These were neither the first nor the last times when statistical disparities led people to jump to conclusions about villainy being the cause. False assumptions as to causation are more than intellectual errors, and their consequences go far beyond economic losses.
Abstract people have an immortality which flesh-and-blood people have yet to achieve.
In short, statistical disparities are commonplace among human beings. Many historical and cultural reasons underlie the peculiar patterns observed. But the even “representation” of groups chosen as a baseline for measuring discrimination is a myth rather than an established fact. It is significant that those who have assumed that baseline have seldom, if ever, been challenged to produce evidence.
How can this be, when the whole purpose of rent control is to keep rents down? First of all, the purpose of any policy tells you absolutely nothing about what will actually happen under that policy. Too many disastrous laws get passed because those who pass them win political points for their good intentions and nobody bothers to check up later to see what actually happened.
A cynic once said that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary government policy.
This has often been carried to the point of encouraging lagging groups to proudly cling to their own culture, or even resurrect it in some cases, with little concern that these groups’ economic and educational lags might be – at least in part – a result of the cultures they were being encouraged to cling to.
Another Boston Globe editorial complained that the burden of proof “now shifts to the plaintiff ”10 – as if this were an unusual place for the burden of proof to be.
What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, “The world has never been a level playing field.
Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed.64 But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.65.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. People with careers as ethnic leaders usually tell their followers what they want to hear.
The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied.
When intellectuals are unable to find enough contemporary grievances to suit their vision or agenda, they can mine the past for harm inflicted by some on others.
Those who have promoted the prevailing social vision, in which lags, gaps or disparities to the detriment of black people are the fault of white people, are trapped in the corollary that these lags, gaps or disparities should disappear, once those other people are constrained by civil rights laws and policies. But nothing of the sort has happened in the wake of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.
In short, human capital is not synonymous with formal schooling.
While some theorists may tend to discuss people in the abstract, actual flesh-and-blood human beings differ enormously in their behavior, not just from individual to individual, but from group to group and from one culture to another. Various tests of honesty reveal very striking differences.
People who have acquired academic degrees, without acquiring many economically meaningful skills, not only face personal disappointment and disaffection with society, but also have often become negative factors in the economy and even sources of danger, especially when they lash out at economically successful minorities and ethnically polarize the whole society they live in.
Decades later, universities in Sri Lanka likewise had “a backlog of unemployed graduates” who had specialized in the humanities and the social sciences.
Despite beliefs in some quarters that education makes people more tolerant of other cultures and groups, it has been precisely individuals from newly educated groups, often lacking marketable skills, who have promoted group polarization, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Western.
But the word “change” is not a blank check for self-indulgence – least of all self-indulgence in the notion that disparities imply villainy, which in turn implies a crusade on the side of the angels against the forces of evil, despite how self-flattering such a vision of the world might be.
The fact that an idea sounds plausible, and is consistent with the prevailing social vision, does not exempt it from the test of empirical evidence.