This late in human history, it is hard to imagine how anyone can write a book on any serious subject without standing on the shoulders of giants, whether giants of the present or of the distant past. In addition to the many writings cited in the footnotes and endnotes of this book, there have been many other writings and other sources of insights that provided a background of historical, geographic and economic knowledge, without which there would have been no basis for the particular research and analysis that enabled me to “cross-examine the facts,” as the great economist Alfred Marshall defined the goal of economic analysis.
The importance of background knowledge especially needs emphasizing in an era when many educators argue that their students need not study mere facts, because facts can be looked up as needed, whether in reference books or on the Internet. But without a general background knowledge of such basic things as history, science and economics, students would have no basis for knowing which facts would be relevant to an issue at hand, and therefore necessary to look up.
Nothing seems more fundamental than the settings in which events took place—including the various times, places and circumstances in which the human species traveled the long road from the prehistoric world to the very different world of today. My interest in the particular kinds of geographic settings in which particular peoples evolved economically and culturally goes back several decades but my discovery of two scholars’ monumental treatises on this subject was a special revelation that added new dimensions, going far beyond the technical facts found in textbooks for people studying to become geographers.
The oldest and most comprehensive of these landmark books was Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple. No one can read that sweeping, and yet finely detailed, book with its long chapters on economic and social patterns found among many island peoples around the world, and different patterns found among peoples in various kinds of mountain environments, coastal environments and others, and come away believing that nature provided equal opportunity for all. Nor can one read that 1911 book and accept the geographic determinism which was rampant during that era, and which Professor Semple both avoided and repudiated.1 What she advanced—and documented extensively—were certain geographic and social patterns that existed “regardless of race or epoch.”2 The word “Influences” in the title was aptly chosen.3
A more geographically confined and differently organized series of monumental books by Professor N.J.G. Pounds bore the general title An Historical Geography of Europe, with each book in that series covering a different era in the development of that particular civilization—a civilization containing within itself many very different geographic settings and historical circumstances. It is an economic, as well as a geographic history. When Professor Pounds noted that “economic growth in Europe was a highly localised phenomenon”4 and that fossil fuels “were notably absent from southern Europe,”5 limiting where an industrial revolution was possible, such facts were yet another contrast with today’s implicit assumptions that all would have equal outcomes if it were not for biased treatment or genetic deficiencies.
In addition to providing important context for understanding the unfolding of historic events, both worldwide geographic scholarship and scholarship concentrated on particular regions of the world—whether Western Europe, Southeast Asia or Latin America—are part of a background education sorely needed in our schools and colleges today. Many social “problems” and their “solutions” look very different when they are seen in terms of the inherent constraints of geographic or social circumstances, and the utter impossibility of changing the past.
There is something refreshing, and even redemptive, in the writings of old-fashioned scholars who devoted a lifetime to producing classic works on one aspect of the human condition, so that those who came after them would have some serious background of knowledge and understanding for proceeding to deal with particular issues of later times. Too much contemporary writing seems to start with a currently prevailing conclusion and working backward to seek evidence supporting that conclusion.
Among the conceptual landmark writings that formed the background for developing the particular analytical framework for Discrimination and Disparities, the work of Gary Becker on the economics of discrimination will be apparent to economists, though his insights and revelations have yet to become part of most current discussions and controversies on economic disparities. Many such discussions and controversies remain fruitless without Professor Becker’s insights of more than half a century ago that remain still unknown to most of our contemporaries, groping in a world of words and visions.
Among factual studies, the pathbreaking research of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, beginning with his studies of black ghettos in Chicago and New York in the first half of the twentieth century, is a model of the clarity, insights and honesty in discussions of racial issues that are all too rare among later writings on the subject.
Other examples of that kind of scholarship, clarity, insights and honesty can be found in the writings of Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, especially in their landmark study, America in Black and White, from which much can still be learned—and needs to be learned—today, more than two decades after it was written. Their work cut through a jungle of misinformation and misconceptions by the intelligentsia, leaving a clearer path for those seeking knowledge and understanding, rather than politically correct rhetoric.
More recent writings that offer great insights into economic disparities, “social justice” visions and social degeneration in America include two landmark books that are not about America, but about similar developments in other countries—Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple (about England) and The Welfare of Nations by James Bartholomew (about welfare states in the Western world in general).
Dr. Dalrymple’s deep insights, based on first-hand experience as a physician in a hospital in a low-income neighborhood in London, and as a physician serving prison inmates, are a truly masterful account of what he has learned, which goes so counter to much contemporary rhetoric and illusions. It is a compelling complement to the fact-filled empirical study of welfare states by James Bartholomew.
Reading either or both these books can be a liberation, as well as a revelation, for many Americans—especially those made uneasy by discussions of the same issues in the United States, where any mention of problems originating among the less fortunate themselves can be stigmatized as unconscious racism, when so many of the less fortunate are members of racial minorities. In Britain and various other Western nations, however, the underclass is predominantly white, and the very same social patterns seen there can be seen for what they are, without the distraction of the “white guilt” in America, so insightfully analyzed in the writings of Shelby Steele, beginning with his own landmark book, The Content of Our Character.
The parochialism of those educators who want to discuss contemporary American problems as if they were unique to America, and thus make the education of minority students be “relevant” to such students, forfeits vast amounts of evidence from around the world and across centuries of history that could be enlightening when we see ourselves as integral parts of the great and somber human tapestry.
One small but revealing episode that comes to mind in this regard involved a black student at Brandeis University, back in the 1960s, who came to my office to discuss some issues that he was wrestling with. I handed him an account of a brief but fierce encounter between Karl Marx and a young German Communist, back in the 1840s. After reading it, he exclaimed: “We had that same argument last week in the Black Students Union!” We can only hope that this helped open his mind to a wider world in general.
In a time when mind-opening writings are especially needed, if only to counter the mind-closing trends in so many academic institutions, the books, articles and syndicated columns of Professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University are a treasure, and Discrimination and Disparities draws on some of those treasures, especially his fact-filled primer Race and Economics and his unique study of the economic forces at work under apartheid in South Africa, South Africa’s War Against Capitalism.
Other mind-opening books, in a mind-closing time, that have been drawn upon in the writing of this book would include a monumental treatise on international trends in violence over the centuries, The Better Angels of Our Nature by Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard. His account of how centuries of progress in the reduction of violence suddenly reversed—internationally—in the 1960s is a painful contrast to many glib and sweeping celebrations of that decade.
Among people closer at hand whose help made this book possible are my wife Mary, whose critiques and suggestions—along with those of my friends Joseph Charney and Stephen Camarata—were valuable contributions. All three have both the insights and the candor essential to constructive commentaries. The whole enterprise would have been all but impossible, especially at my advanced age, without the dedicated work of my assistants of many years, Na Liu and Elizabeth Costa. The institutional support of the Hoover Institution and the Stanford University libraries has also been indispensable.
In the end, however, none of these can be held responsible for my conclusions or for any errors or shortcomings that may appear. For all these I must take sole responsibility.
Thomas Sowell
The Hoover Institution
Stanford University