Interview by the Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Examiner

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Taking on the 'invincible fallacy': A conversation with Thomas Sowell
Interview by Hugo Gurdon, Editor-in-Chief - May 22, 2018


Economist Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has been one of the pre-eminent thinkers in America for decades. His latest book, Discrimination and Disparities, is an examination of what he calls the "invincible fallacy" that improper discrimination must be to blame for different outcomes between people of different races or sexes, or those sorted almost any other way.

This is refuted again and again by empirical evidence, Prof. Sowell tells Editorial Director Hugo Gurdon, in an interview for the Washington Examiner's "Modern Conservatives" series. Politicians, mostly on the Left, manufacture grievances and win over voting groups with promises of policies that won't work and often do enormous damage.

The video interview with Sowell can be viewed on the Washington Examiner website. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

Hugo Gurdon: I'm delighted to be joined today by Prof. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a renowned conservative economist. Prof. Sowell, I want to congratulate you first on your book, Discrimination and Disparities, which is a fascinating read. If I understand it rightly, the thesis of the book, contained in the title, is that discrimination and disparities are two distinct things and that there is what you call an invincible fallacy which suggests that any difference in outcome between different groups, whether they be races, or the sexes, or nations, must be due either to discrimination or to genetic deficiencies. The argument you make is that all the evidence suggests this is absolutely wrong. So first of all, correct me if I'm wrong on the thesis of the book, and then tell us about what you have laid out here.

Sowell: You're absolutely right. It's amazing whenever you look for facts, when you do research either about people or about nature, you find skewed distributions everywhere. But when you listen to people talk, especially in the academic world, the underlying assumption is that people all have the same capability, and that therefore any differences in their outcomes must be due to other people in some way doing them wrong. It's amazing because if you think just of an individual, the same man does not have the same capability. He's not even equal to himself at different stages of life, much less being equal to all other people. They're highly varying stages of their lives.

Gurdon: One of the things that you pointed out, and you mentioned age just now, is that there are some sections of the population, perhaps a section sorted by race where the median age is radically different from that of another group. So you would expect those with the median age of 40 to be earning far more, for example, then those where the median age is 25. Yet when there is a distinction between those two, people suggest that it has to do with unfair discrimination, and that it therefore requires government action to remediate it.

Sowell: Absolutely. Japanese Americans have a median age of 50. Hispanic Americans have a median age of 26. There's no way they could be equally divided on activities that either require the strength and energy of youth such as playing major league baseball, or things that require long years of experience and education such as being a surgeon or a CEO.

Gurdon: So why does the invincible fallacy persist? Why is it invincible? Who's to blame?

Sowell: Well, I think it is invincible mainly because people want to believe it and therefore do not look for any evidence that might go the other way. People who report evidence that points the other way are simply demonized rather than answered.

Gurdon: In fact, some of them are barracked and abused and prevented from speaking when they're invited to college campuses.

Sowell: Oh, absolutely.

Gurdon: You put a very strong emphasis on empirical evidence. When I was reading the book and when I've listened to you talking before, that seems to be a consistent theme — let's look at the evidence. Let's see whether these policies are testable hypotheses. It reminded me very much of something Margaret Thatcher said, which was she was a conservative because the facts of life are conservative. Is it the evidence that you've been studying over the decades that has led you to become a conservative? Are you a conservative because the evidence suggests conservative prescriptions are true?

Sowell: Yes, ah, heavens, I was a Marxist in my 20s even after taking Milton Friedman's course at the University of Chicago. I began doing research there and realized that none of these beliefs would hold up once you start collecting hard facts, and over the years as more and more hard facts turned up, more and more of things that I believed before turned out to be unsustainable.

Gurdon: There's a parallel question. On the back cover of your book, Paul Johnson describes you as the most interesting and original philosopher at work in America now. First of all, do you think of yourself as a philosopher, and second, if the evidence and the facts made you conservative, was it economics that made you a philosopher?

Sowell: Well, I'm not sure. Other people will find all kinds of names for me. Some of them are much worse than philosopher. I really don't spend a lot of time trying to classify myself. Too many other people are doing that, and they can perhaps do it better.

