Large disparities in the economic and other outcomes of individuals, groups and nations have produced reactions ranging from puzzlement to outrage. Attempts to explain the causes of these disparities have likewise produced a wide range of responses. At one end of a spectrum of explanations offered is the belief that those who have been less fortunate in their outcomes are genetically less capable. At the other end of the spectrum is the belief that those less fortunate are victims of other people who are more fortunate.
In between, there are many other explanations offered. But, whatever the particular explanation offered, there seems to be general agreement that the disparities found in the real world differ greatly from what might be expected by random chance. Yet the disparities in outcomes found in economic and other endeavors need not be due to either comparable disparities in innate capabilities or comparable disparities in the way people are treated by other people.
The disparities can also reflect the plain fact that success in many kinds of endeavors depends on prerequisites peculiar to each endeavor—and a relatively small difference in meeting those prerequisites can mean a very large difference in outcomes.
The effect of prerequisites on probabilities is very straightforward. When there is some endeavor with five prerequisites for success, then by definition the chances of success in that endeavor depend on the chances of having all five of those prerequisites simultaneously. These prerequisites need not be rare in order to produce skewed distributions of outcomes. For example, if these prerequisites are all so common that chances are two out of three that any given person has any one of those five prerequisites, nevertheless the odds are against having all five of the prerequisites for success in that endeavor.
When the chances of having any one of the five prerequisites are two out of three, as in this example, the chance of having all five simultaneously is two-thirds multiplied by itself five times. That comes out to be 32/243 in this example,1 or about one out of eight. In other words, the chances of failure are about seven out of eight. All those people with fewer than five prerequisites have the same outcome—failure. Only those with all five of those prerequisites succeed. This creates a very skewed distribution of success, and nothing like a normal bell curve of distribution of outcomes that we might expect otherwise.2
What does this little exercise in arithmetic mean in the real world? One conclusion is that we should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites—which is to say, most meaningful endeavors. And if these are indeed prerequisites, then having four out of five prerequisites means nothing, as far as successful outcomes are concerned. In other words, people with most of the prerequisites for success may nevertheless be utter failures.
Whether a prerequisite that is missing is complex or simple, its absence can negate the effect of all the other prerequisites that are present. If you are illiterate, for example, all the other good qualities that you may have in abundance count for nothing in many, if not most, careers today. As late as 1950, more than 40 percent of the world’s adult population were still illiterate. That included more than half the adults in Asia and Africa.3
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.
Not all the prerequisites are necessarily within the sole control of the individual who has them or does not have them. Even extraordinary capacities in one or some of the prerequisites can mean nothing in the ultimate outcome.
Back in the early twentieth century, for example, Professor Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University launched a research project that followed 1,470 people with IQs of 140 and above for more than half a century. Data on the careers of men in this group—from an era when full-time careers for women were less common4—showed serious disparities even within this rare group, all of whom had IQs within the top one percent.
Some of these men had highly successful careers, others had more modest achievements, and about 20 percent were clearly disappointments. Of 150 men in this least successful category, only 8 received a graduate degree, and dozens of them received only a high school diploma. A similar number of the most successful men in Terman’s group received 98 graduate degrees5—more than a tenfold disparity among men who were all in the top one percent in IQ.
Meanwhile, two men who were tested in childhood, and who failed to make the 140 IQ cutoff level, later earned Nobel Prizes in physics—while none of those men with IQs of 140 and above received a Nobel Prize in any field.6 Clearly, then, all the men in Terman’s group had at least one prerequisite for that extraordinary achievement—namely, a high enough IQ. And, equally clearly, there must have been other prerequisites that none of the hundreds of these men with IQs in the top one percent had.
As for factors behind differences in educational and career outcomes within Terman’s group, the biggest differentiating factor was in family backgrounds. Men with the most outstanding achievements came from middle-class and upper-class families, and were raised in homes where there were many books. Half of their fathers were college graduates, at a time when that was far more rare than today.7
Among those men who were least successful, nearly one-third had a parent who had dropped out of school before the eighth grade.8 Even extraordinary IQs did not eliminate the need for other prerequisites.
Sometimes what is missing may be simply someone to point an individual with great potential in the right direction. An internationally renowned scholar once mentioned, at a social gathering, that when he was a young man he had not thought about going to college—until someone else urged him to do so. Nor was he the only person of exceptional ability of whom that was true.9
Some other people, including people without his great abilities, would automatically apply to college if they came from particular social groups where that was a norm. But without that one person who urged him to seek higher education, this particular internationally renowned scholar might well have become a good worker in some line of work requiring no college degree, but not a world-class scholar.
There may be more or less of an approximation of a normal bell curve, as far as how many people have any particular prerequisite, and yet a very skewed distribution of success, based on having all the prerequisites simultaneously. This is not only true in theory, empirical evidence suggests that it is true also in practice.
