Are "Inequalities" Really Wrong?

Inequalities of income, power, prestige, and other things have long preoccupied intellectuals, both as things to explain and things to correct.  The time and attention devoted to these inequalities might suggest that equality is so common or so automatic that its absence is what requires an explanation.

Various causes of this apparently inexplicable inequality of outcomes have been suggested - racism, sexism, or class bias, for example.  But seldom is it considered necessary to demonstrate the automatic equality which makes an explanation of its absence necessary.  Anyone who suggests that individuals - or, worse yet, groups - are unequal in behavior or performance risks being written off intellectually and denounced morally as biased or bigoted toward those considered less than equal in some respects.  Yet the empirical case for equality of consequential characteristics ranges from meager to non-existent.

Once the focus shifts from abstract potential to empirical capabilities, the notion of equality is not merely unproven but unlikely to the point of being absurd.  How could people living in the Himalayas develop the seafaring skills of people living in ports around the Mediterranean?  How could the Bedouins of the Sahara know as much about fishing as the Polynesians of the Pacific - or the Polynesians know as much about camels as the Bedouins?  How could Eskimos be as proficient at growing tropical crops as the people of Hawaii or the Caribbean?

Such considerations are far more crucial for mundane knowledge than for academic knowledge.  Ph.D.s in mathematics can have the same knowledge in Delhi as in Paris.  However, in the world of mundane but consequential knowledge, how could an industrial revolution have originated in places which lack the key natural resources - iron ore and coal - and are too geographically inaccessible for those resources to be transported to them without prohibitive costs?  The industrial revolution could hardly have begun in the Balkans or Hawaii, regardless of what people were living there - and neither could the people in those places have developed the same industrial skills, habits and ways of life at the same time as people in other places where they industrial revolution in fact began.

Differences among the racial, national or other groups range from the momentous to the mundane, whether in the United States or in other countries around the world and down through the centuries.

Empirically observable skills have always been grossly unequal - which is to say, real people have never been even close to the equality of abstract people, when it comes to developed capabilities, as distinguished from abstract potential.  Among the many groups in countries around the world, very few have ever matched the major role played by the Jains from India in the cutting of diamonds for the world market, whether the Jains lived in India or in Amsterdam.  People of German ancestry have been similarly prominent in the brewing of beer, whether in Germany or in the United States, where the best-selling brands of beer were created by people of German ancestry, as was true of China’s famous Tsingtao beer.  In nineteenth century Argentina, German beer drove English beer from the local market, while Germans also established breweries in Australia and Brazil, as they had brewed beer in the days of the Roman Empire.

Jews have been similarly prominent, if not predominant, in the apparel industry, whether in medieval Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, Argentina or the United States.  Yet intellectuals’ emphasis on external circumstances over internal cultures led an academic historian to say that Jewish immigrants to the United States were fortunate that they arrived in this country just when the garment industry was about to take off.  The same coincidence seems to have occurred in a number of other countries, just as the arrival of large numbers of overseas Chinese in various countries in Southeast Asia galvanized particular sectors of the economics there, and the arrival of Huguenots galvanized the watch-making industry in seventeenth-century England.

Innumerable other examples could be cited, involving other groups in countries around the world.  But none of that has made a dent in the intelligentsia’s indignant responses when discovering statistical disparities in outcomes among groups.  The burden of proof to the contrary is put on others, rather than on those whose presumptions are based on nothing more than reasoning as if they were discussing abstract people in an abstract world, and applying statistical techniques that would be appropriate to such homogeneous human beings or people who are in effect essentially random events, on which much statistical analysis is based.

Whatever the abstract potential of individuals and groups, the distinction between abstract potential and developed capabilities is not trivial, even though that distinction is often lost sight of, or is finessed, by intellectuals who speak in generalities about “equality.”  Abstract potential carries very little weight anywhere in the real world, when people are making decisions for themselves.  Performance is what counts.  What we want to know is what real people can actually do, not what abstract potential there is in abstract people.


Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.128-130