Does Merit Still Matter?

Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: After growing up in Harlem, Thomas Sowell served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War, then received an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master’s degree from Columbia, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. After teaching at universities that included Cornell, Brandeis, and UCLA, Dr. Sowell became a fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1977. Thomas Sowell is the author of some forty books, including his newest volume, Social Justice Fallacies. And this past spring, he turned ninety-three.

Robinson: Dr. Martin Luther King said in 1963: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

You write that Dr. King’s message was equal opportunity for individuals regardless of race.

HE PERSISTED: Hoover senior fellow Thomas Sowell reminds readers, “Adam Smith had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who imagine that they can control an entire society with the ease with which one puts chess pieces where you want them on a chess board.” [Uncommon Knowledge—Hoover Institution]

In the years that followed, the goal rather quickly changed to equal outcomes for all groups and all individuals regardless of ability or determination. What now rose to dominance was DEI and the social justice agenda. If those backing DEI and the social justice agenda could have everything they wanted, what would the country look like?

Sowell: They want everybody to have equal outcomes or as close as they can get to it. Unfortunately, there are no preconditions for that, even in the same family. One of the examples I use in the book is among five-child families.

The National Merit finalist is the firstborn just over half the time. That is, more often than the other four siblings combined. The fifth-born is 6 percent of the time. And so it was, even where you have identical conditions and genetics and almost ideal conditions.

They’re born to the same parents, raised under the same roof, and they’re not the same, not ever.

The “equal chances” fallacy, I’m quoting you: “Even in our society with equal opportunity, people from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things. In American sports, blacks are very overrepresented in professional basketball and football, whites in professional tennis and swimming, and Hispanics in Major League Baseball.” Why is that telling?

“There’s this notion of this inert mass of people down there and then the wonderfully brilliant people at the top who ought to be, deserve to be, telling them what to do.”

Sowell: Because the implicit assumption, and sometimes explicit assumption is that in a world where everything was fair, where everyone was treated fairly, things would be representative of the population, the demographics of the whole in all these various activities.

Imagine a black kid born in Harlem and he’s born with a body identical to that of Rudolf Nureyev, the great ballet dancer; the odds are a thousand to one that he’ll become a ballet dancer, much less another Rudolf Nureyev. Chances are astronomical that he wouldn’t even think about it.

Robinson: So, you mean to say that when you tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers—you tried out for a pitching position and they didn’t hire you—you were not being discriminated against?

Sowell: Actually, I was trying out for first base, and the real reason I messed up was that my position was center field. But to be a good center fielder, I needed hours and hours of practice, and it was a very bad spring. I got very little practice. And so, I figured I was going to go out and make an idiot of myself in center field, so I made an idiot of myself at first base.

Sowell: Well, Adam Smith had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who imagine that they can control a whole society with the ease with which one puts chess pieces where you want them on a chess board. And so, there’s this notion of this inert mass of people down there and then the wonderfully brilliant people at the top who ought to be telling them what to do. And there’s no thought that first of all, those at the top don’t even know the slightest about people’s individual conditions, people who are very different from themselves. And when they try to help, they can make things disastrous.

Robinson: You discuss a theory of justice, which is in certain circles… every university in the country, the philosophy department, political science, sociology. There is a big book on social justice written by John Rawls, the philosopher at Harvard. “Rawls refers to things that society ‘should arrange,’” you write. And then Tom Sowell says, “Interior decorators arrange, governments compel. It is not a subtle distinction.”

Sowell: Well, if you’re going to try to get some kind of result, you have to specify through what kinds of mechanism you expect to use to get that result. And different mechanisms, whether it’s the governments, the market, the Red Cross, whatever, they have their own individual things that they’re good at and not so good at. And so, you can’t get the social justice result that you want unless you have the kind of institution that’s likely to produce that result. Politics is not that kind of institution.

Robinson: Redistribution of wealth, using legal regimes to adjust the proportions of various groups that get certain jobs. They all rely on the government. And what’s very distinctive about the government is it’s the one institution that can send you to jail.

Sowell: Yes, one of the real problems is that you have hundreds of thousands of people making decisions for which they pay no price when they’re wrong, no matter how high a price other people must pay for those wrong decisions.

Right now, the homicide rates are beyond anything that was ever around, let’s say, before 1960. And I mention 1960 in this case because that’s when the Supreme Court remade the criminal law. They discovered rights in the Constitution that no one had noticed for over a century and they were impervious to evidence.