In golf, for example, there is something of an approximation of a bell curve when it comes to the distribution of such examples of individual skills as the number of putts per round of golf, or driving distances off the tee. And yet there is a grossly skewed distribution of outcomes requiring a whole range of golf skills—namely, winning Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) tournaments.10
Most professional golfers have never won a single PGA tournament in their entire lives,11 while just three golfers—Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods—won more than 200 PGA tournaments between them.12 Moreover, there are similarly skewed distributions of peak achievements in baseball and tennis, among other endeavors.13
Given multiple prerequisites for many human endeavors, we should not be surprised if economic or social advances are not evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations at any given time. Nor should we be surprised if the laggards in one century forge ahead in some later century, or if world leaders in one era become laggards in another era. When the gain or loss of just one prerequisite can turn failure into success or turn success into failure, it should not be surprising, in a changing world, if the leaders and laggards of one century or millennium exchange places in some later century or millennium.
If the prerequisites themselves change over time, with the development of new kinds of endeavors, or if advances in human knowledge revolutionize existing endeavors, the chance of a particular pattern of success and failure becoming permanent may be greatly reduced.
Perhaps the most revolutionary change in the evolution of human societies was the development of agriculture—within the last 10 percent of the existence of the human species. Agriculture made possible the feeding of concentrated populations in cities, which in turn have been (and remain) the sources of most of the landmark scientific, technological and other advances of the human race that we call civilization.14
The earliest known civilizations arose in geographic settings with strikingly similar characteristics. These included river valleys subject to annual floodings, whether in ancient Mesopotamia, in the valley of the Indus River on the Indian subcontinent in ancient times, along the Nile in ancient Egypt, or in the Yellow River valley in ancient China.15
Clearly there were other prerequisites, since these particular combinations of things had not produced agriculture, or civilizations dependent on agriculture, for most of the existence of the human species. Genetic characteristics peculiar to the races in these particular locations hardly seem likely to be the key factor, since the populations of these areas are by no means in the forefront of human achievements today.
Patterns of very skewed distributions of success have long been common in the real world—and such skewed outcomes contradict some fundamental assumptions on both the political left and right. People on opposite sides of many issues may both assume a background level of probabilities that is not realistic.
Yet that flawed perception of probabilities—and the failure of the real world to match expectations derived from that flawed perception—can drive ideological movements, political crusades and judicial decisions, up to and including decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States, where “disparate impact” statistics, showing different outcomes for different groups, have been enough to create a presumption of discrimination.
In the past, similar statistical disparities were enough to promote genetic determinism, from which came eugenics, laws forbidding inter-racial marriages and, where there were other prerequisites for monumental catastrophe, the Holocaust.
In short, gross disparities among peoples in their economic outcomes, scientific discoveries, technological advances and other achievements have inspired efforts at explanation that span the ideological spectrum. To subject these explanations to the test of facts, it may be useful to begin by examining some empirical evidence about disparities among individuals, social groups, institutions and nations.
Behind many attempts to explain, and change, glaring disparities in outcomes among human beings is the implicit assumption that such disparities would not exist without corresponding disparities in either people’s genetic makeup or in the way they are treated by other people. These disparities exist both among individuals and among aggregations of people organized into institutions of various sorts, ranging from families to businesses to whole nations.
Skewed distributions of outcomes are also common in nature, in outcomes over which humans have no control, ranging from lightning to earthquakes and tornadoes.
While it might seem plausible that equal, or at least comparable, outcomes would exist among people in various social groups, in the absence of some biased human intervention, or some genetic differences affecting those people’s outcomes, neither belief survives the test of empirical evidence.
A study of National Merit Scholarship finalists, for example, found that, among finalists from five-child families, the first-born was the finalist more often than the other four siblings combined.16 Firstborns were also a majority of the finalists in two-child, three-child, and four-child families.17 If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?
Such results are a challenge to believers in either heredity or environment, as those terms are conventionally used.
IQ data from Britain, Germany and the United States showed that the average IQ of first-born children was higher than the average IQ of their later-born siblings. Moreover, the average IQ of second-born children as a group was higher than the average IQ of third-born children.18
A similar pattern was found among young men given mental tests for military service in the Netherlands. The first-born averaged higher mental test scores than their siblings, and the other siblings likewise averaged higher scores than those born after them.19 Similar results were found in mental test results for Norwegians.20 The sample sizes in these studies ranged into the hundreds of thousands.21
These advantages of the first-born seem to carry over into later life in many fields. Data on male medical students at the University of Michigan, class of 1968, showed that the proportion of first-born men in that class was more than double the proportion of later-born men as a group, and more than ten times the proportion among men who were fourth-born or later.22 A 1978 study of applicants to a medical school in New Jersey showed the first-born over-represented among the applicants, and still more so among the successful applicants.23 Other studies, some going as far back as the nineteenth century, show similar results.24
Most other countries do not have as high a proportion of their young people go on to a college or university education as in the United States. But, whatever the proportion in a given country, the first-born tend to go on to higher education more often than do later siblings. A study of Britons in 2003 showed that 22 percent of those who were the eldest child went on to receive a degree, compared to 11 percent of those who were the fourth child and 3 percent of those who were the tenth child.25
A study of more than 20,000 young people in late twentieth-century France showed that 18 percent of those males who were an only child completed four years of college, compared to 16 percent of male first-born children—and just 7 percent of males who were fifth-born or later born. Among females the disparity was slightly larger. Twenty-three percent who were an only child completed four years of college, compared to 19 percent who were first-born, and just 5 percent of those who were fifth-born or later.26
Birth order differences persist as people move into their careers. A study of about 4,000 Americans concluded that “The decline in average earnings is even more pronounced” than the decline in education between those born earlier and those born later.27 Other studies have shown the first-born to be over-represented among lawyers in the greater Boston area28 and among Members of Congress.29 Of the 29 original astronauts in the Apollo program that put a man on the moon, 22 were either first-born or an only child.30 The first-born and the only child were also over-represented among leading composers of classical music.31
Consider how many things are the same for children born to the same parents and raised under the same roof—race, the family gene pool, economic level, cultural values, educational opportunities, parents’ educational and intellectual levels, as well as the family’s relatives, neighbors and friends—and yet the difference in birth order alone has made a demonstrable difference in outcomes.
