The numbers of people enslaved within Africa itself exceeded the numbers exported. History has largely forgotten them.
The Zaire River, for example, is 2,900 miles long and has a volume of water second only to that of the Amazon, but its rapids and waterfalls near the sea prevent ocean-going ships from reaching inland.
Put differently, how much of male-female differences in income has been due to employer discrimination and how much to other differences arising from social restrictions or other factors is a question rather than a foregone conclusion. Many social restrictions, especially in the past, have been based on attempts to forestall problems growing out of the attraction of the sexes for one another.
No river in sub-Saharan Africa reaches from the open sea to deep into the interior.
While families had incentives to curtail women’s work outside the home, employers had countervailing incentives to try to tap this large potential source of workers. Early New England mill owners, for example, tried to reassure parents of the safety and propriety of letting their daughters work in their businesses by having all-female workforces, often overseen by older women who in effect were chaperons, especially when the young women lived away from home.
Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.
Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? Similarly with “social justice,” “equality,” and other undefined terms that can mean wholly different things to different individuals and groups – all of whom can be mobilized in support of policies that use such appealing words.
People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority.
Given the asymmetrical effects of career obsolescence on woman and men, it is hardly surprising that women tend to work in fields with lower rates of obsolescence – as teachers and librarians, for example, rather than as computer engineers or tax accountants.
One of the most central – and most controversial – premises of the civil rights vision is that statistical disparities in incomes, occupations, education, etc., represent moral inequities, and are caused by “society.
Another central premise of the civil rights vision is that belief in innate inferiority explains policies and practices of differential treatment, whether expressed in overt hostility or in institutional policies or individual decisions that result in statistical disparities. Moral defenses or causal explanations of these statistical differences in any other terms tend themselves to fall under suspicion or denunciation as racism, sexism, etc.
A third major premise of the civil rights vision is that political activity is the key to improving the lot of those on the short end of differences in income, “representation” in desirable occupations or institutions, or otherwise disadvantaged.
Often, it is precisely the lure of a chance to hit the jackpot which causes all the producers to gamble on untried ventures, out of which some prove to be beneficial to the public. To insist on a closer approximation to merit would reduce the incentives and the benefits to society that flow from these incentives.
Unsafe at Any Speed is a classic of propaganda in its ability to use distracting or dismissive rhetoric to evade a need to confront opposing arguments with evidence or logic.
Among the greatest external costs imposed in a society can be those imposed politically by legislators and officials who pay no costs whatever, while imposing billions of dollars in costs on others, in order to respond to political pressures from advocates of particular interests or ideologies.
69 The Smithsonian’s own view of its mission was that it should “tell visitors immediately what we are about and how we’d like them to change.”70 In other words, the purpose of a taxpayer-supported institution is to express the ideologies of those who run it and to brainwash the visiting public with the vision of the anointed.
It would be naive to overlook the self-interest behind many of the glowing pleas for “expanded educational opportunity for youth.” Since youth must compete against each other for jobs, more “opportunity” for tax-subsidized education of middle-class students means a continued escalation of degree requirements for jobs and corresponding restriction of opportunity for youths from poorer families.
Definitions being what they are, young people who waste their time around the house or on street corners are called “unemployed,” while those who waste their time in classrooms are called “students.
Contrary to various economic theories of imperialism, Africa was not a major outlet for European investment or exports.
If one chooses to call tests that require the mastery of abstractions culturally biased, because some cultures put more emphasis on abstractions than others, that raises fundamental questions about what the tests are for. In a world where the ability to master abstractions is fundamental to mathematics, science and other endeavors, the measurement of that ability is not an arbitrary bias. A culture-free test might be appropriate in a culture-free society – but there are no such societies.