Robinson: Contrast your neighborhood in Harlem when you were an eight- and nine- and ten-year-old boy with what we see in neighborhoods in Chicago today, say.

Sowell: Oh my gosh, people are astonished when I tell them I grew up in Harlem. I can’t remember ever hearing a gunshot. I’ve checked with my relatives who grew up in similar neighborhoods in Washington and down in North Carolina; they never heard a gunshot when they were growing up. I remember going back to Harlem some years ago to do some research at a high school. And I looked out the window, and there’s this park there near the high school. I mentioned in passing that when I lived in Harlem as a kid, I would take my dog for a walk in that park. And looks of horror came over the students’ faces. People have no idea how much has retrogressed over the years in the black community and how much of what progress has been made has not been made by politicians or by charismatic leaders.

“People are astonished when I tell them I grew up in Harlem. I can’t remember ever hearing a gunshot.”

Robinson: The big fallacy—at least, I take this is in many ways the heart of the book—racial fallacies. Almost all of your book is addressed to the current moment, but in racial fallacies, you start by going back about a hundred years to lay out the Progressive position in the 1910s and ’20s and for some years afterward in addressing immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe:

“This massive increase in immigration begins toward the end of the nineteenth century and carries on through the 1920s. In addressing the massive increase in immigration, American Progressives claimed that these new immigrants were inherently genetically, and therefore permanently, inferior.”

So, you argue that a century or so ago, Progressives believed roughly the same about Polish and Italian immigrants that whites in the South and rural locations had long believed about blacks.

Robinson: I’ll read a quotation: “With the passing years, more and more evidence undermined the conclusion of the genetic determinists.

Jews, who had scored low on the 1917 Army mental test, began to score well above the national average on various tests as they became a more English-speaking group.

Numerous studies showed that black orphans raised by white families had significantly higher average IQs than other black children.”

You call them genetic determinists, which is one way of putting it. Some races were permanently inferior.

Robinson: And we’ve learned that’s total nonsense. Jews were stupid in 1917 because they scored badly on tests . . .

Sowell: Yes, on tests written in English. And people who spoke English did better on those tests.

Sowell: Yes, but even as of the time of World War I, the data show that black soldiers scored below white soldiers. The people who believed that this was genetically determined, they said, that’s it, that’s the answer, and they moved on.

Some other people said, let’s look at it more closely. They discovered that black soldiers from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and one or two other states scored higher than white soldiers from Mississippi, Alabama, etcetera.

And as I mentioned in the book, people’s genes do not change when they cross a state line. When you have people who are crusading for some idea, whatever the idea is, and they find some data that fits what they believe, that’s the end of the story as far as they’re concerned.

Robinson: From the Progressive-Socialist position a century ago to the progressive position today, racial assertions have ranged from the genetic determinism that we just discussed, which proclaimed that race is everything as an explanation of group differences, to the opposite view that racism is the primary explanation of group differences. How did this happen?

Sowell: Well, it happened because a lot of people arrived at the same conclusion and they had high IQs and PhDs, and that was the end of the story as far as many people were concerned.

Robinson: You once told me, “Peter, the main advantage of earning a Harvard degree is that you never again in all your life have to be intimidated by anyone who has a Harvard degree.”

Tom, as I read this book, for the most part, it's objective, it’s calm, it’s analytical, but when you take on this modern progressive position that racism accounts for anything, there are passages in which you’re angry. I felt that there are passages in which there’s an emotion that is very close to this.

“Median black family income has been lower than median white family income for generations.

However, the median per capita income of Asian groups is more than $15,000 a year higher than the median per capita income of white Americans.

For more than a quarter of a century, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent. And in no year has the poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent.

If black poverty is caused by systemic racism, do racists make an exception for blacks who are married?”

I guess you’re allowed to be angry. Do you have the feeling, when you’re addressing this notion that racism accounts for everything, that the arguments are subtle, it’s persuasive, and you can forgive someone for buying that argument? Or do you have the feeling that it’s willful?

“People don’t look for certain evidence and therefore they don’t find it.”

Sowell: No, I don’t. I think that people don’t look for certain evidence and therefore they don’t find it. And so, based on what they know at a given time, this may be very plausible.

The problem is that you really need other people with a different orientation who are skeptical and who will then look for things and find things that are very different from that. One of the things I found interesting was the fact that there are counties in the United States that are among the poorest counties in the country.

