Paul Gigot Interviews Thomas Sowell on 'Social Justice Fallacies'
The Wall Street Journal's Potomac Watch podcast features author Thomas Sowell, whose new book dissects the misconceptions that distort public understanding about differences among individuals and racial and other groups. And why do so many intellectuals fall for the 'chess piece fallacy' ?
FULL TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
Paul Gigot: Welcome everyone. I'm Paul Gigot, editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and host of Potomac Watch podcast here. And today we have a special visitor, Thomas Sowell, the influential author and thinker. Thomas Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina in the segregated American South decades ago, raised in Harlem in New York City, served in the Marines during the Korean War. Then went to Howard University and later Harvard and the University of Chicago. And he's gone on to a distinguished academic and publishing career. And now at the age of 93, he has published another book entitled Social Justice Fallacies. This book, as always, from Dr. Sowell, is bracing in the way it cuts through conventional wisdom and assumptions with facts and logic and explains how the world really works. Welcome Dr. Sowell. Great to have you here.
Thomas Sowell: Great being here.
Paul Gigot: Now I should say, I've read many of your books going back many years, and one in particular that influenced me was Ethnic America, which I pulled from my bookshelf last night knowing I was going to talk to you today and discovered that I had read it in 1984, way back when. So you've had an important influence on my thinking about the world. And some of those themes from that book are apparent in your new book, Social Justice Fallacies, which I want to talk about today. So let's start off by talking a little bit about when you hear the words, social justice, what do you think people mean and how would you define it?
Thomas Sowell: Well, defining it would in a sense be illogical because it's used in so many different ways that any particular definition would be arbitrary, but there's a general sense, everybody ought to have an equal chance in life, which is I think almost certainly in the United States, almost everybody in the United States would agree with that. But the question is how do you get from where we are to that kind of goal?
Paul Gigot: So when people in public life say we favor social justice, they're talking about a kind of airy meaning that a general sense of everybody should do well in life or everybody should equal outcomes, something like that?
Thomas Sowell: It's amazing because when you look at the real world, we're not even equal to ourselves at different stages of our own life, much less equal to all the other people. There are highly varying stages of life. I think if someone who's middle-aged 40 or 50 would look at his current income and compare it to his income when he was 20, they would probably discover a disparity larger than the disparity between the sexes or between the races.
Paul Gigot: Yeah, well that's certainly true in my case, and I'm glad to have had been able to make more later stages of my life. Now you divide your book into several chapters about the fallacies of social justice that are common in our public debate and discourse. Equal chances fallacies, racial fallacies, chess piece fallacies and knowledge fallacies. Let's go through at least a couple of those and talk about them in more detail. Let's start with equal chances fallacies, what do you mean by that?
Thomas Sowell: Equal probabilities of doing well in all sorts of different endeavors. And tragically, that is very hard to find anywhere in the world. There seems to be a notion that if people are not doing equally or at least comparably, that there has to be some mysterious reason for this. And what is painful is the reams of social justice literature without ever coming across a single instance of that anywhere in the world or anywhere in history going back over the centuries. And there are so many things. And even if every person at the moment of conception were to have equal potentialities, then you would have equal outcomes, other things being equal. But when you realize what a huge range of other things there are, the chances of coming out equally are just extremely low. One example, there was something like 29 astronauts on the Apollo program that put a man on the moon. Of those 29 people, 22 were either the firstborn in their family or an only child. So even in the case where (inaudible) defines equality, that is among children born to the same parents and raised in the same home, the firstborn is so much better off than the subsequent children because he is the only one that has been an only child and have the undivided attention of his parents.
Paul Gigot: The assumption in so many places when you do have differences in outcomes is that this was related to discrimination or related to the fact that society somehow was tilted against the individual. You're arguing that in fact these kinds of unequal chances, if you will, are inherent in human endeavor and being the oldest child, for example, is a significant advantage as you say. I laughed out loud in one of your references to the headline in the, I think it was a headline in The Economist saying, "Be sure to pick your parents carefully."
