The situation of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere is even more problematical. The question as to whether flesh-and-blood people of indigenous ancestry today would have been better off had the Europeans not invaded can scarcely be asked, much less answered, because most flesh-and-blood contemporary American Indians would not exist if the Europeans had not invaded, since they are of European as well as indigenous ancestry. Nature is remarkably uncooperative with our moral categories. There is no way to unscramble an egg.
Again, the sufferings of the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere during the era of European invasion were monumental, not only from the wars and depredations of the conquerors, but even more so from the European diseases which decimated the peoples of North and South America, with 50 percent mortality rates being common in some Indian societies and 90 percent mortality rates not unheard of. But time, unlike videotape, does not go backwards.
A case might be made that those indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere who would exist today if Europeans had not invaded would be better off than those descendants of the aboriginal population (with and without admixtures of the invading races) who actually exist. It is by no means obvious that even this is true but, in any event, that is clearly an issue about inter-temporal abstractions, not flesh-and-blood human beings.
Believers in the quest for cosmic justice do not give up easily. In politics, in law, and in intellectual circles, statistical disparities between the achievements, performances, or rewards of one group and those of the general population are often regarded as proof of either the present-day consequences of past injustices or as evidence that the injustices of the past are persisting into the present as discrimination against the groups in question.22 Sometimes disparities between black and white Americans are attributed to historic racial injustices in the United States, growing out of peculiarities of American history. Yet similar—and even larger—disparities, whether in income or IQ, can be found among groups in other countries with entirely different histories, lacking the very factors that are assumed to underlie black-white differences in the United States.
We have seen how easy it is to go wrong by wide margins when dealing with history. It is equally easy to go wrong with contemporary statistics. If one goes through enough numbers, one will eventually come upon some statistics that seem to fit one’s vision. These are what might be called “Aha!” statistics. Other statistics which suggest opposite conclusions bring no “Aha!” but are more likely to be glided over and forgotten.
A set of statistics that set off journalistic and political firestorms in 1993 showed that black applicants for mortgage loans were turned down at a higher rate than white applicants. The Washington Post declared that a “racially biased system of home lending exists,”23 and numerous other publications, politicians, and activists joined the chorus of denunciation. However, the very same set of statistics showed that white applicants were turned down a higher percentage of the time than Asian Americans. Yet these statistics brought no “Aha!”—no claim that whites were being discriminated against in favor of Asian Americans—because this was not part of the prevailing vision. In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
Statistical comparisons implicitly assume that the groups being compared are indeed comparable on the relevant variables. Very often, however, they are not even close to being comparable. Closer scrutiny of the mortgage lending data, for example, shows that minority applicants for home loans had larger debt burdens, poorer credit histories, sought loans covering a higher percentage of the value of the properties in question, and were also more likely to seek to finance multiple-dwelling units rather than single-family homes, the former being considered the more risky investment.24 Even so, 72 percent of the minority mortgageloan applications were approved, compared to 89 percent of the white mortgage-loan applications. This 17 percentage point difference shrank to 6 percentage points when relevant variables were held constant. Moreover, all of the remaining statistical difference could be traced to different loan approval rates at one bank. Why did the government not take legal action against this one white racist bank? Because it was neither white nor racist. It was a black-owned bank.25
Incidentally, all of this occurred while a wave of bankruptcies was sweeping through American lending institutions. The idea that these institutions were passing up desperately needed profits from paying customers when institutional survival was at stake might seem at least questionable to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of economics. However, a rudimentary knowledge of economics is not a requirement for a career in politics, journalism, or the judiciary. Certainly it is not a prerequisite for colorful expressions of moral indignation.26
It would be possible to go through any number of other statistical comparisons and show why they are not valid.27 But the more fundamental problem is with the presupposition that social groups would be proportionally represented in various activities or institutions, or at various income levels, in the absence of bias and discrimination. On the contrary, it is difficult to find any such even representation in any country or in any period of history, except where a government policy mandates quotas or preferences to achieve an artificial statistical “balance.”
