Dean Baker, co-director of the progressive Center for Economic Policy Research, described the difference between robots produced on the marketplace and robots produced by monopoly. Private producers “won’t directly get rich” because “robots will presumably be relatively cheap to make. After all, we can have robots make them. If the owners of robots get really rich it will be because the government has given them patent monopolies so that they can collect lots of money from anyone who wants to buy or build a robot.” The monopoly “tax” will be passed on to impoverish both consumers and employees.
Ultimately, we should return again to the wisdom of Joseph Schumpeter, who reminds us that technological progress, while it can change the patterns of production, tends to free up resources for new uses, making life better over the long term. In other words, the displacement of workers by robots is just creative destruction in action. Just as the car starter replaced the buggy whip, the robot might replace the burger-flipper. Perhaps the burger-flipper will migrate to a new profession, such as caring for an elderly person or cleaning homes for busy professionals. But there are always new ways to create value.
An increased use of robots will cause labor dislocation, which will be painful for many workers in the near term. But if market forces are allowed to function, the dislocation will be temporary. And if history is a guide, the replacement jobs will require skills that better express what it means to be human: communication, problem-solving, creation, and caregiving.
(Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared in The Freeman in September 2014 under the title, “Ludd vs Schumpeter.”)
SUMMARY
•The use of robotics to increase productivity while decreasing costs works basically the same way as past technological advances, like the production line, have worked. Those advances improved the quality of life of billions of people and created new forms of employment that were unimaginable at the time
•Compared to humans, robots are cheaper to employ—partly for natural reasons and partly because of government intervention. Natural costs include training, safety needs, overtime, and personnel problems such as hiring, firing and on-the-job theft. Unnatural, non-market costs stem from cronyism dispensed by governments
•An increased use of robots will cause labor dislocation, which will be painful for many workers in the near term. But if market forces are allowed to function, the dislocation will be temporary
#47
“STATISTICAL DISPARITIES BETWEEN RACES PROVE DISCRIMINATION”
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
GEORGE ORWELL ADMONISHED, “SOMETIMES THE FIRST DUTY OF INTELLIGENT MEN is the restatement of the obvious.” That’s what I want to do—talk about the obvious.
Law professors, courts, and social scientists have long held that gross statistical disparities between races are evidence of a pattern and practice of discrimination. Behind this vision is the notion that but for discrimination, we’d be distributed proportionately by race across socioeconomic characteristics such as income, education, occupations, and other outcomes.
There is no evidence from anywhere on earth or any time in human history which demonstrates that but for discrimination there would be proportional representation and absence of gross statistical disparities by race, sex, nationality, or any other human characteristic. Nonetheless, much of our thinking, laws, litigation, and public policy are based on proportionality being the norm. Let us acknowledge a few gross disparities and decide whether they represent what lawyers and judges call a “pattern and practice of discrimination,” while at the same time thinking about what corrective action might be taken.
Jews are not even one percent of the world’s population and only three percent of the U.S. population, but they are 20 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners and 39 percent of American Nobel winners. That’s a gross statistical disparity. Is the Nobel committee discriminating in favor of Jews, or are Jews engaging in an educational conspiracy against the rest of us? By the way, during Germany’s Weimar Republic, Jews were only one percent of the German population, but they were ten percent of the country’s doctors and dentists, 17 percent of its lawyers, and a large percentage of its scientific community. Jews won 27 percent of Nobel Prizes won by Germans.
The National Basketball Association in 2011 had nearly 80 percent black and 17 percent white players. But if that disparity is disconcerting, Asians are only one percent. Compounding this racial disparity, the highest-paid NBA players are black, and blacks have won Most Valuable Player 45 of the 57 times it has been awarded. Such a gross disparity works in reverse in the National Hockey League, where less than three percent of the players are black. Blacks are 66 percent of NFL and AFL professional football players. Among the 34 percent of other players, there’s not a single Japanese player. But not to worry, according to the Japan Times Online (Jan. 17, 2012), “Dallas Cowboys scout Larry Dixon believes that as the world is getting smaller through globalization, there will one day be a Japanese player in the National Football League—though he can’t guarantee when.”
While black professional baseball players have fallen from 18 percent two decades ago to 8.8 percent today, there are gross disparities in achievement. Four out of the six highest career home-run totals were accumulated by black players, and each of the eight players who stole more than 100 bases in a season was black. Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold more than 95 percent of the top times in sprinting.