Thomas Sowell: Yes. And that's just one of. There are of course some disparities that are in fact due to discrimination or exploitation, or other sort of varieties of sins. But there are so many other things that you cannot just say then therefore it must have been that. One of the things that is often thrown out, of course, is racism. And it so happens, one of the things I've mentioned in the passing in the book is that if you look at people from the Appalachian counties in the United States, there were half a dozen of them that were featured in the New York Times of being among the poorest in the country. The New York Times didn't say what the race those people were. I checked it out. In those six counties from 90% to 100% of its people were white. And over a period of half a century and various surveys it would take me, every one of those counties, in every one of those surveys, the median income was lower than the median income of Black Americans. So here you have a group that has zero racism, zero legacy of slavery and so forth, but there are so many other things out there that we can't say that it must be racism or legacy of slavery for Blacks when those kinds of things are completely missing. Nevertheless, you get these kinds of results.
Paul Gigot: One section in your book, you take on a headline that appeared in the San Francisco newspaper that said, "Why are Black and Latino people still kept out of the tech industry?" And you break that down a bit. Explain that.
Thomas Sowell: Well, again, if the implicit assumption is things aren't equal, somebody must have done something wrong. There's nothing nefarious at all about the fact that Blacks and other minorities are underrepresented. Asians, for example, have more degrees in engineering than Blacks or Hispanics, even though both Blacks and Hispanics outnumber Asians in the population. And in fact, if you go to PhDs in engineering, Asians have more PhDs in engineering than Blacks and Hispanics combined. Again, there's nothing mysterious or even unusual about this. Back in the 1960s when admission to colleges in Malaysia were by qualifications, the Chinese during the 1960s received 408 degrees in engineering. The Malay majority received four, but we're talking about 100-to-1, larger than 100-to-1 difference. And there's no way in the world the Chinese could discriminate against the Malays who run the universities and who've also run the government that controlled the university.
Paul Gigot: Right. I know a little about Malaysia having spent some time there, and I know that, I mean the Chinese are a minority in Malaysia, highly successful minority as it happens economically. We've touched a little bit here on another chapter, which is racial fallacies. And in that chapter you make an arresting point, which is that the economic progress of Black Americans was actually more rapid in that their movement into the middle class before many of the social welfare programs of the 1960s were put in place. Why don't you elaborate on that?
Thomas Sowell: Yes. Because what people are taught in the schools and are saying in the media the 1960s was what got the Blacks out of poverty and into the professional things. And that they use a reasoning that ruins a lot of other arguments. They simply start at 1960 and show what happens afterwards. But of course the question is what happened before 1960. And from 1940 to 1960s, the poverty rate of Blacks fell from 87% to 47%. Prior to 1960s in terms of moving into professional careers, the Blacks in professional careers doubled. In the decade immediately preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Black children raised by single parent families were 17% in 1940. After these wonderful programs of the 1960s, that quadrupled to 68%. You can run through all sorts of things that are retro aggressions.
Paul Gigot: That's interesting. So arguably, if we hadn't had many of those programs, we would've had more rapid social progress. That's the implication of that point, I think.
Thomas Sowell: Yes. And that's not the only thing that changed for the worst. In the country as a whole, and including Blacks, the homicide rates in the United States had gone down every decade for three consecutive decades. And by the early 1960s, the homicide rate was just under half of what it had been in 1934. In came all these wonderful criminal law changes by the Supreme Court, immediately from 1963 to 1973, the homicide rate doubled. One of the fascinating things about high IQ clever people is that they have so many ways of evading plain evidence that people of lesser would not have it.
Paul Gigot: Smart people being dumb, yes. And my father used to say that about me sometimes. One of the things that's fascinating and runs through your book, and of course your book Ethnic America includes this too, is the differences in groups, in group performance, ethnic groups, for example. And they have a lot to do. You describe about how put much emphasis that they put in education, for example, what kind of professions they go into, the accumulated intellectual capital and experience that a group gets. And you mentioned the fact that Germans, German Americans, Germans around the world do extremely well in the beer industry. They tend to dominate it in fact. And they do that in part because they've been doing it for about a thousand years. They're good at it.
Thomas Sowell: You do something for a thousand years, but eventually you get the hang of it.
Paul Gigot: And that explains a lot of the differences. That kind of history and group cultural focus tends to explain a lot of the differences in American life, not discrimination per se.