Whatever the general advantages or disadvantages the children in a particular family may have, the only obvious advantage that applies only to the first-born, or to an only child, is the undivided attention of the parents during early childhood development.
The fact that twins tend to average several points lower IQs than people born singly32 reinforces this inference. Conceivably, the lower average IQs of twins might have originated in the womb but, when one of the twins is stillborn or dies early, the surviving twin averages an IQ closer to that of people born singly.33 This suggests that with twins, as with other children, the divided or undivided attention of the parents may be key.
In addition to quantitatively different amounts of parental attention available to children born earlier and later than their siblings, there are also qualitative differences in parental attention to children in general, from one social class to another.34 Children of parents with professional occupations have been found to hear an average of 2,100 words per hour, while children from working-class families hear 1,200 words per hour, and children from families on welfare hear 600 words per hour.35 Other studies suggest that there are also qualitative differences in the manner of parent-child interactions in different social classes.36
Against this background, expectations or assumptions of equal or comparable outcomes from children raised in such different ways have no basis. Nor can later different outcomes in schools, colleges or employment be automatically attributed to those who teach, grade or hire them, when empirical evidence shows that how people were raised can affect how they turn out as adults.
It is not simply that youngsters raised in different ways may have different levels of ability as adults. People from different social backgrounds may also have different goals and priorities—a possibility paid little or no attention in many studies that measure how much opportunity there is by how much upward movement takes place,37 as if everyone is equally striving to move up, and only society’s barriers produce different outcomes.
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.
What this suggests, among other things, is that an individual, a people, or a nation may have some, many or most of the prerequisites for a given achievement without having any real success in producing that achievement. And yet that individual, that people or that nation may suddenly burst upon the scene with spectacular success when whatever the missing factor or factors are finally get added to the mix.
Poor and backward nations that suddenly moved to the forefront of human achievements include Scotland, beginning in the eighteenth century, and Japan beginning in the nineteenth century. Both had rapid rises, as time is measured in history.
Scotland was for centuries one of the poorest, most economically and educationally lagging nations on the outer fringes of European civilization. There was said to be no fourteenth-century Scottish baron who could write his own name.38 And yet, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a disproportionate number of the leading intellectual figures in Britain were of Scottish ancestry—including James Watt in engineering, Adam Smith in economics, David Hume in philosophy, Joseph Black in chemistry, Sir Walter Scott in literature and John Stuart Mill in economics and philosophy.
Among the changes that had occurred among the Scots was their Protestant churches’ crusade promoting the idea that everyone should learn to read, so as to be able to read the Bible personally, rather than have priests tell them what it says and means. Another change was a more secular, but still fervent, crusade to learn the English language, which replaced their native Gaelic among the Scottish lowlanders, and thereby opened up far more fields of written knowledge to the Scots.
In some of those fields, including medicine and engineering, the Scots eventually excelled the English, and became renowned internationally. These were mostly Scottish lowlanders, rather than highlanders, who continued to speak Gaelic for generations longer.
Japan was likewise a poor, poorly educated and technologically backward nation, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. The Japanese were astonished to see a train for the first time, that train being presented to them by American Commodore Matthew Perry, whose ships visited Japan in 1853.39 Yet, after later generations of extraordinary national efforts to catch up with the Western world technologically, these efforts led to Japan’s being in the forefront of technology in a number of fields in the latter half of the twentieth century. Among other things, Japan produced a bullet train that exceeded anything produced in the United States.
Other extraordinary advances have been made by a particular people, rather than by a nation state. We have become so used to seeing numerous world-class performances by Jewish intellectual figures in the arts and sciences that it is necessary to note that this has been an achievement that burst upon the world as a widespread social phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even though there had been isolated Jewish intellectual figures of international stature in some earlier centuries.
As a distinguished economic historian put it: “Despite their vast advantage in literacy and human capital for many centuries, Jews played an almost negligible role in the history of science and technology before and during the early Industrial Revolution.” Moreover, “the great advances in science and mathematics between 1600 and 1750 do not include work associated with Jewish names.”40
Whatever the potentialities of Jews during the era of the industrial revolution, and despite their literacy and other human capital, there was often little opportunity for them to gain access to the institutions of the wider society in Europe, where the industrial revolution began. Jews were not admitted to most universities in Europe prior to the nineteenth century.
Late in the eighteenth century, the United States became a pioneer in granting Jews the same legal rights as everyone else, as a result of the Constitution’s general ban against federal laws that discriminate on the basis of religion. France followed suit after the revolution of 1789, and other nations began easing or eliminating various bans on Jews in various times and places during the nineteenth century.
