm to have peace don't understand that in a nuclear age you're not gonna get three years to figure out what's going on. You're either ready on the first day of that war, or you lose.

It matters because if you can get people to believe that their problems are all due to racists, you will get their votes. But if you look at a lot of data, you discover that's not the case. It's very doubtful if all the racists in the country today have half the negative effect on Blacks as the teachers' unions have, because the teachers' unions keep the schools lousy in areas where the people who send their kids to school don't have the option of a private school.

The way to figure out the difference between the regular public schools and the charter schools is to compare them when both are located in the same buildings, so you have comparability, same neighborhood, same building, same group. When you do that, the charter school kids in these low-income Black neighborhoods passed the math test at a rate more than six times as high as the public school in the very same building. The main difference is the public schools are run by the teachers' unions; the charter schools do not have to have unions in most cases. One extreme example: a school I went to in Harlem where only 7% of the regular public school kids passed the math test, and in the charter school 100% passed it. And "proficient" means you've passed, there's a level above that. In that school only 2% of the charter kids scored as low as proficient; the other 98% were in the top bracket above proficient.

When we talk about groups and their environment, we usually mean their tangible current surroundings. But all groups have had different pasts. When the Irish, Jews, and Italians came to America, it was common for Italian and Jewish neighborhoods on New York's Lower East Side to be represented by Irish politicians. Why? Because before they ever got to America, the Irish had reasons to organize in a political way. The Jews and Italians did not; their circumstances wouldn't have made any difference. When they get to New York, they may live in the same neighborhoods, the tangible surroundings the same, but the whole past of the three groups is very different. Even when the Italians and Jews rise to prosperity, it's in different industries, different occupations. Even age, people don't realize some American ethnic groups are a decade older than others, some more than two decades. Japanese Americans have a median age of 52; Mexican Americans somewhere in their 20s. 52-year-old people make more money than 20-year-old people.

"Do we want the mixture of students who are going to be trained to do advanced medical research to be representative of the demographic makeup of the population as a whole? Or do we want students with the highest probability of finding cures for cancer and Alzheimer's? Do you want airline pilots chosen for demographic representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly with pilots who are chosen for their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination? Consequences matter, or should matter, more than some attractive or fashionable theory. More fundamentally, do we want a society in which some babies are born into the world as heirs of prepackaged grievances against other babies born the same day, blighting both their lives, or do we want to at least leave them the option to work things out better in their lives than we have in ours?"