Discrimination and Disparities

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Discrimination and Disparities Page 16

by Thomas Sowell


  38. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), pp. 93–95; William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 526.

  39. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, pp. 94–95.

  40. See, for examples, Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics, revised and enlarged edition, especially Part I; Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), pp. 144, 175, 397, 530, 531, 599, 600. By contrast, she refers to “the cosmopolitan civilization characteristic of coastal regions.” Ibid., p. 347.

  41. Andrew Tanzer, “The Bamboo Network,” Forbes, July 18, 1994, pp. 138–144; “China: Seeds of Subversion,” The Economist, May 28, 1994, p. 32.

  42. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 13, 106, 188–189, 305–314; Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 138; Michio Kaku, Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), pp. 187–188; Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 527; American Jewish Historical Society, American Jewish Desk Reference (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 591.

  43. Quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), p. 139.

  44. Giovanni Gavetti, Rebecca Henderson and Simona Giorgi, “Kodak and the Digital Revolution (A),” 9–705–448, Harvard Business School, November 2, 2005, pp. 3, 11.

  45. “The Last Kodak Moment?” The Economist, January 14, 2012, pp. 63–64.

  46. Mike Spector and Dana Mattioli, “Can Bankruptcy Filing Save Kodak?” Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2012, p. B1.

  47. Henry C. Lucas, Jr., Inside the Future: Surviving the Technology Revolution (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2008), p. 157.

  48. Giovanni Gavetti, Rebecca Henderson and Simona Giorgi, “Kodak and the Digital Revolution (A),” 9–705–448, Harvard Business School, November 2, 2005, p. 4.

  49. Ibid., p. 12.

  50. Karen Kaplan, “Man, Chimp Separated by a Dab of DNA,” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2005, p. A12; Rick Weiss, “Scientists Complete Genetic Map of the Chimpanzee,” Washington Post, September 1, 2005, p. A3; “A Creeping Success,” The Economist, June 5, 1999, pp. 77–78.

  51. Darrell Hess, McKnight’s Physical Geography: A Landscape Appreciation, eleventh edition (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc., 2014), p. 200.

  52. Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment (Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Environment Programme, 2008), p. 29; Rachel I. Albrecht, Steven J. Goodman, Dennis E. Buechler, Richard J. Blakeslee and Hugh J. Christian, “Where Are the Lightning Hotspots on Earth?” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, November 2016, p. 2055; The New Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2005), Volume 3, p. 583.

  53. Alan H. Strahler, Introducing Physical Geography, sixth edition (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2013), pp. 402–403.

  54. Bradley C. Bennett, “Plants and People of the Amazonian Rainforests,” BioScience, Vol. 42, No. 8 (September 1992), p. 599.

  55. Ronald Fraser, “The Amazon,” Great Rivers of the World, edited by Alexander Frater (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), p. 111.

  56. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, p. 6.

  57. See, for example, Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment, pp. 20, 280, 281–282, 347, 521–531, 599, 600; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, translated by Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Vol. I, pp. 34, 35; Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty and Politics, revised and enlarged edition, pp. 45–54.

  58. See, for example, Frederick R. Troeh and Louis M. Thompson, Soils and Soil Fertility, sixth edition (Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2005), p. 330; Xiaobing Liu, et al., “Overview of Mollisols in the World: Distribution, Land Use and Management,” Canadian Journal of Soil Science, Vol. 92 (2012), pp. 383–402; Darrel Hess, McKnight’s Physical Geography, eleventh edition, pp. 362–363.

  59. Andrew D. Mellinger, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and John L. Gallup, “Climate, Coastal Proximity, and Development,” The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, edited by Gordon L. Clark, Maryann P. Feldman and Meric S. Gertler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 169.

  Chapter 2: Discrimination: Meanings and Costs

  1. Harry J. Holzer, Steven Raphael, and Michael A. Stoll, “Perceived Criminality, Criminal Background Checks, and the Racial Hiring Practices of Employers,” Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 49, No. 2 (October 2006), pp. 452, 473.

  2. Jason L. Riley, “Jobless Blacks Should Cheer Background Checks,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2013, p. A11; Paul Sperry, “Background Checks Are Racist?” Investor’s Business Daily, March 28, 2014, p. A1.