In the wake of these developments, Jews began to flow, and then to flood, into universities. By the 1880s, for example, Jews were 30 percent of all the students at Vienna University.41 The net result in the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century, was a relatively sudden proliferation of internationally renowned Jewish figures in many fields, including fields in which Jews were virtually non-existent among the leaders in earlier centuries.
From 1870 to 1950, Jews were greatly over-represented among prominent figures in the arts and sciences, relative to their proportion of the population in various European countries and in the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century, with Jews being less than one percent of the world’s population, they received 22 percent of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, 32 percent in medicine and 32 percent in physics.42
Here, as in other very different contexts, changes in the extent to which prerequisites are met completely can have dramatic effects on outcomes in a relatively short time, as history is measured. The fact that Jews rose dramatically in certain fields after various barriers were removed does not mean that other groups would automatically do the same, if barriers against them were removed, for the Jews already had various other prerequisites for such achievements—notably widespread literacy during centuries when illiteracy was the norm in the world at large—and Jews needed only to add whatever was needed to complete the required ensemble.
Conversely, China was for centuries the most technologically advanced nation in the world, especially during what were called the Middle Ages in Europe. The Chinese had cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans.43 A Chinese admiral led a voyage of discovery that was longer than Columbus’ voyage, generations before Columbus’ voyage,44 and in ships far larger and technologically more advanced than Columbus’ ships.45
One crucial decision in fifteenth-century China, however, set in motion a radical change in the relative positions of the Chinese and the Europeans. Like other nations demonstrably more advanced than others, the Chinese regarded those others as innately inferior—as “barbarians,” just as the Romans likewise regarded peoples beyond the domain of the Roman Empire.
Convinced by the exploratory voyages of its ships that there was nothing to be learned from other peoples in other places, the government of China decided in 1433 to not only discontinue such voyages, but to forbid such voyages, or the building of ships capable of making such voyages, and to greatly reduce the influence of the outside world on Chinese society.
Plausible as this decision might have seemed at the time, it came as Europe was emerging from its “dark ages” of retrogression in the wake of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and was now experiencing a Renaissance of progress in many ways—including progress based on developing things that had originated in China, such as printing and gunpowder. Columbus’ ships, though not up to the standards of those once made in China, were sufficient to cross the Atlantic Ocean in search of a route to India—and to inadvertently make the world-changing discovery of a whole hemisphere.
In short, Europe had expanding opportunities for progress, both within itself and in the larger world opened up to it by its expansion into the other half of the planet, at a time when China’s rulers had chosen the path of isolation—not total, but substantial, isolation. The strait jacket of isolation, inflicted on many parts of the world by geographic barriers that left whole peoples and nations both poor and backward,46 was inflicted on China by its own rulers. The net result over the centuries that followed was that China fell behind in an era of great technological and economic progress elsewhere in the world.
In the pitiless international jungle, this meant that other countries not only surpassed China but imposed their will on a vulnerable China, which declined to the status of a Third World country, partly subordinated to other countries in various ways—including a loss of territory, as the Portuguese took over the port of Macao, the British took over the port of Hong Kong and eventually Japan seized much territory on the mainland of China.
What China lost were not the prerequisites represented by the qualities of its people, but the wisdom of its rulers who, with one crucial decision—the loss of just one prerequisite—forfeited the country’s preeminence in the world.
That the qualities of the Chinese people endured was evidenced by the worldwide success of millions of “overseas Chinese” emigrants, who arrived in many countries in Southeast Asia and in the Western Hemisphere, often destitute and with little education—and yet rose over the generations to prosperity, and in many individual cases even great wealth. The contrast between the fate of China and the fate of the “overseas Chinese” was demonstrated when, as late as 1994, the 57 million “overseas Chinese” produced as much wealth as the billion people living in China.47
Among the more dire national projects that failed among other nations—fortunately, in this case—for lack of one prerequisite was the attempt by Nazi Germany to create a nuclear bomb. Hitler not only had such a program, he had it before the United States launched a similar program. Germany was, at that point, in the forefront of science in nuclear physics. However, it so happened that, at that particular juncture in history, many of the leading nuclear physicists in the world were Jewish—and Hitler’s fanatical anti-Semitism not only precluded their participation in his nuclear bomb project, his threat to the survival of Jews in general led many of these physicists to leave Europe and immigrate to the United States.
It was expatriate Jewish nuclear physicists who brought the threat of a Nazi nuclear bomb to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attention, and urged the creation of an American program to produce such a bomb before the Nazis got one. Moreover, Jewish scientists—both expatriate and American—played a major role in the development of the American nuclear bomb.48
These scientists were a key resource that the United States had and that Hitler could not have, as a result of his own racial fanaticism. The whole world escaped the prospect of mass annihilation and/or crushing subjugation to Nazi oppression and dehumanization because Hitler’s nuclear program lacked one key factor. He had some leading nuclear physicists, but not enough.
China was by no means the only nation to forfeit a superior position among the nations of the world. Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were far more advanced than their British or Scandinavian contemporaries, who were largely illiterate at a time when Greeks and Romans had landmark intellectual giants, and were laying the intellectual and material foundations of Western civilization. As late as the tenth century, a Muslim scholar noted that Europeans grew more pale the farther north you go and also that the “farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.”49
Such a correlation between complexion and ability would be taboo today, but there is little reason to doubt that a very real correlation existed among Europeans as of the time when this observation was made. The fact that Northern Europe and Western Europe would move ahead of Southern Europe economically and technologically many centuries later was a heartening sign that backwardness in a given era does not mean backwardness forever. But that does not deny that great economic and social disparities have existed among peoples and nations at given times and places.
