This was especially apparent during the years when mandatory busing of school children was imposed, in order to get racial “integration” in schools, for its supposed educational benefits, which largely failed to materialize. However, when low-income minority parents have had a choice of where to send their own children to school, the educational results have been demonstrably—and often dramatically—better in the more successful charter schools.
But charter schools have never attracted the same crusading zeal as the busing campaign, not even when children in ghetto charter schools score above the 90th percentile in math and English, while other children from the same neighborhoods in the regular public schools score below the 10th percentile. Often these radically different educational outcomes have occurred in the very same building, housing both the local neighborhood public school and the local neighborhood charter school serving the same population.
Income and Wealth Redistribution “Solutions”
If those who are more fortunate are the reason others are less fortunate, then such things as redistributing income or wealth may seem much more plausible as a “solution” than in a world where the accumulation of human capital is more fundamental than the accumulation of physical wealth, even though the latter can be measured statistically and confiscated politically. Physical wealth can be confiscated and redistributed in a variety of ways, but human capital cannot be, since it is inside the heads of other people.
In many times and places, various prosperous peoples with much human capital have either fled persecution or have been expelled from the countries where they lived—and in both cases forced to leave behind most of their physical wealth, therefore arriving destitute in some new country.
This was the fate of many Jews expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century, many Huguenots fleeing France in the seventeenth century, and the fate of many Gujaratis expelled from Uganda and Cubans fleeing Communist Cuba in the twentieth century, among many others in other countries around the world in other times.
The fate of the Gujaratis and the Cuban refugees in the twentieth century has been particularly well documented. Many Gujaratis arrived destitute in Britain, but eventually rose again to prosperity. Meanwhile, the Ugandan economy they left behind collapsed, in the absence of others with the same human capital as the Gujaratis.59
Cuban refugees likewise rose from their initial poverty on arrival in the United States and, 40 years after their arrival, the total revenue of Cuban-American businesses was greater than the total revenue of the nation of Cuba.60
Something similar happened in the seventeenth century, when large numbers of Huguenots fled religious persecution in France. They took with them skills that had contributed to France’s having been a leading—if not the leading—economic nation in Europe.
Those skills brought by the Huguenot refugees enabled other countries to produce goods they had previously bought from France, and to compete with France in international markets. The French economy suffered many setbacks in the succeeding decades following the exodus of many Huguenots.61
Despite all the voluminous writings making an intellectual or moral case for a confiscation of income and wealth, in the name of “social justice,” there has been remarkably little attention paid to the question of the extent to which this can actually be done in any comprehensive, long-run sense. In the short run, confiscation can easily be done, whether by governments or by mobs looting stores. Detroit has been a classic example of both—and of the long-run consequences.62
Nevertheless, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable strategy from a purely political standpoint, provided the goose does not die before the next election. A two-decades-long career for one man as mayor of Detroit, from 1974 to 1994, was made possible by policies which drove the most economically productive people out of Detroit, ensuring the mayor’s consecutive reelections by the departure of those people most likely to vote against him. It also ensured the decline of Detroit.
Nor was Detroit unique. Such a combination of political success, along with economic and social disaster, can be found in a number of American cities where one political party has stayed in power for decades through redistributionist policies which drove out people who had much human capital, and left the city a hollow shell of its former self, after those tax-paying and job-creating people were gone. Third World nations that have had major confiscations of tangible wealth—whether the capital of foreign investors (“nationalization” of industries) or domestic entrepreneurs—have often suffered a similar fate for similar reasons.
THE PAST AND THE FUTURE
Looking back at the past, there is much to inspire and much to appall. As for the future, all that we can be certain of is that it is coming, whether we are well-prepared or ill-prepared for it.
Perhaps the most heartening things about the past are the innumerable examples of whole peoples who lagged far behind their contemporaries at a given time and yet, in later times, overtook them and moved to the forefront of human achievements.
These would include Britons in the ancient world, when they were an illiterate tribal people, while the ancient Greeks and Romans were laying the intellectual and material foundations of Western civilization—and yet, more than a millennium later, it was the Britons who led the world into the industrial revolution, and established an empire which included one-fourth of the land area in the world and one-fourth of all the human beings on Earth.
