Thomas Sowell on the Trouble With Social Justice – WSJ

Mr. Sowell has been a fellow at Stanford s Hoover Institution since 1980. In a phone interview, he describes the central fallacy of social-justice advocacy as the assumption that disparities are strange, and that in the normal course of events we would expect people to be pretty much randomly distributed in various occupations, income levels, institutions and so forth.

He says that s an assumption based on hope rather than experience or hard evidence. We can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history, he writes in the book s opening chapter on equal chances fallacies. He acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination exist and contributed to disparate outcomes. But he notes that these vices are in fact among many influences that prevent different groups of people whether classes, races or nations from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms or other terms.

For Mr. Sowell, the tremendous variety of geographic, cultural and demographic differences among groups makes anything approximating an even distribution of preferences, habits and skills close to impossible. The progressive left holds up as a norm a state the world has never seen, and regards as an anomaly something seen in societies all over the world and down through history. There s this sort of mysticism that disparities must show that someone s done something wrong to a lagging group, Mr. Sowell says. The social-justice vision starts off by reducing the search for causation to a search for blame. And for so much of what happens, there is no blame.

To illustrate the point, the book s chapter on racial fallacies cites recent census data on poverty. Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination, Mr. Sowell writes. Liberals argue that higher black poverty rates are mainly a product of slavery, Jim Crow and of lingering systemic racism. Yet there are pockets of the U.S. populated almost exclusively by white people who experience no racism and who nevertheless earn significantly less than blacks.

via www.wsj.com