Particular institutions, such as business enterprises, have likewise risen or fallen dramatically over time. Any number of leading American businesses began at the level of the lowly peddler (Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, for example), or were started by men born in poverty (J.C. Penney; F.W. Woolworth) or began in a garage (Hewlett Packard). Conversely, there have been leading businesses that have declined from the pinnacles of profitable success, even into bankruptcy—sometimes with the loss of just one prerequisite.
For more than a hundred years, the Eastman Kodak company was the dominant firm in the photographic industry throughout the world. It was George Eastman who, in the late nineteenth century, first made photography accessible to great numbers of ordinary people, with his cameras and film that did not require the technical expertise of professional photographers. Before Kodak cameras and film appeared, professional photographers had to know how to apply light-sensitive emulsions to photographic plates that went into big, cumbersome cameras sitting on tripods, and know how to later chemically develop the images taken and then print pictures.
Small and simple, handheld Kodak cameras, and rolls of Kodak film in place of photographic plates, enabled people with no technical knowledge at all to take pictures and then leave the developing and printing of those pictures to others. Kodak cameras and film spread internationally. For decades, Eastman Kodak sold most of the film in the entire world. It continued to sell most of the film in the world market, even after film began to be produced in other countries and Fuji film from Japan made major inroads in the late twentieth century, gaining a 21 percent worldwide market share by 1993.50
Eastman Kodak also supplied both amateur and professional photographers with a wide range of photographic equipment and supplies, based on film technology. For more than a century, Eastman Kodak clearly had all the prerequisites for success. As of 1988, the company employed more than 145,000 workers around the world, and its annual revenues peaked at nearly $16 billion in 1996.51 Yet its worldwide dominance came to a remarkably sudden end in the early twenty-first century, when its income plummeted and the company collapsed into bankruptcy.52
Just one key factor changed in the photographic industry—the substitution of digital cameras for film cameras. Worldwide sales of film cameras peaked in the year 2000, when their sales were more than four times the sales of digital cameras. But, three years later, digital camera sales in 2003 surpassed film camera sales for the first time. Then, just two years after that, digital camera sales exceeded the peak sales that film cameras had reached in 2000, and now digital camera sales were more than four times the sales of film cameras.53
Eastman Kodak, which had produced the world’s first electronic image sensor,54 was undone by its own invention, which other companies developed to higher levels in digital cameras. These included electronics companies not initially in the photographic industry, such as Sony, whose share of the digital camera market was more than double that of Eastman Kodak by the end of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century,55 when digital camera sales skyrocketed.
With the sudden collapse of the market for film cameras, Kodak’s vast array of photographic apparatus and supplies, based on film technology, suddenly lost most of their market, and the Eastman Kodak company disintegrated economically. Its mastery of existing prerequisites for success meant nothing when just one of those prerequisites changed. Nor was this collapse from overwhelming dominance in its field unique to Eastman Kodak.56
In nature, as in human endeavors, there can be multiple prerequisites for various natural phenomena, and these multiple prerequisites can likewise lead to very skewed distributions of outcomes.
Multiple factors have to come together in order to create tornadoes, and more than 90 percent of all the tornadoes in the entire world occur in just one country—the United States.57 Yet there is nothing startlingly unique about either the general climate or the terrain of the United States that cannot be found, as individual features, in various other places around the world. But all the prerequisites for tornadoes do not come together as often, anywhere in the rest of the world, as in the United States.
Similarly, lightning occurs more often in Africa than in Europe and Asia put together, even though Asia alone is larger than Africa or any other continent.58 Thunderstorms have prerequisites, and those prerequisites all come together more often in some geographic settings than in others. In the United States, thunderstorms are 20 times as frequent in southern Florida as in coastal California.59
Among many other skewed distributions in nature is the fact that earthquakes are as common around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, both in Asia and in the Western Hemisphere, as they are rare around the rim of the Atlantic.60 Among other highly skewed outcomes in nature is that some geographic settings produce many times more species than others. The Amazon region of South America is one such setting:
South America’s Amazon Basin contains the world’s largest expanse of tropical rainforest. Its diversity is renowned. On a single Peruvian tree, Wilson (1988) found 43 species of ants, comparable to the entire ant fauna of the British Isles.61
Similar gross disparities have also been found between the number of species of fish in the Amazon region of South America, compared to the number in Europe: “Eight times as many species of fish have been caught in an Amazonian pond the size of a tennis court as exist in all the rivers of Europe.”62
Human beings are of course also part of nature. Genetic similarities between chimpanzees and human beings extend to well over 90 percent of their genetic makeup. But chimpanzees have obviously not produced 90 percent of what humans have produced, such as airplanes, computers and rockets that can reach the moon and go beyond, into outer space. There is even a microscopic, worm-like creature which also has most of its genetic make-up match that of human beings.63 But having many or most prerequisites can count for nothing as far as producing the ultimate outcome.
