Forums before death by AOL, social media and spammers... "We can't have nice things"
| alt.politics.economics | "Its the economy, stupid" | 345,379 messages |
[ << oldest | < older | list | newer > | newest >> ]
| Message 344,443 of 345,379 |
| davidp to All |
| =?UTF-8?Q?Thomas_Sowell_on_the_Trouble_W |
| 09 Oct 23 17:14:14 |
From: lessgovt@gmail.com Thomas Sowell on the Trouble With ‘Social Justice’ By Jason L. Riley, Oct. 6, 2023, WSJ Thomas Sowell is best known for his insights on racial controversies, but race isn’t the main topic of most of his books in a career that spans more than six decades. Mr. Sowell, 93, is an economist who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where his professors included Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other future Nobel laureates. His specialty is the history of ideas, and his most recent book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” harks back to his writings on social theory and intellectual history, which include “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980), “The Vision of the Anointed” (1996) and “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” (1999). In his 1987 classic, “A Conflict of Visions,” Mr. Sowell attempted to explain what drives our centuries-old ideological disputes about freedom, justice, equality and power. The contrasting “visions” in the title referred to the implicit assumptions that guide a person’s thinking. On one side you have the “constrained” vision, which sees humanity as hopelessly flawed. This view is encapsulated in Edmund Burke’s declaration that “we cannot change the nature of things and of men but must act upon them as best we can” and in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can ever be made.” The opposite is the “unconstrained,” or utopian, view of the human condition. It’s the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. Mr. Sowell begins “Social Justice Fallacies” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.” Mr. Sowell has been a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution since 1980. In a phone interview, he describes the central fallacy of social-justice advocacy as “the assumption that disparities are strange, and that in the normal course of events we would expect people to be pretty much randomly distributed in various occupations, income levels, institutions and so forth.” He says that’s an assumption based on hope rather than experience or hard evidence. “We can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition—in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history,” he writes in the book’s opening chapter on “equal chances fallacies.” He acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination exist and contributed to disparate outcomes. But he notes that “these vices are in fact among many influences that prevent different groups of people—whether classes, races or nations—from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms or other terms.” For Mr. Sowell, the tremendous variety of geographic, cultural and demographic differences among groups makes anything approximating an even distribution of preferences, habits and skills close to impossible. The progressive left holds up as a norm a state the world has never seen, and regards as an anomaly something seen in societies all over the world and down through history. “There’s this sort of mysticism that disparities must show that someone’s done something wrong” to a lagging group, Mr. Sowell says. The social-justice vision “starts off by reducing the search for causation to a search for blame. And for so much of what happens, there is no blame.” To illustrate the point, the book’s chapter on racial fallacies cites recent census data on poverty. “Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race—either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination,” Mr. Sowell writes. Liberals argue that higher black poverty rates are mainly a product of slavery, Jim Crow and of lingering “systemic racism.” Yet there are pockets of the U.S. populated almost exclusively by white people who experience no racism and who nevertheless earn significantly less than blacks. The book cites Clay and Owsley counties in Appalachian Kentucky, places “that are more than 90 percent white, where the median household income is not only less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole, but also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole.” It’s been true for some time, Mr. Sowell says, that black behavioral patterns play a bigger role in racial disparities than racism does. Black married couples have had poverty rates in the single digits for more than a quarter-century. And black married couples “in which both husband and wife were college-educated earned slightly more than white married couples where both husband and wife were college-educated.” He adds that in a landmark 1899 study of blacks in Philadelphia, the race scholar W.E.B. Du Bois “said that if white people were to lose their prejudices overnight, it would make very little difference to most black people. He said some few would get better positions than they have right now, but for the mass it would be pretty much the same.” Noting today’s black-white wealth disparities, authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi have advocated reparations in the name of social justice. So have such prominent organizations as the NAACP and Black Lives Matter. Mr. Sowell can’t take their arguments seriously. “The situation of slavery in some ways is much like the situation of conquered people,” he says. “There’s no question whatsoever that conquered people have been treated in a terrible way. Being conquered by the Romans was not a fate you would wish on anyone. But the fact is that the net result has been that those parts of Europe conquered by the Romans have been the most advanced parts of Europe for centuries. [continued in next message] --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2) |
(c) 1994, bbs@darkrealms.ca