At various times and places, China and the Islamic world were more advanced than Europe, and later fell behind, while Japan rose from poverty and backwardness in the middle of the nineteenth century to the forefront of economic and technological achievements in the twentieth century. Jews, who had played little or no role in the revolutionary emergence of science and technology in the early modern era, later produced a wholly disproportionate share of all the scientists who won Nobel Prizes in the twentieth century.
Among the appalling things about the past, it is hard to know which was the worst, since there are all too many candidates, from around the world, for that designation. That something like the Holocaust could have happened, after thousands of years of civilization, and in one of the most advanced societies, is almost as incomprehensible intellectually as it is devastating morally and in terms of showing what depths of depravity are possible in all human beings. It is a painful reminder of a description of civilization as “a thin crust over a volcano.”
If longevity and universality are criteria, then slavery must be among the leading candidates for the most appalling of all human institutions, for it existed on every inhabited continent for thousands of years, as far back as the history of the human species goes. Yet its full scope is often grossly underestimated today, when slavery is so often discussed as if it were confined to one race enslaving another race, when in fact slavery existed virtually wherever it was feasible for some human beings to enslave other human beings—including in many, if not most, cases people of their own race.63
Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before Europeans brought the first African slaves—purchased from other Africans who had enslaved them—to the Western Hemisphere. Nor was it unknown for Europeans to be enslaved by non-Europeans. Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed.64 But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.65
This is just one of many ways in which the agendas of the present distort our understanding of the past, forfeiting valuable lessons that a knowledge of the past could teach. At a minimum, the history of slavery should be a grim warning for all time against giving any human beings unbridled power over other human beings, regardless of how attractively that unbridled power might be packaged rhetorically today.
“In hist
ory a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from past errors and infirmities of mankind,” as Edmund Burke said, more than two centuries ago. But he warned that the past could also be a means of “keeping alive, or reviving, dissensions and animosities.”66
The past must be understood in its own context. It cannot be seen as if its context were just like the context of the present, but with events simply taking place in an earlier time. That would be as great an error as failing to understand the implications of the fact that the past is irrevocable. Because human beings can make choices only among options actually available, events in the past can be understood and judged only within the inherent constraints of their particular times and places.
Obvious as all this may seem, it is often forgotten. Nothing that Germans can do today will in any way mitigate the staggering evils of what Hitler did in the past. Nor can apologies in America today for slavery in the past have any meaning, much less do any good, for either blacks or whites today. What can it mean for A to apologize for what B did, even among contemporaries, much less across the vast chasm between the living and the dead?
The only times over which we have any degree of influence at all are the present and the future—both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead, who are far beyond our power to help or punish or avenge. Galling as these restrictive facts may be, that does not stop them from being facts beyond our control. Pretending to have powers that we do not, in fact, have risks creating needless evils in the present while claiming to deal with the evils of the past.
Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.
* On a personal note, as someone who was once a pistol coach in the Marine Corps, I have not been surprised at all that large numbers of shots were fired in such situations.
* Such arbitrary uses of words are not unique to the United States. In Greece, people in “arduous” occupations are legally entitled to retire early on pensions—as early as 55 years old for men and 50 years old for women. Among the occupations designated as “arduous” are hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters and musicians. James Bartholomew, The Welfare of Nations (Washington: Cato Institute, 2016), p. 218.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Even a small book such as this, but one dealing with a vast subject, incurs innumerable debts to the works of others, too numerous to name. In addition to the many writings cited in the footnotes and endnotes, there have been many other writings and other sources of insights that provided a background of historical, geographic and economic knowledge, gleaned over the years, without which there would have been no basis for the particular research and analysis that enabled me to “cross-examine the facts,” as the great economist Alfred Marshall defined the goal of economic analysis.
Closer to home, commentaries and critiques by my wife Mary, and by my colleagues and friends Joseph Charney and Stephen Camarata, have been very helpful, and the whole enterprise would have been all but impossible, especially at my advanced age, without the dedicated work of my assistants of many years, Na Liu and Elizabeth Costa. The institutional support of the Hoover Institution and the Stanford University libraries has also been indispensable.
In the end, however, none of these can be held responsible for my conclusions, or for any errors or shortcomings that may appear. For all these I must take sole responsibility.
Thomas Sowell
The Hoover Institution
Stanford University
NOTES
Chapter 1: Disparities and Prerequisites
1. World Illiteracy At Mid-Century: A Statistical Study (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1957), p. 15.
2. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), p. 111.
3. Ibid., pp. 89–90.
4. Ibid., pp. 111–112.
5. Ibid., pp. 111–113.
6. Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 98–99.
