Intertemporal abstractions are especially useful to those intellectuals who tend to conceive of social issues in terms which allow the intelligentsia to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. When intellectuals are unable to find enough contemporary grievances to suit their vision or agenda, they can mine the past for harm inflicted by some on others. By conceiving of those involved in the past as members of intertemporal abstractions, the intelligentsia can polarize contemporary descendants of those involved in past acts. The kind of society to which that leads is one in which a newborn baby enters the world supplied with prepackaged grievances against other babies born the same day. #51 | | |
It is hard to imagine anything more conducive to unending internal strife and a weakening of the bonds that hold a society together. The tragic history of territorial irredentism offers little reason for optimism about moral irredentism. #52 | | |
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Abstract people are implicitly either equal or at least randomly variable among individuals, which would amount to being equal as groups, where the groups are large enough for these random variations to preclude substantial systematic differences between groups containing millions of people. But actual flesh-and-blood people are remote from any such condition or ideal. #54 | | |
Inequalities of income, power, prestige, and other things have long preoccupied intellectuals, both as things to explain and things to correct. The time and attention devoted to these inequalities might suggest that equality is so common or so automatic that its absence is what requires an explanation. #55 | | |
Various causes of this apparently inexplicable inequality of outcomes have been suggested—racism, sexism, or class bias, for example. But seldom is it considered necessary to demonstrate the automatic equality which makes an explanation of its absence necessary. Anyone who suggests that individuals—or, worse yet, groups—are unequal in behavior or performance risks being written off intellectually and denounced morally as biased or bigoted toward those considered less than equal in some respects. Yet the empirical case for equality of consequential characteristics ranges from meager to non-existent. #56 | | |
Once the focus shifts from abstract potential to empirical capabilities, the notion of equality is not merely unproven but unlikely to the point of being absurd. How could people living in the Himalayas develop the seafaring skills of people living in ports around the Mediterranean? How could the Bedouins of the Sahara know as much about fishing as the Polynesians of the Pacific—or the Polynesians know as much about camels as the Bedouins? How could Eskimos be as proficient at growing tropical crops as the people of Hawaii or the Caribbean? #57 | | |
Such considerations are far more crucial for mundane knowledge than for academic knowledge. Ph.D.s in mathematics can have the same knowledge in Delhi as in Paris. However, in the world of mundane but consequential knowledge, how could an industrial revolution have originated in places which lack the key natural resources—iron ore and coal—and are too geographically inaccessible for those resources to be transported to them without prohibitive costs? The industrial revolution could hardly have begun in the Balkans or Hawaii, regardless of what people were living there—and neither could the people in those places have developed the same industrial skills, habits and ways of life at the same time as people in other places where the industrial revolution in fact began. #58 | | |
Differences among racial, national or other groups range from the momentous to the mundane, whether in the United States or in other countries around the world and down through the centuries. #59 | | |
Empirically observable skills have always been grossly unequal—which is to say, real people have never been even close to the equality of abstract people, when it comes to developed capabilities, as distinguished from abstract potential. Among the many different groups in countries around the world, very few have ever matched the major role played by the Jains from India in the cutting of diamonds for the world market, whether the Jains lived in India or in Amsterdam. People of German ancestry have been similarly prominent in the brewing of beer, whether in Germany or in the United States, where the best-selling brands of beer were created by people of German ancestry, as was true of China’s famous Tsingtao beer. In nineteenth century Argentina, German beer drove English beer from the local market, while Germans also established breweries in Australia and Brazil, as they had brewed beer in the days of the Roman Empire. #60 | | |
Jews have been similarly prominent, if not predominant, in the apparel industry, whether in medieval Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, Argentina or the United States. Yet intellectuals’ emphasis on external circumstances over internal cultures led an academic historian to say that Jewish immigrants to the United States were fortunate that they arrived in this country just when the garment industry was about to take off.57 The same coincidence seems to have occurred in a number of other countries, just as the arrival of large numbers of overseas Chinese in various countries in Southeast Asia galvanized particular sectors of the economies there, and the arrival of the Huguenots galvanized the watch-making industry in seventeenth-century England. #61 | | |
