Thomas Sowell, 94 now USA citizen and political black philosopher is discussing black white equality social justice, as DMK does in TN samudaya kolgai. It has been an issue since 1800 till date. Apart from the personal views, white will not understand the black facts in the above quote; an interview reproduced to understand the issue as well as thoughts. ood or bad, two ways of thinking is here in USA:Now, (K Rajaram IRS 14824) "*Peter Robinson:* All right, can you give me intermediate steps? In other words, what is the social justice agenda? What do they want?
*Thomas Sowell: *They want everybody to have equal outcomes or as close as they can get to it. Unfortunately, you don't have the preconditions for that, even in the same family. One of the examples I use in the book is among five-child families, the National Merit finalist is the firstborn just over half the time. That is, more often than the other four siblings combined. The fifth born is 6% of the time. And so it was even where you have almost ideal conditions. They're born to the same parents, raised under the same roof and they're not the same. *Peter Robinson:* Because all kinds of things matter, including birth order. *Thomas Sowell:* Oh, absolutely, absolutely. *Peter Robinson:* All right, you take on various fallacies here. Let's take on a couple of them. The equal chances fallacy, even in a society... I'm quoting you, "Social Justice Fallacies". Even in a society with equal opportunity, people from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things. In American sports, blacks are very overrepresented in professional basketball, whites in professional tennis and Hispanics in major league baseball. Why is that telling? *Thomas Sowell:* Because the implicit assumption and that sometimes explicit assumption is that in a world where everything was fair, where everyone was treated fairly, you would have, things would be representative of the population, the demographics of the whole in all these various activities. Imagine if a black kid born in Harlem and he's born with a body identical to that of Rudolph Nureyev, the great ballet dancer, the odds are 1,000 to 1 that he'll become a ballet dancer, much less another Rudolph Nureyev. I mean, he would be looked at strangely by all his friends in the neighborhood if he even wanted to do that. *Peter Robinson:* What you mean- *Thomas Sowell:* Chances are he wouldn't even think about it. *Peter Robinson:* Right, right, right. So you mean to say that when you tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers- You tried out for the pitching position in the Brooklyn Dodgers and they didn't hire you, you were not being discriminated against? *Thomas Sowell:* Actually, I was trying out for first base and the real reason I messed up was that my position was center field. But in order to be a good center fielder, I need hours and hours of practice and it was a very bad spring. I got very little practice. And so I figured at least I'm gonna go out and make an idiot of myself in center field, so I made an idiot of myself at first base. *Peter Robinson:* Chess pieces fallacy, the chess pieces fallacy, explain that one. *Thomas Sowell: *Well, Adam Smith had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who imagine that they can control a whole society with the ease with which one puts chess pieces where you want them on a chess board. And so there's this notion of this inert mass of people down there and then the wonderfully brilliant people at the top who ought to be telling them what to do. And there's no thought that, first of all, those at the top don't even know the people's individual conditions who are very different from themselves. And when they try to help, they can make things disastrous. *Peter Robinson:* You discuss a theory of justice, this is under knowledge fallacy. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes. *Peter Robinson:* A theory of justice, which is in certain circles... Certain circles, every university in the country, the philosophy department, political science, you'll get it in sociology. This is the big book on social justice written by John Rawls, philosopher at Harvard. I'm quoting you, Tom. Rawls refers to things that society should arrange. You quote him, arrange, that's the word he uses. And then Tom Sowell says, interior decorators arrange, governments compel. It is not a subtle distinction, explain that. *Thomas Sowell:* Well, if you're going to try to get some kind of result, you have to specify through what kinds of mechanism you expect to get that result. And different mechanisms, whether it's the governments, the market, Red Cross, whatever, they have their own individual things that they're good at and not so good at. And so you can't get the social justice result that you want unless you have the kind of institution that's likely to produce that result. Politics is not that kind of institution. *Peter Robinson:* And yet they all implicitly rely on government. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes. *Peter Robinson:* Redistribution of wealth, using legal regimes to adjust the proportions of various groups that get certain jobs. They all rely on government. And what's distinctive about government is it's the one institution that can send you to jail. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes. *Peter Robinson:* All right, and the point is that's dangerous. We should not want more government, more hands in the power of the politicians. *Thomas Sowell:* Yeah, one of the real problems is that you have people making decisions for which they pay no price when they're wrong, no matter how high a price other people pay. And right now, the homicide rates are beyond anything that were around, let's say, prior to 1960. And I mention 1960 in this case because that's when the Supreme Court remade the criminal law. They discovered rights in the Constitution that no one had noticed for over a century and they were impervious to evidence. *Peter Robinson:* So contrast your neighborhood in Harlem when you were an eight and nine and 10-year-old boy with what we see in neighborhoods in Chicago today, say. *Thomas Sowell:* Oh my gosh, people are astonished when I tell them I grew up in Harlem, I can't remember ever hearing a gunshot. And then, I've checked with my relatives who grew up in similar neighborhoods in Washington