7. Ibid., p. 99.
8. James Corrigan, “Woods in the Mood to End His Major Drought,” The Daily Telegraph (London), August 5, 2013, pp. 16–17.
9. Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment, p. 102.
10. Ibid., pp. 355–361.
11. John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer, China: Tradition & Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 17.
12. William D. Altus, “Birth Order and Its Sequelae,” Science, Vol. 151 (January 7, 1966), p. 45.
13. Ibid.
14. Julia M. Rohrer, Boris Egloff, and Stefan C. Schmukle, “Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 112, No. 46 (November 17, 2015), p. 14225. These differences in median IQs are not necessarily large. However, even modest differences in median IQs can translate into large disparities in the representation of different groups at IQs of 120 and above—which are the kinds of IQs found among people in elite occupations that attract major attention. Most observers are far less interested in what kinds of people qualify to work behind the counter of fast-food restaurants than they are in what kinds of people are qualified to work in chemistry labs or as engineers or physicians.
15. Lillian Belmont and Francis A. Marolla, “Birth Order, Family Size, and Intelligence,” Science, Vol. 182 (December 14, 1973), p. 1098.
16. Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux and Kjell G. Salvanes, “Older and Wiser? Birth Order and IQ of Young Men,” CESifo Economic Studies, Vol. 57, 1/2011, pp. 103–120.
17. Lillian Belmont and Francis A. Marolla, “Birth Order, Family Size, and Intelligence,” Science, Vol. 182 (December 14, 1973), pp. 1096–1097; Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux and Kjell G. Salvanes, “Older and Wiser? Birth Order and IQ of Young Men,” CESifo Economic Studies, Vol. 57, 1/2011, p. 109.
18. Sidney Cobb and John R.P. French, Jr., “Birth Order Among Medical Students,” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 195, No. 4 (January 24, 1966), pp. 172–173.
19. William A Layman and Andrew Saueracker, “Birth Order and Sibship Size of Medical School Applicants,” Social Psychiatry, Vol. 13 (1978), pp. 117–123.
20. Alison L. Booth and Hiau Joo Kee, “Birth Order Matters: The Effect of Family Size and Birth Order on Educational Attainment,” Journal of Population Economics, Vol. 22, No. 2 (April 2009), p. 377.
21. Robert J. Gary-Bobo, Ana Prieto and Natalie Picard, “Birth Order and Sibship Sex Composition as Instruments in the Study of Education and Earnings,” Discussion Paper No. 5514 (February 2006), Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, p. 22.
22. Jere R. Behrman and Paul Taubman, “Birth Order, Schooling, and Earnings,” Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 4, No. 3 Part 2: The Family and the Distribution of Economic Rewards (July 1986), p. S136.
23. Philip S. Very and Richard W. Prull, “Birth Order, Personality Development, and the Choice of Law as a Profession,” Journal of Genetic Psychology, Vol. 116, No. 2 (June 1, 1970), pp. 219–221.
24. Richard L. Zweigenhaft, “Birth Order, Approval-Seeking and Membership in Congress,” Journal of Individual Psychology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (November 1975), p. 208.
25. Astronauts and Cosmonauts: Biographical and Statistical Data, Revised August 31, 1993, Report Prepared by the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Transmitted to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, Second Session, March 1994 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994), p. 19.
27. Arthur R. Jensen, Genetics and Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 143.
28. R.G. Record, Thomas McKeown and J.H. Edwards, “An Investigation of the Difference in Measured Intelligence Between Twins and Single Births,” Annals of Human Genetics, Vol. 34, Issue 1 (July 1970), pp. 18, 19, 20.
29. “Choose Your Parents Wisely,” The Economist, July 26, 2014, p. 22.
30. Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 224–229.
31. For examples and a fuller discussion of social mobility see Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Basic Books, 2016), pp. 178–183, 369–375.
32. Henry Thomas Buckle, On Scotland and the Scotch Intellect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 52.
33. Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, translated and edited by Marius B. Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 7.
34. Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 256.
35. Steven Beller, “Big-City Jews: Jewish Big City—the Dialectics of Jewish Assimilation in Vienna, c. 1900,” The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the Present, edited by Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk and Jill Steward (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 1999), p. 150.
36. Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment, pp. 280, 282.
37. Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 65; Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, second edition, translated by J.R. Foster and Charles Hartman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 69.
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