An Interesting Aside...

In writing this blog, I clearly made the decision to remain anonymous.  So, when I relate stories from my real life, my sharing will be always be limited by the first sentence.

With that said, I will soon be forced to participate in racial sensitivity training sessions.  Not because of anything I've done, but because of a professional association with a company that has totally bought in on the idea of systemic racism.  No doubt, I know to keep my thoughts to myself on this topic.  The interesting factoid is that we were provided with some reading materials to review in advance.  And my main takeaway is the following...

There is plenty of evidence if one looks at this country's history of grave injustices and governmental action that is clearly reprehensible.  Those periods in time, those laws, those court cases, those policies, need no further explanation to see what they are and the motivations behind them.  But, there is also plenty of history of our country recognizing these wrongs and then doing something to correct them, such that it is much better to be a minority, women, etc. today than at any other point in time.

But, what the advance readings seem to be doing, one and all, is referencing these histories, and then offering a data point about today, as if one is clearly caused by the other, but not doing any of the work to show you how.  These works clearly choose to ignore the possibility that something else may be going on (h/t Thomas Sowell).  For example, there was slavery in this country and the founding fathers owned slaves.  You know what else, today black families have lower median incomes than white families.  Two facts, not sure that they are necessarily related.

Over and over, the practice seems to be, here's the belief and conclusion that we want to draw, here's some data that could be interpreted in any number of ways, we offer no additional context other than what happened 150/100/50 years ago, go draw some conclusions.  I guess that I would expect more from a theory that seems to be taking hold of our government, corporate boardrooms, and every single school and university.

But maybe I am asking too much.

Discrimination and Disparities

The author is Thomas Sowell (2019).

I like folks who formulate their views of the world based on facts rather than groupthink and emotion – and, better yet, understand that there is commonly more than one reason for why something has happened.  Sowell fits that bill.  And this book makes that point.

It is very much written to be a retort to the politics and prevailing views of today.  His premise: “…we should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites – which is to say, most meaningful endeavors.”  In other words, we should not ever expect equality of outcomes, and always trying to explain such reality in the form of an -ism or malevolent action is incredibly naïve.

He does a good job of explaining, so I plan to quote generously:

“People from different social backgrounds may also have different goals and priorities – a possibility paid little or no attention in many studies that measure how much opportunity there is by how much upward movement takes place, as if everyone is equally striving to move up, and only society’s barriers produce different outcomes.”

And:

“Social mobility is the extent to which a society permits upward and downward movement.  How much movement actually takes place depends also on the extent to which individuals and families avail themselves of the opportunities.  Measuring social mobility by how much movement takes place proceeds as if nothing depends on how individuals and families behave.  That certainly avoids complications for those promoting the prevailing social vision.  But it also avoids empirically testing that vision.”

To wit:

“Deliberate, biased suppressions of other people’s opportunities are just one of the various other impediments to equal outcomes.  But those things which offend our moral sense do not automatically have more causal weight than morally neutral factors such as demography, geography or language differences.”

His book reminds me of what Douglas Murray had to say – the utopia against which our racist and sexist society is compared simply has never existed.  We have never seen equal outcome, distributions, or proportional representation.  And complaining in advocacy of something which is unrealistic strikes me as a waste of time and resources.