How does one explain these gross sports disparities? Do they warrant the attention of the courts?
There are some other disparities that might bother the diversity people. For example, Asians routinely get the highest scores on the math portion of the SAT, while blacks get the lowest.
Then there are deadly racial/ethnic disparities. Vietnamese American women have an incidence rate of cervical cancer that is five times higher than that of Caucasian women. The rates of liver cancer among Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese populations are two to eleven times higher than that among Caucasians. Tay-Sachs disease is rare among populations other than Ashkenazi Jews (of European descent) and the Cajun population of southern Louisiana. The Pima Indians of Arizona have the highest known diabetes rates in the world. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as it is among white men.
Then there’s the issue of segregation. The New York Times “Room for Debate” section on May 21, 2012, led with, “Jim Crow is dead, segregation lives on. Is it time to bring back busing?” The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University in January 2003 declared that schools are racially segregated and becoming more so, adding, “Civil rights goals have not been accomplished. The country has been going backward toward greater segregation in all parts of the country for more than a decade.” Six years later, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA reported that “schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades.”
Let’s look at segregation. Casual observation of ice hockey games suggests that blacks’ attendance is by no means proportional to their numbers in the general population. A similar observation can be made about black attendance at operas, dressage performances, and wine tastings. The population statistics of South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana, Wyoming, and Vermont show that not even one percent of their populations are black. On the other hand, in states such as Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented in terms of their percentage in the general population.
Blacks are a bit over 50 percent of the Washington, D.C., population. Reagan National Airport serves the Washington, D.C., area. Like other airports, it has water fountains. At no time has the writer observed anything close to blacks being 50 percent of water fountain users. It is a wild guess, but I speculate that on any day, not more than 10 or 15 percent of the people at water fountains are black. Would anyone suggest that Reagan National Airport water fountains are racially segregated? Would we declare South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana, Wyoming, an
d Vermont racially segregated? Are ice hockey games, operas, dressage performances, and wine tastings racially segregated? Moreover, would anyone propose busing blacks to South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana, and Wyoming and whites from those states to Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to achieve racial balance? What corrective action might be taken to achieve racial integration at ice hockey games, operas, dressage performances, and wine tastings?
A little reflection shows that people give the term “racial segregation” one meaning for water fountains, operas, and ice hockey games, and an entirely different meaning for schools. The sensible test to determine whether Reagan National Airport water fountains are segregated is to see whether a black is free to drink at any fountain. If the answer is affirmative, the fountains are not racially segregated even if no blacks drink at the fountains. The identical test should also be used for schools. Namely, if a black student lives within a particular school district, is he free to attend a particular school? If so, the school is not segregated, even if not a single black attends. When an activity is not racially mixed today, a better term is “racially homogeneous,” which does not mean segregated in the historic usage of the term.
I hope that the people who say schools are segregated won’t make the same claim about water fountains, states, operas, and ice hockey games.
(Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in November 2012 under the title, “Diversity, Ignorance and Stupidity” in The Freeman.)
SUMMARY
•There is no evidence from anywhere on earth or any time in human history which demonstrates that but for discrimination there would be proportional representation and absence of gross statistical disparities by race, sex, nationality, or any other human characteristic
•Casual observation of ice hockey games suggests that blacks’ attendance is by no means proportional to their numbers in the general population but that’s not evidence of “discrimination”
#48
“THE SOLUTION TO OVER-POPULATION IS POPULATION CONTROL”
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
ACCORDING TO AN AMERICAN DREAM ARTICLE, “AL GORE, AGENDA 21 AND POPULATION Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”: “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time. . . . No human is genuinely ‘carbon neutral,’ especially when all greenhouse gases are figured into the equation. Therefore, everyone is part of the problem, so everyone must be part of the solution in some way. . . . Strong family planning programmes are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns.”
Thomas Friedman agrees in his New York Times column “The Earth is Full” (June 8, 2008), in which he says, “[P]opulation growth and global warming push up food prices, which leads to political instability, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, and so on in a vicious circle.”
In his article “What Nobody Wants to Hear, But Everyone Needs to Know,” University of Texas at Austin biology professor Eric R. Pianka wrote, “I do not bear any ill will toward people. However, I am convinced that the world, including all humanity, WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us.”
