Current Events > Book Club General: Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell

(+) Yeah! (+)

@Questionmarktarius
@Balrog0

You guys read it yet? I'm a chapter in and it's fantastic. Not a very large book, but it's concise and heavily sourced so it's well worth the cost thus far.

The premise of the first chapter is that disparities occur naturally in nations, nature, and across all kinds of individual groups. Disparities are thus not in themselves evidence for neither inferior genetics (like the far right would argue) nor discrimination (like the far left would argue).

It's also about how success in any endeavor means meeting the prerequisites for success. Meeting 4 out of 5 prerequisites, for example, doesn't guarantee success. It just makes it a bit more likely. One example is a massive study that followed a group of people with IQs above 140 and noted how a subset of those people never amounted to anything brilliant due to meeting many but not all of the prerequisites for success in their chosen endeavors.

He then sifts through a lot of empirical evidence to demonstrate the points. Really interesting examples.
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For the people with the high IQs, is it possible they were just waiting for something to happen because they felt they were so smart?
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LightningAce11 posted...

For the people with the high IQs, is it possible they were just waiting for something to happen because they felt they were so smart?

That's one possible explanation. They may have felt that because of their intellect, they didn't need to put in as much effort at whatever they were trying to achieve.

Another possible explanation is that, while very intelligent, they never had access to a mentor or to someone who could point them in the right direction. So they would attempt to reinvent the wheel and resolve problems that had already been solved.

Etc.
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Can you post a pdf rip? Ill read it if you do, looks interesting.
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Russman posted...

Can you post a pdf rip? Ill read it if you do, looks interesting.

Sorry brother, that's illegal and Thomas Sowell deserves money because he's a fucking beast.
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does high IQ equal high intelligence, and vice versa?
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boxington posted...

does high IQ equal high intelligence, and vice versa?

Nope.
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boxington posted...

does high IQ equal high intelligence, and vice versa?

There's certainly a correlation between high IQ and intelligence. How much of a causal relationship there is between the two is hard to say.

In the example I mentioned with the study of the high IQ group, none of the members of the 140+ IQ group won a Nobel Prize for anything. But a few members of a group with smaller IQ did win a Nobel Prize. Granted, the people who won the prize were part of a group that also had above-average IQ across the board, but it goes to show that IQ in itself is not the only predictor of success or intelligence.

It certainly plays a role in those things, though. There is some baseline of IQ that determines whether or not you can be useful to society in the traditional sense of being employable.
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What if someone had a memory so good they could remember every beat and note of a song after only listening to it once and could reproduce it perfectly.
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thanks for the answers
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Chapter 2 is blowing my mind. It's on the meaning and costs of discrimination, and how free market forces historically dealt with discrimination. Super interesting exposition and examination of empirical evidence. Will try to summarize it after I finish it but everyone really should just read the entire book for themselves.
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Chapter 2 started out as an analysis on the different types of discrimination. For example, there are four definitions he provided:

1) Uninformed discrimination against individuals
2) Uninformed discrimination against groups
3) Informed discrimination against individuals
4) Informed discrimination against groups

He then described how people may engage in the different types of discrimination, often times in order to mitigate costs. For example, if an employer is trying to hire for a job...and he has a choice between group A and group B, and if the job is sensitive to alcoholism because of the dangers of the work, he will necessarily discriminate against group B if X% of group B is alcoholic. This is because there are real costs and dangers to other workers, to consumers, and to the business if alcoholics are working there.

This is to the detriment of the subset of group B that doesn't drink alcohol, but to the benefit of the rest of the people involved. He made this point to show how there are nuances to employment practices.

Then he talked about how market forces are superior to political process for ending uninformed discrimination against groups. For example, when the white slave owners lost their slaves due to the civil war and the federal mandate that slaves be freed...sharecropping popped up. The whites wanted to keep the former slaves down by giving them awful working conditions and awful profits for their work.