Those who believe in cosmic justice sometimes argue that this simply shows how widespread discrimination is. But many groups who are in no position to discriminate against anyone are over-represented in high-paying occupations, prestigious academic institutions, and numerous other desirable sectors of the economy and society. It would be possible to go through a long list of statistical disparities involving either people or things, where not even a plausible case for discrimination can be made. Here are just a few:
More than four-fifths of the doughnut shops in California are owned by people of Cambodian ancestry.28
In the early twentieth century, four-fifths of the world’s sugar-processing machinery was made in Scotland.29
As of 1909, Italians in Buenos Aires owned more then twice as many food and drinking establishments as the native Argentines, more than three times as many shoe stores, and more than ten times as many barbershops.30
During the decade of the 1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia supplied between 80 and 90 percent of all university students in medicine, science, and engineering.31
In the early twentieth century, all of the firms in all of the industries producing the following products in Brazil’s state of Rio Grande do Sul were owned by people of German ancestry: trunks, stoves, paper, hats, neckties, leather, soap, glass, watches, beer, confections, and carriages.32
In eighteenth-century Russia, 209 out of 240 cloth factories in the province of Astrakhan were owned by Armenians.33
Of the 16,000 workers who built the East Africa Railway line from the port of Mombasa to Lake Victoria, 15,000 were from India.34
As of 1937, 91 percent of all greengrocers’ licenses in Vancouver, Canada, were held by people of Japanese ancestry.35
Although less than 5 percent of Indonesia’s population, ethnic Chinese have at one time run three-quarters of its 200 largest businesses.36
In the early 1920s, Jews were only 6 percent and 11 percent of the populations of Hungary and Poland, respectively, but they were more than half of all the doctors in both countries.37
This list could be extended many times over.38
Why are different groups so disproportionately represented in so many times and places? Perhaps the simplest answer is that there was no reason to have expected them to be statistically similar in the first place. Geographical, historical, demographic, cultural, and other variables make the vision of an even or random distribution of groups one without foundation.
Statistical disparities are of course not limited to racial groups or to male-female differences. Moreover, believers in the quest for cosmic justice often confuse the fate of statistical abstractions with the fate of flesh-and-blood human beings. Much has been written, f
or example, about how small percentages of the population receive large percentages of the nation’s income or hold some large percentage of the nation’s wealth. The implicit assumption is that we are talking about classes of people when, in the United States at least, we are in fact often talking about individuals at different stages of their lives.
The vast majority of the wealth of Americans is concentrated in the hands of people over fifty years of age. The average wealth in older families in the United States is some multiple of the average wealth in younger families. But these are not differences in social classes. Everyone who is old was once young and all the young are going to be old, except for those who die prematurely. Yet the vision of social classes remains impervious to these plain facts, and statistical abstractions are automatically seen as classes of people.
Studies which have followed individual Americans over a period of years have found that most do not stay in the same quintile of the income distribution for as long as a decade. The first of these studies was conducted by a group of academics of left-wing persuasion, who seemed to be thrown into disarray by their own findings, which were based on following the same individuals for eight years.39 But none of this should be surprising. People are eight years older at the end of eight years. They have eight years more experience, eight years more seniority. If they have set up a business, they have had eight years in which to become better known and to attract more customers. In the professions, they have had eight years in which to build up a clientele. Why would they not be in higher income brackets at the end of eight years?
“The poor,” who are often defined as the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, are as transient in that role as the rich. Only 3 percent of the American population remained in the bottom 20 percent for as long as eight years. More who began in the bottom 20 percent had reached the top 20 percent by the end of that period than remained where they were. Yet “the poor” continue to be identified as the bottom 20 percent, instead of the 3 percent who remain at the bottom. Our intellectual discourse and our public policy are based on the statistical abstraction of 20 percent, rather than the flesh-and-blood 3 percent who are genuinely poor.
It is reminiscent of a story about someone who was told that, in New York City, someone is hit by a car every 20 minutes. “He must get awfully tired of that” was the response. But some of our most renowned intellectuals, not to mention moral and political leaders, commit the same mistake of thinking that it is the same people all the time when they talk about statistical abstractions as if they were talking about flesh-and-blood people who are rich and poor. The genuinely rich and the genuinely poor, put together, do not add up to even 10 percent of the American population.40 Yet these two marginal groups are the central characters in the moral melodramas which dominate American politics, journalism, and even academic and judicial discourse.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
Whatever the intellectual deficiencies of the vision of cosmic justice, it has become politically entrenched in many countries around the world. Its consequences are therefore important for that reason alone. What are those consequences?
Those pursuing the quest for cosmic justice have tended to assume that the consequences would be what they intended—which is to say, that the people subject to government policies would be like pieces on a chessboard, who could be moved here and there to carry out a grand design, without concern for their own responses. But both the intended beneficiaries and those on whom the costs of those benefits would fall have often reacted in ways unexpected by those who have sought cosmic justice.
