Discrimination and Disparities QUOTES

1 " The crucial question is not whether evils exist but whether the evils of the past or present are automatically the cause of major economic, educational and other social disparities today. The bedrock assumption underlying many political or ideological crusades is that socioeconomic disparities are automatically somebody's fault, so that our choices are either to blame society or to 'blame the victim.' Yet whose fault are demographic differences, geographic differences, birth order differences or cultural differences that evolved over the centuries before any of us were born? "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

2 " Engels said: “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

3 " Wrongs abound in times and places around the world - inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of virtually every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the word as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

4 " 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. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

5 " People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

6 " At a minimum, history shows how dangerous it can be, to a whole society, to automatically and incessantly attribute statistical differences in outcomes to malevolent actions against the less successful. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

7 " 24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

8 " The time is long overdue to count the costs of runaway rhetoric and heedless accusations - especially since most of the costs, including the high social cost of a breakdown of law and order, are paid by vulnerable people for whose benefit such rhetoric and such accusations are ostensibly being made. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

9 " Statistics compiled from what people say may be worse than useless, if they lead to a belief that those numbers convey a reality that can be relied on for serious decision-making about social policies. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

10 " The actual track record of promoting separate group identities, whether called “Balkanization” or “diversity,” has been appalling, in countries around the world. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

11 " If you are not prepared to undergo the extended toil and sacrifice that some particular endeavor may require, then despite having all the native potential for great success in that endeavor, and with all the doors of opportunity wide open, you can nevertheless become an utter failure. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

12 " All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

13 " Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences—such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks—cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

14 " Most notable achievements involve multiple factors—beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, and a willingness to do what it takes, without which all the native ability in an individual and all the opportunity in a society mean nothing, just as the desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

15 " In seeking to establish the causes of poverty and other social problems among black Americans, for example, sociologist William Julius Wilson pointed to factors such as “the enduring effects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, public school segregation, legalized discrimination, residential segregation, the FHA’s redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1940s and ’50s, the construction of public housing projects in poor black neighborhoods, employer discrimination, and other racial acts and processes.”1 These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be “yes.” Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.2 The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole.3 In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.4 Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today’s black married couples exempt from slavery and other injustices? As far back as 1969, young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards, and who also had the same education as young white males, had similar incomes as their white counterparts.5 Do racists care whether blacks have reading material and library cards? "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

16 " ...lifelong benefits [to students who learn to think for themselves] include a healthy skepticism towards political slogans and a healthy desire to check out the facts before repeating rhetoric on other issues. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

17 " When John Rawls, in his A Theory of Justice repeatedly referred to outcomes that 'society' can 'arrange,' these euphemisms finessed aside the plain fact that only government has the power to override millions of people's mutually agreed transactions terms. Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinctions. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

18 " Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time, and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it. Nor is human "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

19 " Despite the inability to confiscate and redistribute human capital, nevertheless human capital is - ironically - one of the few things that can be spread to others without those with it having any less remaining for themselves. But one of the biggest obstacles to this happening is the 'social justice' vision, in which the fundamental problem of the less fortunate is not an absence of sufficient human capital, but the presence of other people's malevolence. For some, abandoning that vision would mean abandoning a moral melodrama, starring themselves as crusaders against the forces of evil. How many are prepared to give up all that - with all its psychic, political and other rewards - is an open question. "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities

20 " But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the world as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day? "

― Thomas Sowell , Discrimination and Disparities