But what ended up happening was that eventually, some whites realized that they could profit more if they hired blacks at a higher premium than other whites. This is because when the south was agricultural, having a workforce that was highly skilled and effective at planting and harvesting crops (which is what slaves were forced to do beforehand) was of critical importance.

So competition for black labor caused black wages to skyrocket during the sharecropping era. To paraphrase Sowell, it's because while racists care less about other races...they care more about themselves than they do members of their own race. So the free market was a strong deterrent to discrimination in employment wherever there was competition for labor. He then goes into many examples of how this wasn't the case in government-regulated national utilities like the telephone industry, because of how the political process does not experience the pain of the profit-motive when it discriminates.

He also talked about the same phenomena during apartheid in South Africa. The white supremacists there mandated that companies could not hire blacks for some roles or in quantities larger than X for some roles. But in the industries where there was competition, most notably the large private sector, the companies would hire black labor anyway and just eat the cost of the fines. This is because it was more profitable for them to do so despite any of their own racist beliefs towards black people.

So profit-seeking and competition in the market place are demonstrable deterrents to discrimination, whereas the political process has enshrined discrimination and made it more pronounced.

Then he presents evidence on how the minimum wage disproportionately affected black males. Example: In the first half of the 20th century, when racism/poverty in the black community were worse than what they are now, black teenager unemployment rate was virtually the same as white teenager unemployment rate. He blames the long-term consequences of the minimum wage for low labor market participation rates in the black community starting since the end of the first half of the 20th century.

Then he talks about how building shortages mandated by law, in California and etc, caused properties to artificially skyrocket in value to the detriment of the black community.
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Also, fun fact. The first time Thomas Sowell saw a black secretary on the campus at University of Chicago...was when he saw Milton Friedman's secretary!

I did not know this, but Milton Friedman was also a Jew who was discriminated against and blocked from opportunity back when racism against Jews was common in America. Yet when that racism died down because of disgust towards the Nazis, and when he was able to advance his position...he was the first person who hired a black woman to be his secretary at the university! That's badass. Never knew that about him.

@Romes187 You might enjoy the book as well, forgot to include you in the first post.
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I've heard many great things about it. I'll pick it up and give it a go

Currently reading some agatha Christie to my wife and baby every night which zaps my personal reading time but that's ok.

Chapter 3 was about self-sorting and unsorting of people. In other words, it was about how people choose where they want to live when they're free to choose.

He presented evidence on how all people, from every great immigration into America across the hundreds of years we've been around, preferred to live in the same cities and even neighborhoods as people from the same place as them. And this sorting happened at a level even more granular than simply saying Italians lived with Italians, Shiite Muslims lived with Shiite Muslims. People would self-sort even down to which part of Italy or Nigeria or etc they were from, preferring to be closer to people who were from the same religion/culture/city from the country they came from.

His point was that uniformity in a population's demographics doesn't necessarily reflect racism or illicit practices in housing. He then went on to talk about how government attempts to introduce low-income people into middle-class areas were problematic.

They were problematic for two reasons. 1) They weren't effective at producing repeated and consistent marked improvements in income/education/over-all condition of the poor people who were subsidized into better areas and 2) They reduced the condition of the people who earned their way into those areas.

One thing that blew my mind was what he wrote about who was most vocal about opposing these government programs to subsidize housing. For example, he mentions how white people who earned their way into good areas were vocal about opposing subsidized housing for other whites. And he also talked about how in areas like Chicago, it wasn't whites that were most vocal about opposing subsidized housing for blacks - it was actually middle class blacks who didn't want their property values to go down because of subsidized renting introducing violence into the area.

Pretty complex and sensitive topic. Highly recommend everyone take a peek at chapter 3. He also talked a lot about how schooling, mostly in the north, wasn't segregated in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The black community in the north was well integrated into the majority-white culture of the time. Sowell claimed that it was only after southerners sought economic opportunity in the north that a lot of poorly educated and more violent people (black and white) moved to the north and upended the peaceful integration between the races.