  3. See, for example, Zy Weinberg, “No Place to Shop: Food Access Lacking in the Inner City,” Race, Poverty & the Environment, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 2000), pp. 22–24; Michael E. Porter, “The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1995, pp. 63–64; James M. MacDonald and Paul E. Nelson, Jr., “Do the Poor Still Pay More? Food Price Variations in Large Metropolitan Areas,” Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 30 (1991), pp. 349, 350, 357; Donald R. Marion, “Toward Revitalizing Inner-City Food Retailing,” National Food Review, Summer 1982, pp. 22, 23, 24.

  4. David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More: Consumer Practices of Low-Income Families (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. xvi.

  5. See, for example, “Democrats Score A.&P. Over Prices,” New York Times, July 18, 1963, p. 11; Elizabeth Shelton, “Prices Are Never Right,” Washington Post, December 4, 1964, p. C3; “Gouging the Poor,” New York Times, August 13, 1966, p. 41; “Overpricing of Food in Slums Is Alleged at House Hearing,” New York Times, October 13, 1967, p. 20; “Ghetto Cheats Blamed for Urban Riots,” Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1968, p. 8; “Business Leaders Urge Actions to Help Poor,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1968, p. C13; Frederick D. Sturdivant and Walter T. Wilhelm, “Poverty, Minorities, and Consumer Exploitation,” Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3 (December 1968), p. 650.

  6. Donald R. Marion, “Toward Revitalizing Inner-City Food Retailing,” National Food Review, Summer 1982, pp. 23–24. “Sales in urban stores are 13 percent lower by volume, and operating costs are 9 percent higher. Profits, before taxes, are less than half of the suburban stores. Labor costs are higher, shrinkage costs are greater, sales per customer are lower, insurance and repair costs are higher, and losses due to crime are more than doubled in the inner-city stores.” Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Agricultural Production, Marketing, and Stabilization of Prices of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, Ninety-Fourth Congress, Second Session, June 23 and 25, 1976 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 57. See also pp. 116, 124–125.

  7. “They view Blacks as their personal preserve, their field of plunder where extraordinary profits have and can be made at the expense of our community.” “The Poor Pay More… for Less,” New York Amsterdam News, April 20, 1991, p. 12.

  8. Dorothy Height, “A Woman’s Word,” New York Amsterdam News, July 24, 1965, p. 34.

  9. Ray Cooklis, “Lowering the High Cost of Being Poor,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 28, 2009, p. A7.

  10. Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (New York: Grove Press, 2011), p. 119.

  11. See U.S. Census Bureau, B01002, Median Age by Sex, Universe: Total Population, 2011–2015 American Community Survey Selected Population Tables.

  12. “Choose Your Parents Wisely,” The Economist, July 26, 2014, p. 22.

  13. The Chronicle of Higher Education: Almanac 2014–2015, August 22, 2014,
p. 4.

  14. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1846–1895, translated by Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 476.

  15. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 423.

  16. Adam Smith denounced “the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers” and “the clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers,” whom he characterized as people who “seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” As for policies recommended by such people, Smith said: “The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pp. 128, 250, 460. Karl Marx wrote, in the preface to the first volume of Capital: “I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My stand-point, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.” In Chapter X, Marx made dire predictions about the fate of workers, but not as a result of subjective moral deficiencies of the capitalist, for Marx said: “As capitalist, he is only capital personified” and “all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909), Vol. I, pp. 15, 257, 297.

  17. William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, third edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 52–53, 54–55, 59.

  18. Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy 1865–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 47–49, 130–131.

  19. Ibid., pp. 102, 144–146.

  20. Ibid., p. 117.

  21. Walter E. Williams, South Africa’s War Against Capitalism (New York: Praeger, 1989), pp. 101, 102, 103, 104, 105.

  22. The book that resulted from this research was Walter E. Williams, South Africa’s War Against Capitalism.

  23. Ibid., pp. 112, 113.

  24. See, for example, Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Basic Books, 2009), Chapter 7; Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 73–75, 123, 170–172.

  25. Jennifer Roback, “The Political Economy of Segregation: The Case of Segregated Streetcars,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 893–917.

  26. Ibid., pp. 894, 899–901, 903, 904, 912, 916.

  27. Kermit L. Hall and John J. Patrick, The Pursuit of Justice: Supreme Court Decisions that Shaped America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 59–64; Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 8.

  28. Bernard E. Anderson, Negro Employment in Public Utilities: A Study of Racial Policies in the Electric Power, Gas, and Telephone Industries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), pp. 73, 80.

  29. Ibid., pp. 93–95.

  30. Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 210.