Gurdon: OK, we'll leave it to them. One of the things that we at the Washington Examiner have recently been looking at is whether or not the Democrats take their voters for granted. Just to give an example, they had a strong majority in 2009 in Congress and had the presidency. They had been talking about fixing immigration but when they had the majority and ability to do so, they didn't fix it. What they did was not fix it and run on fixing it after the next election. President Obama did it again in the 2012 election. In your book you said that there is a kind of incentive for politicians not to fix problems. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sowell: Well, I think some of them may be aiming to fix them, but if they don't have all the facts available to them and if they are determined to have a preconceived notion, the chances of their fixing it are very remote. And serial solutions — I call them that — you solve one problem by creating a bigger problem which then catches up with you and you solve that some other way. We have that in California where back in the 1970s we started restricting the building of housing along the coast and down in the San Francisco peninsula. And it comes in as an enormous surprise to people that housing prices have just skyrocketed.

Gurdon: One point that you made was that if a politician or a party, which is in power, fixes a problem that drew a lot of voters to them, then that constituency goes away — they fix the problem, they lose the people who want them to fix the problem. Do you think politicians would rather actually keep the problem to go into elections and campaign on them rather than actually get them done?

Sowell: No, not necessarily. I think for example, of the Equal Opportunities Commission, which is set up to fight against the discrimination. When they succeeded to some extent or rather when the conditions are such that there's less discrimination for all kinds of reasons, they then have to create a bigger problem. They have to have another definition of discrimination so that now people, for example, do background checks on all job applicants to see if they have criminal records. The EOC is suing companies for doing that because it said that that has a disparate impact on low income minorities. So when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, no one thought that doing background checks was discrimination, but they must always expand whatever evil there is. If the evil is in fact fading away, they must nevertheless come up with new definitions that will preserve the word.

Gurdon: You say in the book that the Supreme Court actually enshrined disparate impact as a basis for presuming that there has been some form of a unconstitutional discrimination.

Sowell: Oh, absolutely, and there is a huge mischief here, which is not only for employers, but employees as well, including minority employees. You can file a lawsuit that will cost millions of dollars to defend legally and drag on for a decade or more. It means that there's every incentive now for employers to avoid hiring people in the category that the government can use to start such lawsuits. You don't even need to have a single human being claim to be discriminated against for those lawsuits to go forward because the numbers don't match the preconceptions. Then by definition, there's discrimination as far as they're concerned.

Gurdon: There have been a number of polls that suggest a certain increase in the support that President Trump is getting amongst black voters and particularly young black voters. Do you think that there are any signs that there may come a point where racial minorities, particularly black people, are less lockstep-aligned with the party of the Left, and they realize that their position is not improved by their support for the Democrats?

Sowell: Well, it's possible. Much depends upon how well the Republicans articulate, and articulation has never been one of the skills of the Republicans with a few exceptions like a Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln, but in between, not a lot.

Gurdon: They're not very good at making the point that they might easily be regarded as the party of the have-nots rather than the party of the haves, which is the way they are portrayed. It's always seemed to me one of the ironies — I think you get to this in your book — that where the government and the unions have stepped in to try and improve the incomes of people down at the bottom of the ladder, or to raise wages, there is higher unemployment. In the late 1980s it was suggested that 5 percent unemployment was basically maximum employment. Well, we're at 3.9 percent in the U.S. now, and you point out that in Hong Kong unemployment is 2 percent. So there are policies which are said to help people at the bottom, but actually throw more out of work.

Sowell: Yes, one of the worst are the minimum wage laws. It's painful because I have been following that for decades and uniformly the increase of minimum rates has led to people losing their jobs. If you go back as far as 1948, the black unemployment rate was under 10 percent among teenagers, same as the white race, and the difference between the two groups was virtually nil. Right? As you increase the minimum wage a huge racial gap opens up between them. It's what you would expect by the most elementary application of economics, but apparently no one is interested in those facts.

Gurdon: One of the things that comes through in your writing is that you do not have a lot of sympathy for self-pity. One of the ways that you put it was that people used to count their blessings whereas now they count their unfulfilled wishes. Can you talk a little bit about that change and the way society has changed in that?

Sowell: This is partly a result of education. I know, blessings do not get votes, and unfulfilled wishes do. So it's understandable that politicians have to manufacture grievances. I'm always amazed at the lengths to which people will go to create grievances, the most insignificant things. Some years ago there were a lot of grievances on the Left because of the way the map of the world was presented because it distorted the sizes of Europe and tropical countries. Well, there's no way in the world you can have an accurate map of a globe on a two dimensional map, and so you only have a choice as to what are you going to distort.