Not sure about how true that last part is, though. Will have to dig deeper into that, because I've never heard that stuff before. I always assumed that separate but equal segregation was universal in America, even in the north. But the narrative Sowell presented was not like that at all (with regards to the North).
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oh this fucking moron

edit: sowell not tc

From his newspaper columns, Thomas Sowell is trash. He thinks every problem in existence is because of some mysterious, nebulous "intelligensia." That's basically his favorite word.
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jumi posted...

From his newspaper columns, Thomas Sowell is trash. He thinks every problem in existence is because of some mysterious, nebulous "intelligensia." That's basically his favorite word.

Sowell is definitely not trash. I'm on chapter 4 of this book and haven't seen the word Intelligensia used a single time. Instead he's presented a shit ton of citations to studies and evidence.
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sowell is the epitome of that stereotype of "one of the good ones"

basically he's the only black intellectual that conservative nutjobs can point to. the dude's citation skills and sourcing of his claims are on par with that of a college freshman. nothing he says should be taken seriously

FLUFFYGERM posted...

jumi posted...

From his newspaper columns, Thomas Sowell is trash. He thinks every problem in existence is because of some mysterious, nebulous "intelligensia." That's basically his favorite word.

Sowell is definitely not trash. I'm on chapter 4 of this book and haven't seen the word Intelligensia used a single time. Instead he's presented a shit ton of citations to studies and evidence.

His book editor must be more strict than whoever edits his columns.
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jumi posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

jumi posted...

From his newspaper columns, Thomas Sowell is trash. He thinks every problem in existence is because of some mysterious, nebulous "intelligensia." That's basically his favorite word.

Sowell is definitely not trash. I'm on chapter 4 of this book and haven't seen the word Intelligensia used a single time. Instead he's presented a shit ton of citations to studies and evidence.

His book editor must be more strict than whoever edits his cloumns.

Columns are necessarily condensed due to the physical limitations imposed on writers. It's books and long-form publications that are more indicative of someone's positions and clout.
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jumi posted...

From his newspaper columns, Thomas Sowell is trash. He thinks every problem in existence is because of some mysterious, nebulous "intelligensia." That's basically his favorite word.

I don't think you've read many Thomas Sowell columns.
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Tag
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Mal_Fet posted...

jumi posted...

From his newspaper columns, Thomas Sowell is trash. He thinks every problem in existence is because of some mysterious, nebulous "intelligensia." That's basically his favorite word.

I don't think you've read many Thomas Sowell columns.

he's a better person for it

Mal_Fet posted...

jumi posted...

From his newspaper columns, Thomas Sowell is trash. He thinks every problem in existence is because of some mysterious, nebulous "intelligensia." That's basically his favorite word.

I don't think you've read many Thomas Sowell columns.

Unfortunately I have read quite a few. Though not recently. This was more during the late Bush/early Obama era.
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@Mal_fet
@Godnorgosh

You guys might be interested in chapter 4 (The World of Numbers). Some of the stuff he talked about there was mindblowing. Specifically around dishonesty in statistics around income.

He talked about how household income as a metric is intentionally designed to be deceiving. You can formulate those statistics in such a way as to talk about household income decreasing, even while individual incomes are increasing. He then mentions a few examples of how that could be the case and why individual incomes are what actually matters. The good news is that those are increasing!

Example: If you have two people living together as room mates and making $20,000 a piece, and they both get promoted and then make $30,000 a piece...and if they move out to get their own place since they earn more money, you now have two households that are "earning less" even though the individuals are earning more and are empowered to live a better and more independent life.

Then he talks about income brackets and how people refer to the bottom 20 percent as "the poor" even though we hardly ever talk about the time factor. IE how much they earn over time. He presented evidence on how 95% of the people initially in the bottom 20 percent over the period 1975 to 1991 rose to the top quintile. Only 5 percent of the bottom 20 percent remained in the bottom 20 percent over that time period. Which means that only 1 percent of the population sampled actually constituted "the poor" in any meaningful sense, even though political pundits and leftists would talk about "the poor" as if they're an unchanging group of people. It's simply not true.