and down in North Carolina, they never heard a gunshot when they were growing up. I remember going back to Harlem some years ago to do some research at a high school. And I looked out the window and there's this park there near the high school. And I mentioned in passing that when I lived in Harlem as a kid, I would take my dog for a walk in that park. And looks of horror came over the students' faces. People have no idea how much has retrogressed over the years in the black community and how much of what progress has been made has not been made by politicians or by charismatic leaders. One of the things that drives me crazy are people who cite the trends over time without deciding where they're gonna start the time period. For example, this guy said all sorts of wonderful things happened in the 1960s and beyond, and especially for the minorities and the poor and so forth. So what I did, I said no, well, you can't... If you start the data in 1960, we don't know how much was a result of that and how much was a result of other things. That also applies in other things. So for example, one simple one, many people say... Ralph Nader wrote this book in 1965 and asked about the automobile safety and so on. As a result, there were laws by the government and the death rates went down after that, which is true in itself. But the death rate went down at a far higher rate prior to his writing the book. And this was the continuation of a trend that went back another 20 or 30 years. *Peter Robinson:* Because the market, because car manufacturers when it came right down to it had very little interest in getting people killed driving their vehicles- *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, if you kill off your customers, your chances are you won't sell as many cars. *Peter Robinson:* The big fallacy, at least, I take this is in many ways the heart of the book, racial fallacies. Now, in this section, in this chapter on racial fallacies, you begin... Almost all of this book is addressed to the current moment, but in racial fallacies, you start by going back about 100 years to lay out the Progressive position in the 1910s and '20s and for some years afterward. I'm quoting you, in addressing the massive increase in immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, this begins a massive increase in immigration begins toward the end of the 19th century and carries on through the 1920s. In addressing the massive increase in immigration, Progressives claimed that these new immigrants were inherently genetically and therefore permanently inferior. So your argument is that a century or so ago, Progressives believed roughly the same about Polish and Italian immigrants that whites in the South had long believed about blacks. *Thomas Sowell:* Oh yes. *Peter Robinson:* All right, "Social Justice Fallacies", I'm gonna read a quotation, then I'd like you to take us through this material. With the passing years, more and more evidence undermined the conclusion of the genetic determinists. Jews, who had scored low on the 1917 Army mental test, began to score above the national average on various tests as they became a more English-speaking group. A study showed that black orphans, black orphans raised by white families, had significantly higher average IQs than other black children. So in the century since this, you call them genetic determinists, which is one way of putting it, they were racists or they believed that some races were permanently inferior. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, and should be eliminated. *Peter Robinson:* And we've learned that's total nonsense. But even more than that, we've learned that IQ is malleable. Is that correct? *Thomas Sowell:* I'm not sure what you mean by malleable. *Peter Robinson:* Well, that is to say that this ranking of- *Thomas Sowell:* Oh, the ranking changes radically- *Peter Robinson:* Jews are stupid in 1917 because they score badly on tests- *Thomas Sowell:* Yeah, on tests written in English. *Peter Robinson:* Tests written in English, okay. *Thomas Sowell:* And people who spoke English did better on those tests. *Peter Robinson:* Or that blacks have a certain fixed IQ ranking and then you have black orphans raised by white families, in other words, a different cultural- *Thomas Sowell:* Yeah, but even before that study, that study wasn't done until 1976, but even as of the time of World War I, the data show that black soldiers scored below white soldiers. And this is one of the reasons. You need people with contrary opinions to be able to be free to attack things. The people who believed that this was genetically determined, they said, that's it, that's the answer and they moved on. Some other people said let's look at it more closely. They discovered that black soldiers from New York, it was New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and one or two other states scored higher than white soldiers from Mississippi, Alabama, et cetera, et cetera. And as I mentioned in the book, people's genes do not change when they cross a state line. The problem is when you have people who are crusading for some idea, whatever the idea is and they find some data that fits what they believe, that's the end of the story as far as they're concerned, which is fine if there are other people with contrary ideas who will look closer for something that goes the other way. *Peter Robinson:* And then get listened to. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, yes. *Peter Robinson:* By the way, you describe in the book, the Flynn effect discovered by your friend, the late James Flynn. Can you describe that, that's fascinating. *Thomas Sowell:* Well, the idea of genetic determinism is that you had to rid the country of these inferior races because otherwise the national IQ would go down over time because the poorer people had more children than the richer people. And so that went on for... Here again, the IQ data there that the genetic determinists were relying on looked like it supported what they said. But Jim Flynn decided that... Well, first of all, you have to understand how an IQ score is arrived at. Whatever number of questions answered correctly is the average at a given time, is given the number 100 because when you do these tests, especially with children, if a six-year-old child scores the same as a 12-year-old child, that means the six-year-old child is either much brighter than usual or the 12-year-old child is a lot less than usual. And so you compare all the six-year-old children and whatever the six-year-old children, how many questions they answer correctly, that becomes 100 and then similarly for all the other ages. So you can do that. And at adulthood at some point, you simply say adult and non-adult, all right. Now, that sounds very innocent in itself, but what happens when people start answering more questions correctly than before? The next generation answers more questions. Now, the number of questions answered by the second generation becomes 100. And so over time, as more and more people, black, white and whatever are answering more and more questions correctly, then the tests are re-normed. So having an IQ of 100 in 1925 is not the same thing as having an IQ of 100 in 1935 or 1950. *Peter Robinson:* And this is exactly what was going on. People of all different kinds were smarter crudely. Is that fair? *Thomas Sowell: *Well, once Jim Flynn decided to go back to the raw data, not just take the IQs. How many questions was this? And he discovers that the number of questions being answered correctly was increasing by large amounts, roughly one statistical deviation from one generation to the next. *Peter Robinson:* Which is big. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, and so the number of questions that the blacks were answering, let's say around 2,000 and having an IQ of 85 would've been an IQ of 104 back in 1947. And so all this information was being ignored because people took the IQ test as if that was the fixed number of questions answered correctly. *Peter Robinson:* And so you take the lid off that when the Flynn effect... *Thomas Sowell:* Shows that the opposite was happening, that instead of the national IQ going down, it was going up. *Peter Robinson:* It was going up. And so we have this fascinating discovery that somehow or other the conditions of modern life that requires more abstract thinking, somehow it's bringing in- *Thomas Sowell:* The whole group is just rising. *Peter Robinson:* The whole group is rising, all right. All right, from the Progressive position a century ago to the Progressive position today, racial assertions have ranged from the genetic determinism that we just discussed, which proclaimed that race is everything as an explanation of group differences to the opposite view that racism is the primary explanation of group differences. How did this happen? *Thomas Sowell:* Well, it happened because a lot of people arrived at the same conclusion and they had high IQs and PhDs, and that was the end of the story as far as many people were concerned. I mean, a high IQ and low information is a very dangerous combination. *Peter Robinson:* Sorry, but you once told me... I'm talking to a Harvard man of course, I'm very conscious of this and you once told me, "Peter, the main advantage of earning a Harvard degree is "that you never again in all your life have "to be intimidated by anyone who has a Harvard degree." Listen, Tom, as I read this book, for the most part, it's objective, it's objective throughout, it's calm, it's analytical, but when you take on this modern Progressive position that racism accounts for anything, there are passages in which you're angry. I felt that there are passages in which there's emotion that is very close to this. So let me just read a little bit to you. *Thomas Sowell:* Okay. *Peter Robinson:* Median black family income has been lower than median white family income for generations, but the median per capita income of Asian groups is more than 15,000 a year higher than the median per capita income of white Americans. Is this the white supremacy we're so often warned about? For more than a quarter of a century, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families, married-couple families been as high as 10%. And in no year has the poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10%. If black poverty is caused by systemic racism, do racists make an exception for blacks who are married? I guess you're allowed to be angry. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, yes. *Peter Robinson:* So do you have the feeling, when you're addressing this notion that racism accounts for everything, do you have the feeling that the arguments are subtle, it's persuasive, and you can forgive someone for buying that argument? Or do you have the feeling that it's willful, that the case is so clearly mistaken that there's a willfulness about it? *Thomas Sowell:* No, I don't, I think that people don't look for certain evidence and therefore they don't find it. And so on the basis of what they know at a given time, this may be very plausible. The problem is that you really need are other people with a different orientation who are skeptical and who will then look for things and find things that are very different from that. One of the things that I found interesting was the fact that there are various counties in the United States which are among the poorest counties in the country. And six of those counties have a population that ranges from 90% white to 100% white. *Peter Robinson:* Appalachian counties, Kentucky and Ohio as I recall. *Thomas Sowell:* Yeah, but mainly it's the hillbilly communities. And of course there's that great book that was written, "The Hillbilly Elegy". It was on the bestseller list for more than a year consecutively. *Peter Robinson:* JD Vance now Senator Vance. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, and there, these are people who have faced zero racism. *Peter Robinson:* They are white after all. *Thomas Sowell:* And they are white and zero racism, and also back in the '30s when they did IQ studies, their IQs were not only at the same level as those of blacks, they had the same pattern, namely that the young people whether they were black or hillbilly would have an IQ very close to the national average at age six, but by the time they were teenagers, it just kept going down and down and down 'cause it's relative to the other people of that age group. And they simply were falling behind. So it was clearly not biological, it was social. But despite that, these hillbilly counties had incomes that were not only lower than the national average, they were lower than the average of black incomes for a period of half a century. It may have been longer than that because I only went through half a century. But in every study that was done over that half century, they scored lower, their family incomes were lower than the family incomes of blacks. So obviously, there must be other things that cause people to be poor other than racism. *Peter Robinson:* All right, people in low-income American hillbilly counties already face zero racism because they're virtually all white. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes. *Peter Robinson:* Yet, they have lower incomes than blacks, just as you were saying. In other words, some behavior patterns seem to pay off. Now, this book is dedicated to fallacies, to showing errors in premises and errors in analysis. It's not dedicated to an alternative explanation. Nevertheless, you've got this argument lurking in here that it's the way people live, it's the way cultural patterns- *Thomas Sowell:* Yes. *Peter Robinson:* So what are the patterns that pay off? *Thomas Sowell:* Well, oh my heavens, that's a much larger book than this. *Peter Robinson:* Well, you've got time on your hands. *Thomas Sowell:* In terms of fallacies for our public policy, what does not pay off is having charismatic leaders depending upon government to do things because if you look what has happened to blacks before and after there was a massive government effort on their behalf. The poverty rate among blacks if you start in 1940 instead of 1960, 'cause 1960 is the magic number for people who are saying the government did all these wonderful things and blacks advanced because of it. In 1940, the black poverty rate was 87%. By 1960, it was down to 47%. *Peter Robinson:* That's dramatic *Thomas Sowell:* Well, from 1960 to 1970, it went down to 30%. And in 1970, affirmative action was now in place. It went down to 29%. So in the 20 years prior to the 1960s, the black poverty rate went down by 40 points and in the 20 years after 1960, it went down by 18 points. But again, you have the same thing you had with what was the Ralph Nader effect, you see. *Peter Robinson:* You start in 1960, you miss this. *Thomas Sowell:* You miss all of that. *Peter Robinson:* So you've got in this book, this is a point you make again and again in the section on racial fallacies that I started thinking of it. I don't think you used these terms, but this is not an original thought with me. I started thinking of it as a hidden century of black progress from Emancipation with the end of the Civil War through to 1965, let's say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, '65. Through the mid-'60s, you've got a century and you argue black educational attainment rises. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes. *Peter Robinson:* Black poverty rate drops dramatically. *Thomas Sowell:* Yeah. *Peter Robinson:* And these are people who started with no property, overwhelmingly illiterate. This is from the moment... *Thomas Sowell:* Yes. *Peter Robinson:* Year zero is 1865 for African Americans. And the claim and the other point that you make at a number of places is that the black family is overwhelmingly intact. Right up to 1960, most black... Go ahead, explain that. *Thomas Sowell:* Not only do people take credit for things that were not their doing, they overlook the negative things that came in after the 1960s as a result of policy. In 1940, 17% of black children were raised in single-parent homes. *Peter Robinson:* 17%. *Thomas Sowell:* 17. I forget the exact date in the 20th century, but after these wonderful reforms were put in, that quadrupled to 68% of black children were being raised in single-parent homes. Now, there's a whole literature on all the bad things that happen to kids who are raised by single parents. Whether they are black or white, American or British, the studies show the same things. One study said that fatherlessness has a bigger effect than even race and poverty. And certainly as I think back into my own life, I realized how fortunate I was because even though my biological father died before I was born and I was adopted, I was adopted into a family where I was the only child in a family of four adults and these were not people who were out having an active social life someplace. The life was there in the home. *Peter Robinson:* They gave you their time. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, yes, and I remember years later when I became a parent and like other new parents, I wanted to know when a kid was supposed to do this, when he's supposed to do that. And I said how old was I when I started to walk? And the lone surviving member of the family that raised me said, "Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. "Somebody was always carrying you." *Peter Robinson:* So you had four adults doting on you. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, yes, yes. And part of the rise of blacks before was because of things that were done by blacks. Example I think of a lot was a kid who grew up in Harlem at the same time I did. We were in the same school, lived two blocks from me and we met many years later by accident on a street in San Francisco and we talked about the old times. And one of the things he mentioned to me 'cause he had gone on, he was making more money than I was and he had become wealthy and he lived overseas with servants and he came back and moved out to the wine country and all that stuff. But one of the things that struck me, he said that he could remember times when he was growing up when his father would sit at the dinner table watching the children eat and not eat anything himself. Now, that's what- *Peter Robinson:* And now the father isn't even there. *Thomas Sowell:* Yes, that's right, that's right. So those kinds of things are what do it. *Peter Robinson:* Right, "Social Justice Fallacies", the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major factor in ending the denial of basic Constitutional rights to blacks in the South, but there is no point trying to make that the main source of the black rise out of poverty. Nor can the left act as if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was solely their work. A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Act." So you're saying something here which is... *Thomas Sowell:* Sacrilege. 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