Gurdon: That idea of equality, and that only discrimination can produce differences in outcome, stokes the feeling of entitlement and of dependency doesn't it? That plays into your observation that there are lots of people who love to tell others how to live their lives. That seems to be behind the idea of the nanny state. How much damage is that doing? I've seen you suggest that it's done a great deal more damage, for example, than the legacy of slavery.

Sowell: Yes. Because if you look at the things that have happened since the 1960s where this idea of the government looking after everybody took hold, you find, for example, that the number of black children who grew up without a father was about one third of black children. Two thirds of black children were raised in two parent families. This is 100 years after slavery. But after 35 years of the welfare state, that was driven to the point where now two-thirds of the black kids were being raised without a father present, and among blacks in poverty, 85 percent. So, if we just look at the timelines, we can see where this originated. It originated in the 20th century, with the triumph of the welfare state. Moreover, the same thing has happened in Britain and other places where the underclass is primarily white. The results there are virtually identical.

Gurdon: Is there a moral element to this? I mean, if you emphasize equality and you suggest that there should be no disparity of outcome, does it raise envy into a sort of ideal? It says envy isn't wrong, it is a justified anger against an improper outcome.

Sowell: Yes. And I think that's been concentrated for a very long time among the intelligentsia far more so than among the public at large. For example, if an infant mortality rate is cut in half, I don't think a mother who realized that her child has twice the chance of living is worried about the fact that some billionaire’s child has 2.5 times as much chance of living.

Gurdon: You made mention in your farewell a column that there have been great material advances, but there have also been many social retrogressions. People are very substantially richer and can enjoy material goods which even the rich in past generations could not afford or were just not available. I’d be interested to know whether you're an optimist or a pessimist. You see some things improving and some things getting worse. Where do you fit on that optimistic-pessimistic scale?

Sowell: I suppose in terms of the material things, I'm optimistic. I remember a relative of mine who worked for a rich family once took me to work with him, and in the living room was this console with this little tiny screen where there was the first television, which cost an enormous amount of money. It was certainly not as large as a postcard and it must've cost thousands. Yet today people on welfare wouldn't have something like that. Material things have just gotten better. People’s behavior? That unfortunately I think has gotten worse and progressively so over the years. Again, primarily a turning point was the 1960s.

Gurdon: Your book examines different kinds of discrimination that sound terribly complicated, but I'm going to let you explain what it means and the way it affects our politics.

Sowell: Well, when we say someone has discriminating tastes, we mean that this is someone who is very good at discerning differences and making the right choices accordingly. But that's very different from the kind of discrimination that's led to the anti-discrimination laws where the fact that a person is black or is a woman determines how that person is treated. It is easy to confuse the two. There are politicians who have a vested interest in promoting confusion because, for one thing, different people have different interests, different backgrounds, and so forth. So they will almost inevitably have different outcomes. Trying to decide which kind of discrimination there is, is a tough one. Let me give an example. Employers who do criminal background checks tend to hire more young black males than employers who do not. The ones who don't have the criminal background checks see a young black male and they know that they're taking a chance hiring him because of the higher incidence of criminal activity. But what if the employer has a business that requires him to check everybody? He knows that this guy either does or doesn't have a criminal background, and therefore he hires more young blacks. But that reality doesn't seem to affect the politicians in the slightest or intellectuals.

Gurdon: On the question of race, something that comes through at the end of your book is that you oppose reparations to blacks for slavery.

Sowell: Yes. Slavery was one of the longest living, most universal of all human institutions. Now that says something about human nature. So if you had reparations for slavery, virtually everybody on the planet would have had an ancestor somewhere who was enslaved. The number of whites who were enslaved in North Africa was larger than the number of blacks who were enslaved in the United States.

Gurdon: Those were Europeans ... sold into the Ottoman Empire, I think.

Sowell: All around the Mediterranean, there were hundreds of towers built on the coast line so people could be warned when the pirates approached, so they wouldn't be captured and taken away in slavery. There were over 100 towers around Sicily alone.

Gurdon: As a final question, I want to switch from the subject of slavery to the subject of freedom. A value that comes through more in your books than any other is the value you place on individual freedom, and the freedom of individuals to sort themselves as they choose rather than having the government sort them. Is that an accurate description of your feeling?

Sowell: It is, even aside from the feeling of being free, which people have risked their lives for. The government can't possibly know as much about what you want as you know. There's an old saying that a fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him. I think that applies to a lot of things.

Gurdon: Thank you for being with us.