The same happens with "the rich." When in reality, the richest of the rich is not a single group that has persisted over time. They are overwhelmingly a transient class, not an enduring class. There's a ton of turnover in the top fifth of the income distribution, and even more the higher up you go.

"At some point between the ages of 25 and 60, over three-quarters of the population will find themselves in the top 20 percent of income distribution." So basically, when someone resents "the rich" they are basically resenting what they themselves will become as they work and acquire skills.
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Reading the last chapter which is a conclusion of the other chapters with more examples sprinkled in. Ultimately the point of the book is that disparities can and do occur naturally. Meaning, a disparity is not in itself evidence of racism/sexism/discrimination. There are morally neutral and culturally relevant factors that play into why disparities form.

He also talks about the unintended consequences of trying to legislate against disparities. In fact, these types of policies often hurt the people they claim to be trying to help. The policies that have worked historically were the ones that weren't based on the fallacy of assuming equal outcomes as necessary postconditions of equal opportunities.

It's a fairly nuanced book, with plenty of criticism for both the left/right. On to reviewing all the citations in the massive Notes section!
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@jumi

Finally saw him use the word Intelligentsia on page 107! :P
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mistalightbulb posted...

sowell is the epitome of that stereotype of "one of the good ones"

basically he's the only black intellectual that conservative nutjobs can point to. the dude's citation skills and sourcing of his claims are on par with that of a college freshman. nothing he says should be taken seriously

Thomas Sowell is awesome. You mad.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

@Mal_fet
@Godnorgosh

You guys might be interested in chapter 4 (The World of Numbers). Some of the stuff he talked about there was mindblowing. Specifically around dishonesty in statistics around income.

He talked about how household income as a metric is intentionally designed to be deceiving. You can formulate those statistics in such a way as to talk about household income decreasing, even while individual incomes are increasing. He then mentions a few examples of how that could be the case and why individual incomes are what actually matters. The good news is that those are increasing!

Example: If you have two people living together as room mates and making $20,000 a piece, and they both get promoted and then make $30,000 a piece...and if they move out to get their own place since they earn more money, you now have two households that are "earning less" even though the individuals are earning more and are empowered to live a better and more independent life.

Then he talks about income brackets and how people refer to the bottom 20 percent as "the poor" even though we hardly ever talk about the time factor. IE how much they earn over time. He presented evidence on how 95% of the people initially in the bottom 20 percent over the period 1975 to 1991 rose to the top quintile. Only 5 percent of the bottom 20 percent remained in the bottom 20 percent over that time period. Which means that only 1 percent of the population sampled actually constituted "the poor" in any meaningful sense, even though political pundits and leftists would talk about "the poor" as if they're an unchanging group of people. It's simply not true.

The same happens with "the rich." When in reality, the richest of the rich is not a single group that has persisted over time. They are overwhelmingly a transient class, not an enduring class. There's a ton of turnover in the top fifth of the income distribution, and even more the higher up you go.

"At some point between the ages of 25 and 60, over three-quarters of the population will find themselves in the top 20 percent of income distribution." So basically, when someone resents "the rich" they are basically resenting what they themselves will become as they work and acquire skills.

I'm reminded of a particular Sowell quote about statistics: "A is always greater than B if you ignore enough of B and exaggerate A."
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@mistalightbulb posted...

sowell is the epitome of that stereotype of "one of the good ones"

basically he's the only black intellectual that conservative nutjobs can point to. the dude's citation skills and sourcing of his claims are on par with that of a college freshman. nothing he says should be taken seriously

You're literally insulting Sowell for his skin color.

What's it like being a racist?
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not sure, ask your friends at the next clan rally

It's interesting that the only time I see the phrase "one of the good ones" used is by leftists when they're criticizing black conservatives.
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just so you guys know, most people here see through your fake outrage bullshit.

PanzerElite posted...