What can we conclude from all these examples of highly skewed distributions of outcomes around the world? Neither in nature nor among human beings are either equal or randomly distributed outcomes automatic. On the contrary, grossly unequal distributions of outcomes are common, both in nature and among people, including in circumstances where neither genes nor discrimination are involved.
What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, “The world has never been a level playing field.”64 The idea that the world would be a level playing field, if it were not for either genes or discrimination, is a preconception in defiance of both logic and facts. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings, but to automatically make those sins the sole, or even primary, cause of different outcomes among different peoples is to ignore many other reasons for those disparities. Geography and demography, for example, are among the many factors that make equal or random outcomes among human beings very unlikely.
Geography is an intractable obstacle to the equal or random outcomes implicitly assumed to be the norm, in the absence of discrimination or genetic differences. The huge cost difference between water transportation and land transportation is just one aspect of geography that creates skewed distributions of outcomes.
Back in the days of the Roman Empire, the cost of shipping a cargo across the length of the Mediterranean Sea—more than 2,000 miles—was less than the cost of carting that same cargo 75 miles inland.65 This meant that people living on the coast had a vastly larger universe of economic and cultural interactions with other people available to them. A geographic treatise pointed out that, in ancient times, the European hinterland was “lingering in a backward civilization as compared with the Mediterranean coastland.”66
As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, San Francisco could be reached both faster and cheaper by water, across the Pacific Ocean from a port in China, than by land from the center of the United States.67 Here again, what such huge cost differentials between land transportation and water transportation meant was that people living on coasts often had a vastly larger economic and cultural universe available to them than did those living inland.
People living on a coast have long been able to communicate and interact, economically and otherwise, over long distances with other people on that same coast, as well as more distant people elsewhere in many cases. There is no way that people located in more isolated areas, whether in distant mountain villages, tropical jungles or inaccessible deserts had comparable opportunities for economic and social development over the centuries.
Modern transportation revolutions in land, sea and air transport have eroded—but by no means eliminated—cost differences in access to a wider world by water than by land. Moreover, there is nothing that the modern transportation revolution can do to eliminate the continuing effects of past centuries of very different economic and social evolution by peoples living in very different geographic circumstances.
Coastal peoples around the world have long tended to be more prosperous and more advanced than people of the same race living farther inland, while people living in river valleys have likewise tended to be more prosperous and more advanced than people living up in the isolated hills and mountains around the world.68
Transportation costs to and from mountain communities have long been prohibitively expensive for all but goods with a very high value concentrated in products of a small size and weight. Exquisite handicrafts of various sorts, produced in many mountain communities around the world69 have provided some economic relief from the poverty long common in such communities.
Climate and soil are likewise geographic obstacles to equal prospects or equal outcomes. Most of the most fertile land in the world is in the temperate zones and little or none in the tropics.70 That affects not only agriculture, but also the timing and pace of urbanization, based on the productivity of food required to feed concentrated urban populations. Areas that are located both near the sea and in the temperate zones have been found to have 8 percent of the world’s inhabited land area, 23 percent of the world’s population, and 53 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product.71
Not all of this is due to the current significance of fertile land and agriculture. But even highly industrialized and commercial societies today arose only after centuries of civilization and urban development whose origins, scope and pace derived from an agriculture sufficiently productive to enable urban communities to be founded and grow, long before such societies could develop comparably in places with less fertile land.
Societies situated differently, as regards such geographic factors as fertile land, navigable waterways and the presence or absence of creatures capable of being used as draft animals or beasts of burden had—for centuries or millennia—very different prospects of developing into advanced societies at the same pace.72
Much of the Western Hemisphere is similar, geographically, to Europe, in terms of fertile soil, navigable waterways and climate, but was utterly devoid of heavy-duty draft animals and beasts of burden like horses and oxen before such animals, which played major roles in the economic development of Europe, were brought to the Western Hemisphere by Europeans. Even the smaller llamas, used as beasts of burden by the Incas before the Europeans arrived, were confined to a fraction of South America.
Factors with major influences on these societies’ development in centuries past—such as the fertility of their land—may not be nearly so important today, when highly industrialized or commercial societies can readily import food and raw materials from a globalized world economy. Similarly, the once crucial socioeconomic role of draft animals and beasts of burden has now been largely replaced by automobiles, trucks, tractors, railroads and airplanes in most of the industrially and commercially developed countries. But draft animals and beasts of burden played major roles in these countries developing to the point where such animals could be replaced by self-propelled mechanisms. Societies today can differ greatly in their socioeconomic development, as a result of the extent to which the pace of their development was facilitated or impeded by geographic factors in centuries past.
Geographic differences alone have been enough to preclude the equal opportunity that many seem to assume would exist in the absence of discriminatory bias or genetic differences. Mountain peoples are not a race, since they exist on different continents around the world, and were isolated from each other for millennia. Yet they share many social characteristics that have made their options and achievements very different from the options and achievements of people in the surrounding lowlands, and still more different from those of people living in coastal areas.
Mountain peoples are about 10 to 12 percent of the world’s population,73 which may seem small, but in absolute numbers that is a population more than twice the size of the population of the United States, and more than ten times the size of Italy’s population.74 But, while Italy has produced such landmark figures in human history as Galileo, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Marconi and Fermi, the world’s mountain communities have produced no such individuals, despite having a far larger population than Italy.