Thomas Sowell: Absolutely. And if you look at it internationally, it's even more clear because there's always the notion that in this particular society there are special reasons why these groups do this and someone else does something else. But if you take the same group and study what happened to them in radically different kinds of societies. In the case of the Germans, I mean they dominated the beer industry in Latin America, they dominated it in Australia. They created a famous beer in China. So you can't say that the immediate surroundings are what carry the weight.
Paul Gigot: Yeah. Tsingtao beer in China was a favorite of mine when I was living over there, and I didn't know until your book that it had actually been produced by the Germans. But it makes perfect sense. We're going to take a break and when we come back, we'll be back talking with Dr. Thomas Sowell about social justice fallacies. When we come back. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast." That is, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast."
Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
Paul Gigot: Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot and I'm here with Dr. Thomas Sowell, the author of many books and a new one, Social Justice Fallacies. Another fallacy you talk about is called the chess piece fallacies. And I guess you mean that the assumption that human beings are chess pieces and that they behave like you want them to, you can move them around as if they were on a chessboard. But of course human beings aren't chess pieces. Give us an example or two.
Thomas Sowell: Oh, my heavens. Well, one of the areas of course is in taxation. There are people out there who think that the government needs more money and we just get the rich to pay their undefined tax fair share, and they act as if the rich are just going to stand there and do nothing while the government is going to take their money. And of course in the globalized age of today especially, where you can transfer vast sums of money with the click of a computer mouse, that's not going to work. One of the things that drives me crazy are people who talk about tax cuts for the rich. People who want to cut the taxes for the rich are basing their reasoning on the belief that the greater wealth remaining in the hands of the rich will somehow trickle down to others. It drives me crazy. And for years I have defied anybody to name any person outside of an insane asylum who ever had that theory. And to this day, no one has come up with a single example. The whole thing was that if you have extremely high rates, such as 73% at the beginning of the 1920s, people will simply put their money into tax-exempt bonds and pay nothing. And the way that the Coolidge administration got more money out of high income people was by lowering the tax rate to 25%. And then people took their money out because they could make a greater killing in the market. And when they took it out, the government collected more taxes. But that was not just a one shot deal. That's happened in a number of places when the tax rate and the tax revenues do not automatically move in the same direction and often they move in the opposite direction.
Paul Gigot: Well, we're seeing that now in the United States as you get migration out of high tax states to low tax or in some cases no state income tax states like Texas or Florida, Tennessee, and you can see that movement in people and in incomes. It's very significant and it's affecting places like New York. You also mentioned minimum wage loss as being another example of a chess piece fallacy. Explain that.
Thomas Sowell: It's astonishing because there's so much data on this that it's amazing that there's still a controversy. When you raise minimum wage above what it would be an ordinary supply and demand, that causes more people to apply for jobs because they don't remain the same. They try to get the jobs. But the employers have now have an incentive not to hire as much labor as before. And so you create a chronic surplus of job applicants. And you can see that in the statistical data. When the minimum wage was neglected for a number of years and was the obsolete cause of inflation, the income of Black and white teenagers was the same and it was a fraction of what it is today. So that as they raised the minimum wage, employers found ways of not hiring as much labor.
Paul Gigot: Yeah. And you see that in so many different aspects of economic life in particular. You attribute a lot of these fallacies to the mistaken views of intellectuals and American elites, global elites who you would think with the time and opportunity to read and to learn and to read history would be best positioned not to make these kinds of mistakes. Right? So why are, in your view, intellectuals so prone to these social justice fallacies?
Thomas Sowell: That's a tough one, but the empirical fact that they are goes back at least as far as the 18th century. And many of their arguments that they use today are basically rehashes of what was said over the past two centuries. It's an enormously self-flattering view of the world that there they are, the Olympian elite helping the downtrodden and preempting the decisions that people make in their own life because they're so sure that the decisions that they would impose are superior. And apparently for some people it's sufficient that there's a consensus of the elites that's treated as if it's an established fact.
Paul Gigot: Going back to the old Joseph Schumpeter, the economist view in the 20th century, that when you get a society that starts producing wealth, it creates an intellectual class that has a certain kind of resentment against that success and wealth and then reacts against it with these kinds of observations.
