Website owner: James Miller
By the Numbers
The following is from Thomas Sowell. Compassion Versus Guilt. pp. 228 - 230
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By the Numbers
When intellectuals discover that the world does not behave according to their theories, the conclusion they invariably draw is that the world must be changed. It must be awfully hard to change theories.
The prevailing unproven dogma of the intellectuals today is that groups would be evenly distributed statistically, if it were not for arbitrary barriers, discrimination and other forms of social malaise.
Courts of law listen solemnly while statistics are used to show that the ethnic, sex, or other balance of some company's employees could not be the result of random chance. Once that is shown, the company is well on its way to being convicted of discrimination, even if it applied the same hiring and promotion standards to everybody.
Applying statistical analysis of random events would make sense if human beings were random events. But groups differ around the world, and they have differed throughout history. In the simple task of collecting sap from rubber trees in colonial Malaya, the average Chinese worker produced twice the output of the average Malay worker. In India's state of Andra Pradesh, farmers from the coastal region have gotten three times the output per acre of farmers from the interior—even when the coastal farmers moved into the interior and farmed the same land just used by interior farmers.
In baseball, there were seven consecutive years in which no white man won the National League's Most Valuable Player Award. Given the racial make-up of the United States, the odds against that happening by random chance are more than 600,000 to 1. But the fact that it wasn't pure chance does not mean that there was collusion or discrimination against whites.
Far from behaving randomly, groups show the most pronounced patterns, persisting for centuries in very different societies. The military achievements of Germans have not been confined to Germany, but go back thousands of years in other countries as well. More than once, the entire army of the Roman Empire was headed by a general of German ancestry—and the same has been true in czarist Russia, and in the United States in both world wars. Germans in czarist Russia were 1 percent of the population and 40 percent of the military officers.
People do not immigrate randomly. During the great era of Italian immigration to the Western Hemisphere, most people from southern Italy went to North America, while most people from northern Italy went to South America. Figure that out. People from towns just a few miles apart in Italy settled on opposite coasts of Australia. Similar patterns are common in other countries: Most pre-war Japanese immigrants from around Hiroshima went to the United States, those from Nagasaki to China, and those from Okinawa to the Philippines. In the Balkans, more than half the population of one Macedonian village immigrated to Toronto.
People who go on to higher education from different social or ethnic backgrounds do not specialize in the same mix of subjects. The Japanese and the Hispanics specialize in a drastically different mix of subjects, whether you compare Japan with Hispanic countries or Japanese Americans with Hispanic Americans. In India, untouchables who attend the universities do not choose the same subjects as other castes. Nor do the Central Asians in the Soviet Union choose a random mix of subjects, or the same mix as other ethnic groups. Nor do all groups perform at the same level. More than half the students in Sri Lanka who received an A on the university mathematics entrance examination were from the small (and oppressed) Tamil minority. Similar results can be found for Chinese, Japanese, or Jewish students in the United States and other countries.
These many peoples have undoubtedly all had their reasons for their decisions, and there were undoubtedly also reasons why performance levels in the same activities have differed so dramatically—whether or not observers will ever know what all these reasons were. But reason is not randomness. It is time to tell the intellectuals that their theories are wrong—and that we are not going to tear the world apart trying to make reality conform to their preconceptions. It would make a good New Year's resolution.
—December 10, 1985
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