And six of those counties have a population that ranges from 90 percent white to 100 percent white.

Sowell: And they are white, and zero racism, and also back in the 1930s, when they did IQ studies, their IQs were not only at the same level as those of blacks, they had the same pattern: namely that the young people, whether they were black or hillbilly, would have an IQ very close to the national average at age six, but by the time they were teenagers, it just kept going down and down and down because it’s relative to the other people of that age group. And they were simply falling behind.

So, it was clearly not biological, it was social. These hillbilly counties had incomes that were not only lower than the national average, they were lower than the average of black incomes for a period of half a century. Obviously, there must be other things that cause people to be poor other than racism.

Robinson: Now, this book is dedicated to fallacies, to showing errors in premises and errors in analysis. It’s not dedicated to an alternative explanation. Nevertheless, you’ve got this argument lurking in here that it’s the way people live, it’s the cultural patterns. So, what are the patterns that pay off?

Sowell: In terms of fallacies for our public policy, what does not pay off is having charismatic leaders depending upon the government to do things, if you look at what has happened to blacks before and after there was a massive government effort on their behalf. The poverty rate among blacks, if you start in 1940 instead of 1960—because 1960 is the magic number for people who say the government did all these wonderful things and blacks advanced because of it—in 1940, the black poverty rate was 87 percent. By 1960, it was down to 47 percent. From 1960 to 1970, it went down to 30 percent. And in 1970, affirmative action is now in place. It went down to 29 percent. So, in the twenty years before the 1960s, the black poverty rate went down by 40 points and in the twenty years after 1960, it went down by 18 points.

Robinson: Year zero is 1865 for African Americans. And the point you make in many places is that the black family was overwhelmingly intact. Right up to 1960.

Sowell: Not only do people take credit for things that were not their doing, they overlook the negative things that came in after the 1960s as a result of policy.

In 1940, 17 percent of black children were raised in single-parent homes. I forget the exact date in the twentieth century, but after these wonderful reforms were put in, that quadrupled to 68 percent of black children being raised in single-parent homes.

Now, there’s a whole literature on all the bad things that happen to kids who are raised by single parents; whether they are black or white, American or British, the studies show the same things.

One major study said fatherlessness has a bigger effect than even race and poverty.

And certainly, as I think back on my own life, I realize how fortunate I was because even though my biological father died before I was born and I was adopted, I was adopted into a family where I was the only child in a family of four adults and these were not people who were out having an active social life someplace. The life, our life, was there in the home.

Sowell: Yes, and years later when I became a parent, like other new parents, I wanted to know when a kid was supposed to do this, when he’s supposed to do that. And I said, how old was I when I started to walk?

And the lone surviving member of the family that raised me said, “Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you.”

Robinson: From Social Justice Fallacies: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major factor in ending the denial of basic constitutional rights to blacks

“Consequences matter, must matter, more than some attractive or fashionable theory.”

in the South, but there is no point trying to make that the main source of the black rise out of poverty. Nor can the left act as if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was solely their work. A much higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the act.” So, you’re saying something here which is . . .

Robinson: It’s shocking, it’s heretical. Well, you say the Civil Rights Act ensured equality before the law. It was overdue, it was necessary, it was just. It’s an accomplishment in American history, but at about the same time, we get the creation of an explosion of the welfare state, and that state does people harm. It harms the African-American family to an unimaginable degree.

Sowell: Yes, and the other thing too. The Civil Rights Act was not what got blacks into professional occupations. In the decade before 1964, the number of blacks in professional occupations doubled. So, this is not a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Robinson: Tom, let me read a few single sentences from your book and you tell us what you meant. “Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create real catastrophes.”

You mention genetic determinism; they concluded their reasoning that you had to put an end to certain races.

There was a Progressive who wrote a book with that theme [The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant] which was translated into German and Hitler called it his Bible.

During the 1920s, in reaction to World War I, the idea rose among the intellectual elites that the way to prevent war was to stop arming, you see. Disarmament was the way to avoid a war. No evidence made the slightest impression on them, and they pulled the West into a war that probably would never have happened because the totalitarian dictatorships that started that war were well aware that the United States, Britain, and France had an industrial capacity greater than theirs. And you wouldn’t ordinarily attack countries that have greater industrial capacity than yours unless you thought that they were gutless and foolish enough not to remain armed.

