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.