Innumerable other examples could be cited, involving other groups in countries around the world. But none of that has made a dent in the intelligentsia’s indignant responses when discovering statistical disparities in outcomes among groups. The burden of proof to the contrary is put on others, rather than on those whose presumptions are based on nothing more than reasoning as if they were discussing abstract people in an abstract world, and applying statistical techniques that would be appropriate to such homogeneous human beings or people who are in effect essentially random events, on which much statistical analysis is based. #62 | | |
Whatever the abstract potential of individuals and groups, the distinction between abstract potential and developed capabilities is not trivial, even though that distinction is often lost sight of, or is finessed, by intellectuals who speak in generalities about “equality.” Abstract potential carries very little weight anywhere in the real world, when people are making decisions for themselves. Performance is what counts. What we want to know is what real people can actually do, not what abstract potential there is in abstract people. #63 | | |
The exceptional facility of intellectuals with abstractions, including the application of statistical probabilities to these abstractions, does not eliminate the difference between those abstractions and real people in the real world. Nor does it guarantee that what is true of those abstractions is necessarily true of reality, much less that intellectuals’ sophisticated visions about these abstractions should over-ride other people’s very different direct experiences in the real world. Intellectuals may indeed dismiss the “perceptions” of others and label them as “stereotypes” or “myths,” but that is not the same as proving them wrong empirically, even if a remarkable number of intellectuals act as if it does. #64 | | |
Behind the widespread practice of regarding group differences in demographic “representation” in various occupations, institutions, or income levels as evidence of social barriers or discrimination, there is the implicit notion that the groups themselves cannot be different, or that any differences are the fault of “society,” which must correct its own mistakes or sins. #65 | | |
Since there is no one named “society,” what such intellectuals usually turn to for redress is the government. Implicit in all this is the assumption that there is something wrong about individuals and groups being different in their empirical capabilities, since their abstract potentials have been presumed to be the same. #66 | | |
In addition to intergroup differences in particular occupational skills, there are large and consequential differences in median age. Some groups differ by a decade in median age and others differ by two decades or more.58 Large differences among groups in median age occur both within nations and between nations. Just among Asian Americans, the median age ranges from 43 years old for Japanese Americans to 24 years old for Americans of Cambodian ancestry.59 Among nations, the median age in Germany and Japan is over forty while the median age in Afghanistan and Yemen is under twenty.60 How a group of people, whether races or nations, whose median ages are decades apart could have the same knowledge, skills and experience—or have the same outcomes that depend on such knowledge, skills and experience—is a question that need not be faced by those who proceed as if they are discussing abstract people in an abstract world. None of these empirical facts disturbs the vision of abstract equality or curbs the outrage of the intelligentsia at discovering the real world consequences of these differences, which are just some of the many differences among races, nations and other subdivisions of the human species. #67 | | |
When some of the many consequential differences among groups are taken into account and that still does not reduce their differences in outcomes to zero, the unexplained residual is more or less automatically attributed to discrimination. For example, when black and white Americans in the same income brackets were turned down for mortgage loans at different rates, that was enough for editorials in USA Today and in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others, to conclude that this was due to racial discrimination, and for a front-page news story in the New York Times to imply as much.61 But that ignores other economic variables affecting the acceptance or rejection of mortgage loan applications, such as credit scores, which are different on average between blacks and whites. #68 | | |
What most media accounts have also left out is that Asian Americans had higher average credit scores than those of whites, which in turn were higher than those of blacks. In 2000, when blacks were turned down for conventional mortgage loans at double the rate for whites, the whites were in turn denied conventional mortgage loans at nearly double the rate for Asian Americans.62 But including Asian Americans in these comparisons would have undermined the racial discrimination theory. So would inclusion of the fact that banks owned by blacks also turned down black applicants—at a rate higher than the rejection rates of black applicants by white-owned banks.63 All of these real world differences were avoided by reasoning as if discussing abstract people whose differences in outcomes could only be due to mistaken or malign decisions made by others. #69 | | |