Those given legal entitlements to various compensatory benefits have, for example, have developed a sense of entitlement. As a group leader in India asked: “Are we not entitled to jobs just because we are not as qualified?”41 A Nigerian likewise spoke of “the tyranny of skills,”42 Black American college students planning to go on to post-graduate education were found by one study to feel no sense of urgency about needing to prepare themselves academically “because they believe that certain rules would simply be set aside for them.”43
A similar lack of urgency was found by a study of Malaysian students in Malaysia, where they are legally entitled to preferential access to coveted positions in government and in the private economy.44 In the American Virgin Islands, even school children have excused their own lack of academic and behavioral standards by pointing out that government jobs will be waiting for them when they grow up—jobs for which their West Indian classmates will not be eligible, even though the latter perform better academically and behave themselves better in school as well, because the West Indians are not American citizens.45
There has been a particularly tragic consequence of the quest for cosmic justice for young black Americans. Just as some parents make the mistake of talking around small children as if they cannot hear or understand, so those promoting a vision of cosmic injustices as the cause of all the problems of black Americans have failed to understand the consequences of this vision for young blacks who do not yet have either the personal experience or the maturity to weigh those words against reality. The net result in many ghetto schools has been the development of an attitude of hostility to learning or to conforming to ordinary standards of behavior in society. Worse, those young black students who do wish to get an education, to speak correct English, and to behave in ways compatible with getting along with others, are accused of “acting white”—betraying the race—and are subject to both social pressures and outright intimidation and violence.
It would be hard to imagine a more devastating self-destruction of a whole generation’s future. Many of the politicians, intellectuals, and others who have loudly and often proclaimed that discrimination explains all, or virtually all, black-white differences are themselves appalled and baffled by this turn of events. Yet these attitudes among young blacks make perfect sense if the vision that is presented to them is true. Why study and discipline yourself in preparation for the adult world if the deck is completely stacked against you anyway? At least you can show that you are not a sucker who is taken in. What these students are doing is consistent with the vision that is presented to them, however tragically counterproductive it may be in the world of reality.
This pattern of able and ambitious young people being held back by fear of the envy and resentment of their peers is not limited to blacks or to the United States. Similar patterns have been found among working-class youngsters in the east end of London—a pattern aptly characterized by an observer there as “loathsomely insidious.”46
What of those whose interests are to be sacrificed in the quest for cosmic justice? They too respond quite rationally, in light of the options presented to them. Individuals may cease to strive as hard for posts that they are less likely to get or may remove themselves from the whole society, as some highly educated Chinese have done in Malaysia and some highly educated Indians have done in Fiji, or as highly skilled and highly entrepreneurial Huguenots removed themselves from France in centuries past.
In the United States, where an employer’s failure to have a workforce ethnically representative of the local population is taken as evidence of discrimination, employers can choose locations where they are not near concentrations of blacks and thus minimize their legal risks. Of course, this means that blacks end up losing job opportunities as a result of being preferentially entitled to jobs. Whether the jobs lost this way are greater or less than the jobs gained where local employers accede to government policy is an empirical question. However, this question attracts remarkably little attention or interest from those zealous for symbolic “social justice.” It may also be worth noting that the rate of progress of blacks, and especially of low-income blacks, during the era of affirmative action policies has been less than that under the “equal opportunity” policies which preceded it, or even before equal opportunity policies.47
In this and other circumstances, the quest for cosmic justice does not necessarily
mean an end result of greater equality or justice than under policies meant to carry out traditional, mundane human justice. The only clear-cut winners in the quest for cosmic justice are those who believe in the vision it projects—a vision in which those believers are so morally and/or intellectually superior to others that their own relentless pursuit of this vision is seen as all that offers some modicum of hope to those who would otherwise be victims of the lesser people who make up the rest of society. It is a very self-flattering vision—and hence one not easily given up. Evidence to the contrary is not only likely to be dismissed, but is often blamed on the malevolence or dishonesty of those who present such evidence.
It is difficult to explain the fury and ruthlessness of those with this vision of cosmic justice, whenever they are challenged, by the simple fact that they consider policy A to be better than policy B. What is at stake for them is not merely a policy option, but a whole vision of the world and of their own place in that world. No wonder it is seldom possible to have rational discussions of some of these issues.
Nobody should be happy with cosmic injustices. The real questions are:
What can we do about them—and at what cost?
What should we do collectively about them—and how much should we leave up to individuals themselves?
Just as those seeking cosmic justice must become aware of the enormous costs of their quest, so those who see cosmic justice as a dangerous mirage must also recognize how naturally people of all philosophical persuasions prefer the vision embodied in this quest and attempt to practice it, whenever circumstances permit without ruinous costs or dangerous risks. Not only have such conservative intellectual leaders as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek acknowledged and lamented the undeserved misfortunes of some and the huge windfall gains of others, the behavior of many highly traditional people reveals similar concerns, expressed for example in massive philanthropy, but also in everyday life. Even the most conservative families often operate on the Marxian principle, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” when they spend heavily for the present and future benefit of children who are themselves earning no money. Indeed, this pattern sometimes extends into the children’s adulthood and it often extends to other family members struck by medical or financial disasters.
The Quest for Cosmic Justice Page 4