This is not a criticism of mountain peoples, but an attempt to demonstrate the consequences of the inherent constrictions of their geographic circumstances. Mountain people within Italy have produced no such landmark achievements as those in the rest of that country’s population. A classic study of a mountain village in Italy in the mid-twentieth century found the people living there to be not only desperately poor but also largely cut off from the outside world.75 Most mountain peoples have had nothing resembling equal opportunity, compared to their contemporaries in more favorable geographic settings, even though the cause of their plight was not other human beings but the inherent geographic constraints of their circumstances.
The influence of geography is not limited to the specific geographic characteristics of a given location, such as water transport costs versus land transport costs, or differences in the fertility of the soil. Geographic location as such can have a major influence. When agriculture developed in the Middle East during prehistoric times, and with it a more advanced urban civilization with a written language among other things, knowledge of such advances reached Greece long before it reached the British Isles or Scandinavia, simply because Greece was located closer to where such advances originated. Ancient Greek civilization became far more advanced, by almost any standard, than the societies in the British Isles or Scandinavia at that time.
Over the centuries, as other landmark advances took place at various locations around the world, particular peoples located nearer to the source of such advances had opportunities to advance themselves that peoples located farther away did not. Many other historic developments—ranging from wars, political upheavals, devastating epidemics, and mass migrations to landmark voyages of discovery, and both scientific and technological breakthroughs—all combined to present radically different opportunities to different peoples at different places, and even within a given society.
Multi-ethnic societies, with groups from various other societies around the world, can inherit to some extent the cultural consequences of the very different advantages and disadvantages of the geographic locations of those other societies, as well as current influences of the society in which they all live today. Scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of such things have often reached radically different conclusions from those who implicitly assume that an absence of equal outcomes is both unusual and suspicious.
The conclusion of French historian Fernand Braudel—that “In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally”76—is a conclusion reached by many others who have done empirical studies of peoples, institutions and societies around the world. A landmark international study of ethnic groups by Professor Donald L. Horowitz of Duke University concluded that the idea of “proportional representation” of such groups was something that “few, if any, societies have ever approximated.”77 The research of Professor Myron Weiner of MIT led him to point out: “All multi-ethnic societies exhibit a tendency for ethnic groups to engage in different occupations, have different levels (and, often, types) of education, receive different incomes, and occupy a different place in the social hierarchy.”78 An international study of the ethnic makeup of military forces found that “militaries fall far short of mirroring, even roughly, the multi-ethnic societies” from which their people are drawn.79
Specific locational differences in various socioeconomic outcomes and intellectual achievements have also been found. Professor Angelo Codevilla, for example, divided Europe into various cultural zones and concluded that “a European child will have a very different life” if born “east or west of a line that starts at the Baltics and stretches southward along Poland’s eastern border, down Slovakia’s western border and along the eastern border of Hungary, then continues down through the middle of Bosnia to the Adriatic Sea.”80
A monumental empirical treatise, Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray, traced differences in historic advancements in the arts and sciences within different parts of Europe and concluded that “80 percent of all the European significant figures can be enclosed in an area that does not include Russia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Spain, Portugal, the Balkans, Poland, Hungary, East and West Prussia, Ireland, Wales, most of Scotland, the lower quarter of Italy, and about a third of France.”81 Within the United States, that same study found similarly skewed locational differences among the origins of notable achievements in the arts and sciences, with the northeast grossly over-represented and most of the South grossly under-represented, except for Virginia.82
Among the most overlooked factors in socioeconomic outcome differences, both within nations and between nations, are such demographic factors as differences in median age. These differences are not small, and neither are their consequences.
In the United States, for example, income differences between middle aged people and young adults are larger than income differences between blacks and whites.83 Moreover, these income differences among age groups have increased over time, as the physical vitality of youth has become less valuable economically with the replacement of human muscle power by mechanical and electrical power, while the development of human capital—knowledge, skills and experience—has become more valuable, with the development of more advanced technologies and more complex organizations.
Ethnic and other social groups differ in median ages by as much as two decades or more. In the United States, for example, the median age of Japanese Americans is 51 and the median age of Mexican Americans is 27.84
How likely is it that these two groups—or others—would have the same proportions of their populations equally represented in occupations, institutions or activities requiring long years of education and/or long years of job experience? Is it surprising if Hispanic Americans are not as well represented as Japanese Americans in the professions, or in managerial careers, for which long years of education and experience are usually required? How many 27-year-olds of any ethnic background meet the requirements for being CEOs in civilian life or generals and admirals in the military?
Even if Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans were absolutely identical in everything else besides age, they would nevertheless differ significantly in incomes and other age-related outcomes. Racial, ethnic and other groups are of course seldom, if ever, identical in everything else. That makes the prospects of equal outcomes even more improbable, and disparities in outcomes even more questionable as automatic indicators of discrimination. In terms of capabilities, a man is not even equal to himself at different stages of life, much less equal to the wide range of other people at varying stages of their own respective lives.
In these circumstances, equal rights and equal treatment of all does not mean equal performances—and virtually guarantees unequal performances and outcomes. This does not mean that either genes or discrimination can simply be dismissed as a possible factor in any given circumstance, but only that hard evidence would be required to substantiate either of these possibilities, which remain testable hypotheses, without being foregone conclusions.