Where concrete information is lacking or unstudied, equality tends to be the default assumption of the intelligentsia when comparing groups, no matter how many, or how large, are the inequalities that have already been found in factors that have been studied. Whether in a racial or other context, where some—sometimes just one—of these factors have been held constant and the differences in outcomes do not completely disappear, that is often taken as proof that bias or discrimination explains the remaining differences in outcomes. #70 | | |
The fundamental flaw in such reasoning can be illustrated in a noncontroversial area such as baseball. There were two players on the 1927 New York Yankees with identical batting averages of .356, one of whom has remained famous to this day, while the other is almost completely forgotten. Their equality in one dimension in no way implied equality in other dimensions. In this case, one .356 hitter hit 6 home runs that year (Earle Combs) and the other hit 60 (Babe Ruth). #71 | | |
Similarly, when Lewis Terman’s famous decades-long study of unusually high-IQ children assessed their achievements in adulthood, many had very high achievements but, as a later writer observed, “almost none of the genius children from the lowest social and economic class ended up making a name for themselves.” Almost a third of these high-IQ children “from the other side of the tracks” had “a parent who had dropped out of school before the eighth grade.”64 They were like the other children in the sense of having IQs of 140 or above, but not in terms of the cultural background factors involved in high achievements. #72 | | |
The same principle applies in innumerable contexts, not only in American society but in other countries around the world. University students in India who came from families with similar incomes were found to come from families with very different levels of literacy when comparing students who were Dalits (formerly called “untouchables”) with students who were caste Hindus—illiteracy being higher in the families of the Dalits.65 Equality of income did not imply equality of other consequential characteristics. In other countries, people with the “same” education—measured quantitatively—have had very different qualities of education, whether measured by their own performances as students, by their choices of specialization or by the quality rankings of the institutions in which they were educated.66 Only abstract people in an abstract world are the same. #73 | | |
In a world where consequential characteristics are multi-dimensional, equality in one dimension says nothing about whether other dimensions are equal or unequal between particular groups. Yet a vast literature on socioeconomic “disparities” and “gaps”—transformed verbally into “inequities,” if not deliberate discrimination—proceeds as if the causes behind these effects must be external, especially if these differences in outcomes do not disappear completely when holding constant some given dimension or dimensions of the factors involved, such as income among black and white mortgage loan applicants. #74 | | |
Equality is one of the most widespread and long-lived ideals, especially among modern intellectuals.q Its variety of very different, and even mutually contradictory, meanings may be part of the reason for its longevity, since many people with very different substantive ideas can espouse and believe in equality as a vague generality. Moreover, the same individual can shift from one concept of equality to another as the convenience of the argument might require. #75 | | |
Like many emotionally powerful concepts, equality is seldom defined with any precision. Equality might mean that everyone should be regarded as equally important, that their interests should be regarded as being of equal concern to others. Thus a baby’s interests are as important as an adult’s, even though the baby lacks the capabilities of an adult. Alternatively, equality might mean that everyone should be treated equally—that they should all be judged by the same criteria and rewarded or punished by the same standards. Another meaning of equality might be that the people themselves are equal in either their potential or their developed capabilities. Yet another meaning of equality might be that people are entitled to equal prospects of success or reward, even if that requires those with lesser potentialities or capabilities to receive compensatory advantages, as Condorcet advocated in the eighteenth century67 and as John Rawls advocated in the twentieth century.68 #76 | | |
The point here is that all these very different notions are encompassed by the undefined word “equality.” Abstract people may have equality in all these senses simultaneously, but that is very different from saying that the same is true of flesh-and-blood human beings in the real world. #77 | | |
Similar principles are involved when discussing differences between the sexes, as well as differences among races or other subdivisions of the human species. The fact that the widest income differences between the sexes are between men with children and women with children69 is hardly surprising, when recognizing the mundane fact that how those children are produced and raised differs radically between mothers and fathers, however much fathers and mothers can be made verbally equivalent as parents when discussing people in the abstract. #78 | | |