Thomas Sowell: I think he's onto something, because there's a constant complaint that people who don't have any great talent, education and so forth are making vastly more money than the people who may be the leading scholar in their field. To help realize that the fact that they are the leading scholar in their field doesn't mean that they have even minimal competence in any number of other fields.
Paul Gigot: Well, I'm wondering, do you worry at all about inequality and unequal outcomes? Not as a matter per se of social justice, but at the practical level where the impact that these unequal outcomes can have on the policies and actions by say Congress?
Thomas Sowell: I think political inequalities are pretty dangerous, but when you look at things like vast differences in ages between groups, Japanese Americans being more than 20 years older than Mexican Americans, people who are 20 years older usually have higher incomes, whether they're Japanese Mexicans or whatever.
Paul Gigot: A lot more wealth too, a lot more wealth.
Thomas Sowell: Absolutely. So the kinds of disparities people worry about in the United States are nothing if you compare other countries around the world.
Paul Gigot: So let's step back a bit, and as you look at American life right now and you were going to promote policies that enhance opportunity for all, the most opportunity for all, what would be the most important policies that you would promote? What would do the most good?
Thomas Sowell: Oh my goodness. Get rid of minimum wage law, get rid of politicians making or any other people making decisions for other people and paying no price for being wrong. And of course that's what's happening, what our school situation is at. People are out there imposing all kinds of sexual things on children in schools, believing that they're having a wonderful effect and not paying the slightest attention to the data which show that among other things, venereal diseases and teenage pregnancy, all of that was going down before the 1960s when all these programs began. They all immediately turned around and went up and have gotten worse. They depict children as if they're prisoners of their parents, and they're going to rescue them. After doing all these things to give children more rights as they see fit, the suicide rate among children has skyrocketed, but again, the big thing is they are impervious to evidence.
Paul Gigot: They don't want to look at the evidence. And you did an entire book on school choice, I think, if I'm not mistaken, not long ago, and we promoted at the Journal as a very important reform that can help to break the monopoly of the public school system that has led to some of these terrible outcomes. I would assume, is that one of the reforms you'd promote?
Thomas Sowell: Absolutely. And it's hard to put it in a few words, but some institutions are such that you can get away with doing things that make things worse and there's nothing to stop you. But if you have a market economy, for example, the mistakes that you make cost you money, it costs you your own money. It doesn't cost the taxpayer's money. And the government all can do is waste the taxpayer's money and that's no incentive to stop doing it.
Paul Gigot: I want to end with kind of a big picture question. You've obviously seen a lot of changes in American life over your decades thinking about these things, good and bad. There seems to be a more pervasive pessimism among the public these days. And I wonder if you think about the course of American society and life, and I wonder if you think that's warranted? Are things worse than they used to be or is this one of those just another period in American, like many others in American history when we seem to be down, but we eventually figured out how to move ahead in a better way?
Thomas Sowell: I would say that we should be aware that there is such a thing as a point of no return. In the Roman Empire there were bad times that the Romans got out of and survived. But eventually when you just keep persisting in the wrong-headed things, that's when you reach the point of no return. And I have the feeling that we are on that course, and I'm hoping that some of the people who are out there trying to fight against that will have some success.
Paul Gigot: Well, if you read Social Justice Fallacies by Dr. Thomas Sowell, his new book that we've been discussing here on the podcast, you will have ammunition to fight against, intellectual ammunition, factual ammunition to make the case to fight against those fallacies and the dangerous direction that we are taking on so many areas of American life. Dr. Sowell, thank you so much for being here. It's a pleasure. Good luck with the book and thanks for everything you've done for this great country of ours.
Thomas Sowell: Thank you.
Paul Gigot: Thanks for listening everybody.
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My college, University of PA, sucks as do most all of the "Ivies." They simply want more Islamist money to fund their programs.
When I attended the Political Science would not give tenure to my dear friend, Hank ABRAHAM BRHAM, TENURE SO HE WENT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF VA AND RECEIVED TENURE IMMEDIATELY. "HANK" WAS THE NATION'S EXPERT ON SCOTUS'S History I had him speak here.
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