It's interesting that the only time I see the phrase "one of the good ones" used is by leftists when they're criticizing black conservatives.

A few months ago, someone posted a topic about an NRA spokesperson who happens to be black. One of the vocal leftists on this board posted in that topic and said "Oh? The NRA has found a new pet black person so soon after Killer Mike?"
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mistalightbulb posted...

just so you guys know, most people here see through your fake outrage bullshit.

Did you not just criticize Sowell for being black? No one else brought up his skin color until you did
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I'm thinking for the rest of this topic we can analyze the citations and notes to check their quality and to see what other citations are used. How old the data is, what possible rebuttals there are, which of Sowell's claims were strong/weak, etc.

Then we can plan for the next book! Which will be Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. I've already read half of that. Amazing book, possibly the best book I've ever read so far.
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What do the movements between quintiles look for 1991 to 2017? Is this a new book? Seems odd to talk about 40+ years ago if so ;)

Really though, id like to see his source for those numbers
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Balrog0 posted...

Really though, id like to see his source for those numbers

good luck. sowell seems to have a hard time citing sources and backing up his bullshit

Balrog0 posted...

What do the movements between quintiles look for 1991 to 2017? Is this a new book? Seems odd to talk about 40+ years ago if so ;)

Really though, id like to see his source for those numbers

Citation for that sentence was W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, "By Our Own Bootstraps: Economic Opportunity & the Dynamics of Income Distribution," Annual Report, 1995, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, p. 8.

Idk about more recent years. It could be that The Great Recession threw off trends and makes it hard to measure accurately. It could be that any research bodies still tracking these numbers haven't finished tracking the next cohort. I bet once we dig into the citations we can find out!
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I was mostly joking with that lol

Thanks for the source, though, I wasn't joking about that
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In that section he also cited Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 105
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mistalightbulb posted...

Balrog0 posted...

Really though, id like to see his source for those numbers

good luck. sowell seems to have a hard time citing sources and backing up his bullshit

What a great way of admitting you've never read one thing he's ever written while still looking like a tool.
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Mal_Fet posted...

mistalightbulb posted...

Balrog0 posted...

Really though, id like to see his source for those numbers

good luck. sowell seems to have a hard time citing sources and backing up his bullshit

What a great way of admitting you've never read one thing he's ever written while still looking like a tool.

The only time to care what mrlightbulb thinks about anything is if you're looking for a new Blu-ray steelbook or if you want to know how to earn a six-figure Gamer Score
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

He talked about how household income as a metric is intentionally designed to be deceiving. You can formulate those statistics in such a way as to talk about household income decreasing, even while individual incomes are increasing. He then mentions a few examples of how that could be the case and why individual incomes are what actually matters. The good news is that those are increasing!

Example: If you have two people living together as room mates and making $20,000 a piece, and they both get promoted and then make $30,000 a piece...and if they move out to get their own place since they earn more money, you now have two households that are "earning less" even though the individuals are earning more and are empowered to live a better and more independent life.

Is it pretty much what this video is saying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXI_ADnp22c" data-time="
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

In that section he also cited Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 105

And

U.S. Department if the Treasury, "Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005," November 13, 2007, pp. 2, 4, 7

Appreciated bro!

But, next time, I'd prefer you make it even easier for me so i can be lazier and just give me hyperlinks
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bump
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bump for afternoon CE!
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@boxington

Some interesting analysis on IQ and intelligence from the book Enlightenment Now, on the chapter on Knowledge. On pages 240 and 241, Steven Pinker talks about how the average IQ has been increasing all over the planet. By about three points per decade! And it's been a sustained phenomenon.

To put things into perspective, if an average person from the year 1910 were to find a time machine and come to 2018, they would be considered borderline stupid when measured with modern standards. Whereas if an average person from today went back in time to 1910, they would be smarter than virtually everyone else alive.

Some possible causes behind the increase in IQ is the increased access to food, health, environmental quality, and education. Across the board.
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thank you.
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