Empirical data suggest that being a mother increases the importance of a particular job’s working conditions relative to the importance of its pay—especially when some higher paid occupations require very long hours of work, including unpredictable demands to work nights and weekends, or to fly off to other cities or countries on short notice for indefinite amounts of time, as high-powered lawyers or executives may have to do. But to be a father with a family to support can have the opposite effect of being a mother, making higher pay more important to fathers than to single men, childless husbands or to women—all of whom have lower incomes than fathers—even if that means taking jobs whose working conditions are not particularly desirable or even as safe as most jobs. More than 90 percent of job-related deaths occur among men, for example.70 Given their respective incentives and constraints, the fact that parenthood has opposite effects on the incomes of women and men is by no means mysterious. #79 | | |
With sexes, as with races, taking more causal factors into account tends to substantially reduce statistical differences in incomes, sometimes to the vanishing point, where a very large number of relevant factors can be both identified and quantified—which is by no means always possible as a practical matter. But, where an unexplained residual difference in outcomes remains after taking various factors into account, christening that unexplained residual “discrimination” presupposes that either all the relevant dimensions have been identified and reliably quantified by observers or that the remaining unidentified relevant factors are equal, despite how unequal the identified relevant factors may have been. #80 | | |
In the case of income differences between women and men, where the very same factor—parenthood—can have opposite effects on income, holding parenthood constant as a factor does not mean comparing women and men who are comparable. Where women and men are truly comparable—for example, when they are older than the usual child-bearing years and both have worked continuously and full-time in the same occupations—various studies have found the women making the same incomes as the men, or more than the men.71 Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, has pointed out that empirical studies using fewer explanatory variables concluded that there was sex discrimination more often than studies that used a larger number of explanatory variables.72 #81 | | |
In general, income differences between women and men are more often found where they do different jobs, or have the same jobs but with different working conditions, work different numbers of hours annually, have differences in continuous years of employment, or have other such work-related differences, rather than where they do the same job, under the same conditions and with the same qualifications and experience.73 But mundane reasons for income differences between the sexes have no such attraction for much of the intelligentsia as external reasons, such as employer discrimination, which allow the intelligentsia to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. #82 | | |
With both the sexes and the races, empirical evidence may not only be mishandled but even deemed unnecessary, as exemplified in the phrase “glass ceiling” as an explanation for the under-representation of women in higher levels of employment. Defined as an “invisible but impenetrable barrier between women and the executive suite,”74 the term “glass ceiling” implies that even in the absence of any tangible empirical evidence of that barrier—since it is “invisible”—we are to accept its existence, much as people in a well-known fable were to accept the emperor’s new clothes.r In other words, the whole question of the existence or effect of the posited barrier is taken out of the realm of empirical evidence. Such verbal virtuosity simply preempts the question as to whether there is an internal reason or an external obstruction that explains the differential advancement of women to higher management positions. #83 | | |
Where that question is not finessed aside by sheer assertion, however, the evidence against the external barrier theory is considerable. For example, Diana Furchtgott-Roth has pointed out that the “top corporate jobs require one to be in the pipeline for at least 25 years” and that “less than 5 percent of the qualified candidates for these jobs were women.”75 A Canadian study found similar differences between male and female executives there.76 In the United States, a report by the Government Accountability Office found that female managers were younger than male managers, had less education and were more often part-time workers.77 Numerous other specific differences in both the qualifications and the preferences of women have been found in other studies.78 #84 | | |
The point here is not that the intelligentsia were mistaken or ill-informed on particular issues. The more fundamental point is that, by proceeding as if discussing abstract people in an abstract world, intellectuals evade the responsibility and the arduous work of learning the real facts about real people in the real world—facts which often explain the discrepancies between what intellectuals see and what they would prefer to see. #85 | | |
Many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world—differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing. Apparently their theories, and the vision behind them, cannot be wrong. #86 | | |