“Do we want a society in which some babies are born into the world as heirs of prepackaged grievances against other babies born on the same day?”

Sowell: If you can get people to believe that their problems are all due to racists, you will get their votes.

But that’s not the case. It’s very doubtful whether all the racists in the country today have one-tenth the negative effect on blacks as the teachers’ unions have. The teachers’ unions keep the schools lousy in areas where the people who send their kids to school do not have the option to send them to a private school.

Robinson: Tom, would you close our discussion by reading a passage from Social Justice Fallacies?

“Do we want the mixture of students who are going to be trained to do advanced medical research to be representative of the demographic makeup of the population as a whole, or do we want students with the highest probability of finding cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s? Do you want airline pilots chosen for the demographic representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly with pilots who were chosen for their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination? Consequences must matter or should matter, more than some attractive or fashionable theory. More fundamentally, do we want a society in which some babies are born into the world as heirs of prepackaged grievances against other babies born on the same day, blighting both their lives or do we want to at least leave them the option to work things out better in their lives than we have in ours?”

2 posted on 03/23/2024 7:36:42 AM PDT by ClearCase_guy (It's not "Quiet Quitting" -- it's "Going Galt".)

3 posted on 03/23/2024 7:39:23 AM PDT by aquila48 (Do not let them make you "care" ! Guilting you is how they control you. )

Merit will always matter. But there is a war against merit by the worthless, soulless, DEI worshipping left.

4 posted on 03/23/2024 7:39:56 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page. More photos added.)

It matters for long-term survival. No merit will eventually kill off whatever business is not using it.

5 posted on 03/23/2024 7:41:25 AM PDT by Jonty30 (Do you know why I'm always right? It's because I know everything. )

Is there audio of this interview?

Merit is antithetical to D.I.E.

One of these concepts must be destroyed.

I didn’t see a link to audio on the site.

9 posted on 03/23/2024 7:50:40 AM PDT by Twotone (We have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seemed crazy. - B. Weinstein)

yes, merit definitely still matters

if you’re actually qualified, they’ll turn you down every time now

merit matters a whole lot

10 posted on 03/23/2024 7:55:02 AM PDT by faithhopecharity (“Politicians are not born. They're excreted.” Marcus Tillius Cicero (106 to 43 BCE))

For sure it won’t matter once they have their Central Bank Digital Currency / Social Credit System in place.

11 posted on 03/23/2024 7:55:14 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (The worst thing about censorship is █████ ██ ████ ████s████ █ ███████ ████. FJB.)

What a brilliant man. He truly is a treasure and should be quoted often to all people.

It is like a bear chase you only have to be better than one person. They are flooding the zone with idiots that don’t want to put in the extra effort. That can’t last.

In its period of decadence, as Western Civilization has sunk intellectually, morally, and in every possible way to the lowest levels of “woke”, all standards are lowered.

14 posted on 03/23/2024 8:08:44 AM PDT by Savage Beast (Pray for the Enlightenment of the Democrats.)

Merit always matters, but merit means different things to different people.

To a traditionalist, “merit” means “ability to accomplish a task.”

To a progressive, “merit” means “ability and willingness to do what one is told.”

15 posted on 03/23/2024 8:17:35 AM PDT by cockroach_magoo (cockroach_magoo did not formally deprogram himself.)

Spent some time at Stanford in the 70’s. It’s gone to he$$ but Hoover is independent from the school. Hansen, Condi Rice and Sowell are...cool. A friend used to give me grief for attending a ‘Jr’ university.

16 posted on 03/23/2024 8:19:48 AM PDT by sasquatch (Do NOT forget Ashli Babbit! c/o piytar)

17 posted on 03/23/2024 8:22:02 AM PDT by sasquatch (Do NOT forget Ashli Babbit! c/o piytar)

18 posted on 03/23/2024 9:03:58 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd (A truth that’s told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent ~ Wm. Blake)

I’ve often wondered if blacks were better off in the Jim Crow era. Reading what Dr. Sowell says - leads me to believe that.

19 posted on 03/23/2024 9:05:53 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd (A truth that’s told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent ~ Wm. Blake)

“What a brilliant man. He truly is a treasure and should be quoted often to all people!”

20 posted on 03/23/2024 9:07:11 AM PDT by Grampa Dave ((“Surrender often means wisely accommodating to what is beyond our control.” — Sylvia Boorstein.))

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