However, there is absolutely no relationship between high populations, disaster, and poverty. Population-control advocates might consider the Democratic Republic of Congo’s meager 75 people per square mile to be ideal while Hong Kong’s 6,500 people per square mile is problematic. Yet Hong Kong’s citizens enjoy a per capita income of $43,000 while the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world’s poorest countries, has a per capita income of $300. It’s no anomaly. Some of the world’s poorest countries have the lowest population densities.
Planet Earth is loaded with room. We could put the world’s entire population into the United States, yielding a density of 1,713 people per square mile. That’s far lower than what now exists in all major U.S. cities. The entire U.S. population could move to Texas, and each family of four would enjoy more than 2.1 acres of land. Likewise, if the entire world’s population moved to Texas, California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, each family of four would enjoy a bit over two acres. Nobody’s suggesting that the entire earth’s population be put in the United States or that the entire U.S. population move to Texas. I cite these figures to help put the matter into perspective.
Let’s look at some other population density evidence. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, West Germany had a higher population density than East Germany. The same is true of South Korea versus North Korea; Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore versus China; the United States versus the Soviet Union; and Japan versus India. Despite more crowding, West Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, and Japan experienced far greater economic growth, higher standards of living, and greater access to resources than their counterparts with lower population densities. By the way, Hong Kong has virtually no agriculture sector, but its citizens eat well.
One wonders why anyone listens to doomsayers who have been consistently wrong in their predictions—not a little off, but way off. Professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, predicted major food shortages in the United States and that by “the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted the starvation of 65 million Americans between 1980 and 1989 and a decline in U.S. population to 22.6 million by 1999. He saw England in more desperate straits: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
By a considerable measure, poverty in underdeveloped nations is directly attributable to their leaders heeding the advice of western “experts.” Nobel laureate and Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal said (1956), “The special advisors to underdeveloped countries who have taken the time and trouble to acquaint themselves with the problem . . . all recommend central planning as the first condition of progress.” In 1957 Stanford University economist Paul A. Baran advised, “The establishment of a socialist planned economy is an essential, indeed indispensable, condition for the attainment of economic and social progress in underdeveloped countries.”
Topping off this bad advice, underdeveloped countries sent their brightest to the London School of Economics, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale to be taught socialist nonsense about economic growth. Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson taught them that underdeveloped countries “cannot get their heads above water because their production is so low that they can spare nothing for capital formation by which the standard of living could be raised.” Economist Ranger Nurkse describes the “vicious circle of poverty” as the basic cause of the underdevelopment of poor countries. According to him, a country is poor because it is poor. On its face this theory is ludicrous. If it had validity, all mankind would still be cave dwellers because we all were poor at one time and poverty is inescapable.
Population controllers have a Malthusian vision of the world that sees population growth outpacing the means for people to care for themselves. Mankind’s ingenuity has proven the Malthusians dead wrong. As a result we can grow increasingly larger quantities of food on less and less land. The energy used to produce food, per dollar of GDP, has been in steep decline. We’re getting more with less, and that applies to most other inputs we use for goods and services.
Ponder the following question: Why is it that mankind today enjoys cell phones, computers, and airplanes but did not when King Louis XIV was alive? After all, the necessary physical resources to make cell phones, computers, and airplanes have always been around, even when cavemen walked the earth. There is only one reason we enjoy these goodies today but did not in past eras. It’s the growth in human knowle
dge, ingenuity, and specialization and trade—coupled with personal liberty and private property rights—that led to industrialization and betterment. In other words human beings are immensely valuable resources.
What are called overpopulation problems result from socialistic government practices that reduce the capacity of people to educate, clothe, house, and feed themselves. Underdeveloped nations are rife with farm controls, export and import restrictions, restrictive licensing, price controls, plus gross human rights violations that encourage their most productive people to emigrate and stifle the productivity of those who remain. The true antipoverty lesson for poor nations is that the most promising route out of poverty to greater wealth is personal liberty and its main ingredient, limited government.
(Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in November 2011 under the title, “Population Control Nonsense” in The Freeman.)
SUMMARY
•There is no relationship between high populations, disaster, and poverty
•By a considerable measure, poverty in underdeveloped nations is directly attributable to their leaders heeding the advice of western “experts” who champion repressive, redistributive and anti-private property “solutions”
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism Page 21