The belief that disparities in incomes are indicators of disparities in the treatment of those with lower incomes is part of a more general set of assumptions that some one particular factor is the key or dominant factor behind differences in outcomes. In the early twentieth century, the key factor behind economic, intellectual and other disparities among different groups was assumed to be genetics.85 That view was as dominant then as the opposite view today that disparities in outcomes imply discrimination. American colleges and universities had hundreds of courses on eugenics then,86 just as many academic institutions today have courses—and whole departments—teaching that outcome disparities imply discrimination.
Nor was genetic determinism peculiar to the United States or confined to any particular part of the political or ideological spectrum, though American Progressives took the lead in promoting genetic determinism in the United States then, as they later took the lead in promoting the opposite presumption that disparities imply discrimination in the second half of the twentieth century. On both sides of the Atlantic, and in both eras, leading intellectual and political figures were in the forefront of those promoting the prevailing presumption of their times.
In England, for example, John Maynard Keynes was one of the founders of the eugenics society at Cambridge University, and such other internationally renowned British writers on the political left as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley, Harold J. Laski and Sidney and Beatrice Webb were also advocates of eugenics. Among British conservatives, Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, who would later differ on other issues, were both supporters of eugenics.87
In the United States, leading figures in the eugenics movement included founders and leading officials of the American Sociological Association and the American Economic Association.88 Among the pioneers in the development of mental tests, Professor L.M. Terman of Stanford University concluded from his study of minorities in the southwestern United States that “They cannot master abstractions”89 and Carl Brigham, creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), declared that U.S. Army mental test results during the First World War tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”90
In short, stampedes toward one-factor explanations do not exempt even the leading intellectuals of an era. Nor are one-factor explanations confined to disparities among human beings. It extends to issues about differences in nature. No one can dispute that sunlight is hotter in the tropics, but that scientific fact does not prevent the highest temperature ever recorded in Asia, Africa, North America and South America from all having been recorded outside the tropics on all these continents.91 No part of Europe is in the tropics, but there are European cities whose highest recorded temperatures are higher than any temperature ever recorded in Singapore, located virtually on the Equator.92
In general, even a major factor—unchallenged as a scientific fact—can be outweighed by some combination of other factors. It is no denial of the influence of differences in north-south locations on temperatures to point out that the average high temperature in December is the same in London as in Washington, even though London is located more than 850 miles farther north than Washington.93 The warm waters of the Gulf Stream, flowing through the Atlantic Ocean, transfer warmth northeastward past Western Europe, including London, creating milder winters in that part of the world than at the same latitudes in Asia, North America or Eastern Europe.
Other factors enable many other places in the temperate zones to reach higher temperatures than many places in the tropics.94 None of this contradicts the scientific fact that sunlight is hotter in the tropics. But that unchallenged fact does not mean that this single factor automatically determines all outcomes. Similarly, among human beings, the unchallenged fact of discriminatory bias against various groups in countries around the world does not preclude outcomes from being determined by a wider range of other factors in particular places and times.
While we find skewed distributions of outcomes in many dimensions of human activities around the world, we find assumptions of equal or comparable outcomes as a default setting in many social theories that regard the absence of equality of outcomes as automatic signs of some sinister influences which have prevented this natural equality from taking place. But neither equality of achievements nor equality of crimes is common.
The murder rate in Eastern Europe has been some multiple of the murder rate in Western Europe for centuries.95 Today, according to the British publication The Economist, Latin America has “8% of the world’s people but 38% of its recorded murders.” Moreover, “80% of violent killings in Latin American cities occur on just 2% of streets.”96
Neither genetics nor discrimination is either necessary or sufficient to account for all skewed outcomes among human beings. But, given how widely, how long and how strongly each of these two explanations—that is, genes or discrimination—has dominated thinking, laws and policies in various parts of the world, it is no small matter to escape from having painted ourselves into a corner with either of these sweeping preconceptions.
Two of the monumental catastrophes of the twentieth century—Nazism and Communism—led to the slaughter of millions of human beings by their own governments, in the name of either ridding the world of the burden of “inferior” races or ridding the world of “exploiters” responsible for the poverty of the exploited. While each of these beliefs might have been testable hypotheses, their greatest political triumphs came as dogmas placed beyond the reach of evidence or logic.
Neither Hitler’s Mein Kampf nor Marx’s Capital was an exercise in hypothesis testing. While Karl Marx’s vast three-volume economic treatise was a far greater intellectual achievement, “exploitation” was at no point in its 2,500 pages treated as a testable hypothesis. Exploitation was instead the foundation assumption on which an elaborate intellectual superstructure was built—and that proved to be a foundation of quicksand. Getting rid of capitalist “exploiters” in Communist countries did not raise the living standards of workers even to levels common in many capitalist countries, where workers were presumably still being exploited, as Marxists conceived the term.
Discrimination as an explanation of economic and social disparities may have a similar emotional appeal for many. But we can at least try to treat these and other theories as testable hypotheses. The historic consequences of treating particular beliefs as sacred dogmas, beyond the reach of evidence or logic, should be enough to dissuade us from going down that road again—despite how exciting or emotionally satisfying political dogmas and the crusades resulting from those dogmas can be, or how convenient in sparing us the drudgery and discomfort of having to think through our own beliefs or test them against facts.