Differences ≠ Discrimination (necessarily)

It's Not This Simple Folks

Here is another rather controversial article I wrote for SwiftEconomics some time back (and wrote a similar article for Mises too). Check it out.

Say you’re walking home on the wrong side of the tracks late at night and you see a young, black man walking toward you. Do you become nervous? If so, does that make you a racist?
​
What if it is a black woman walking toward you? If you’re less scared than under the previous scenario, does that make you a sexist?

What if it is an old black man? Again, if you’re less scared, does that make you an ageist?

What if it is a young black man, but he is well kempt, wearing a suit and holding a briefcase while speaking with Oxfordian-like grammar on an iPhone 4? If you’re less nervous, does this make you classist (someone who discriminates on class, I don’t know what the term is)?

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out many times, progressives believe that groups being equal in the aggregate is what is “normal” when that is seen no where at no time in the history of the world. And often these differences are massive. And furthermore, often the minority is doing better than the majority. For example, Asians in the United States make more than whites (why doesn’t Jesse Jackson throw any protests about this?). Furthermore, the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka does better than the Sinhalese majority, the Chinese in Malaysia do better than native Malays, the Germans do better in most South American countries than the local populations as do the Lebanese in West Africa (Thomas Sowell discusses all this here).
​
In the United States, atheists are generally not trusted (to say the least). They also make more money than Christians. Hell, taller people make more money than shorter people. Can you simply infer discrimination from this?

What about men and women? Currently, men make up 97.6% of the Fortune 500 CEO’s (488 out of 500). This is sometimes cited as evidence in and of itself for discrimination against women. OK fine, but on the other side, 91.5% of the prison population is male. Is that not also discrimination? Shouldn’t both be 50/50? Instead, the majority of politicians, Nobel prize winners, top academics, business leaders, inventors and scientists have been and are men. But then again, most criminals, psychopaths, drug addicts, high school dropouts and the homeless (not to mention warmongering or oppressive politicians) are also men. Indeed, variance is probably one of the biggest differences between men and women, that is if one is to accept that we’re not all blank slates and evolution actually does exist.

Let’s make this real obvious; the following chart shows average income based on age for men in 2005. As you can see, when people get older, until about 50 at least, they start making more money. Is anyone stupid enough to believe that this gap is simply because employers discriminate against younger people? (I should note that as of 2000, the median age of blacks in the United States was 30 and the median age of whites was 39, which might be just a little bit relevant here.)

Now, many of the differences we see are likely environmental and much has to do with cultural or economic factors. The high rate of crime among black males, in my judgement, is mostly due to their poor economic status coming out of slavery and Jim Crow, the black markets caused by the War on Drugs, the disintegration of the black family incentivized by the welfare state, the miserable state of our monoplozied, public schools and a gangster culture that has unfortunately developed among some parts of the black underclass.

This is all conjecture, educated conjecture, but conjecture nonetheless. Surely though, environment and other factors play major roles. But even if genes were completely irrelevant, other things can explain differences in one’s environment than discrimination or even a general state of being “disadvantaged.” Walter Williams pointed out many years ago that African Americans with advanced degrees were more likely to become professors than go into other fields such as engineering. Well, so what? Maybe that’s what these individuals found the most rewarding. It’s not like professors are paid badly just because they make less than engineers. But they are going to make less on the aggregate than groups, such as Asians, who are more likely to enter these higher paying fields.

Discrimination certainly could be why, or part of the reason why, there are more blacks in prison than whites as well as more men in prison than women. It certainly could play a part in every difference I’ve stated and the countless numbers I’ve left absent from this piece. However, it’s important to remember, especially with all the racial tension circling around the media circus of the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case, that differences, in and of themselves, do not necessarily mean discrimination.
​

Photos from http://backyardskeptics.com/, chegg.com and http://creoleindc.typepad.com ​