  31. Bernard E. Anderson, Negro Employment in Public Utilities, pp. 150, 152. During the 1950s, the percentage of male employees in the telecommunications industry who were black actually fell in such Southern states as Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Ibid., pp. 84–87.

  32. Ibid., pp. 84–87.

  33. Ibid., pp. 114, 139.

  34. Michael R. Winston, “Through the Back Door: Academic Racism and the Negro Scholar in Historical Perspective,” Daedalus, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Summer 1971), pp. 695, 705.

  35. Milton & Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 91–92, 94–95, 105–106, 153–154.

  36. Greg Robinson, “Davis, Allison,” Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, edited by Colin A. Palmer (Detroit: Thomson-Gale, 2006), Volume C–F, p. 583; “The Talented Black Scholars Whom No White University Would Hire,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 58 (Winter 2007/2008), p. 81.

  37. George J. Stigler, “The Economics of Minimum Wage Legislation,” American Economic Review, Vol. 36, No. 3 (June 1946), p. 358.

  38. Walter E. Williams, Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2011), pp. 42–43.

  39. Ibid.; Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 98.

  40. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 77.

  41. Jason B. Johnson, “Making Ends Meet: Struggling in Middle Class,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 2005, p. A11.

  42. Stephen Coyle, “Palo Alto: A Far Cry from Euclid,” Land Use and Housing on the San Francisco Peninsula, edited by Thomas M. Hagler (Stanford: Stanford Environmental Law Society, 1983), pp. 85, 89.

  43. Hans P. Johnson and Amanda Bailey, “California’s Newest Homeowners: Affording the Unaffordable,” California Counts: Population Trends and Profiles (Public Policy Institute of California), Vol. 7, No. 1 (August 2005), p. 4.

  44. Leslie Fulbright, “S.F. Moves to Stem African American Exodus,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 9, 2007, p. A1.

  45. Bureau of the Census, 1990 Census of Population: General Population Characteristics California, 1990 CP–1–6, Section 1 of 3, pp. 27, 28, 31; U.S. Census Bureau, Profiles of General Demographic Characteristics 2000: 2000 Census of Population and Housing, California, Table DP–1, pp. 2, 20, 42.

  46. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 106–110; Jonathan Gill, Harlem, pp. 180–184.

  47. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem, p. 110.

  Chapter 3: Sorting and Unsorting People

  1. Joses C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 119, 145–146.

  2. Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (New York: Grove Press, 2011), p. 140; Charles A. Price, Southern Europeans in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 162; Philip Taylor, The Distant Magnet: European Emigration to the USA (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 210, 211; Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 28, 117–120; Samuel L. Baily, “The Adjustment of Italian Immigrants in Buenos Aires and New York, 1870–1914,” American Historical Review, April 1983, p. 291; John E. Zucchi, Italians in Toronto: Development of a National Identity, 1875–1935 (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), pp. 41, 53–55, 58.

  3. Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2012), p. 31; Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), pp. 174–175, 178, 356, 358; Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews 1870–1914 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 76, 85–108, 238–239; S
tephen Birmingham, “The Rest of Us”: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), pp. 12–24.

  4. Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 182–184; Irving Cutler, “The Jews of Chicago: From Shetl to Suburb,” Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, fourth edition, edited by Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), pp. 127–129, 134–135, 143–144.

  5. H.L. van der Laan, The Lebanese Traders in Sierra Leone (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1975), pp. 237–240; Louise L’Estrange Fawcett, “Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians in Colombia,” The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration, edited by Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi (London: The Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1992), p. 368.

  6. Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams, pp. 176–177.

  7. Teiiti Suzuki, The Japanese Immigrant in Brazil: Narrative Part (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1969), p. 109.

  8. Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams, p. 185.

  9. Charles A. Price, The Methods and Statistics of ‘Southern Europeans in Australia’ (Canberra: The Australian National University, 1963), p. 45.

  10. E. Franklin Frazier, “The Negro Family in Chicago,” E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations: Selected Writings, edited by G. Franklin Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 122–126.

  11. E. Franklin Frazier, “The Impact of Urban Civilization Upon Negro Family Life,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 2, No. 5 (October 1937), p. 615.

  12. David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 27.

  13. Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 209.

  14. Jonathan Gill, Harlem, p. 284.

  15. Andrew F. Brimmer, “The Labor Market and the Distribution of Income,” Reflections of America: Commemorating the Statistical Abstract Centennial, edited by Norman Cousins (Washington: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1980), pp. 102–103.

 

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