Back in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed the essence of the social justice vision when he wrote of “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”1 In the kind of world envisioned by Rousseau, all classes, races and other subdivisions of the human species would have equal chances in all endeavors— other things being equal. But the more other things there are, influencing outcomes, the lower the chances of all those other things being equal.
In the real world, there is seldom anything resembling the equal outcomes that might be expected if all factors affecting outcomes were the same for everyone. Even in a society with equal opportunity— in the sense of judging each individual by the same standards— people from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things, much less invest their time and energies into developing the same kinds of skills and talents.
In American sports, for example, blacks are very over-represented in professional basketball, whites in professional tennis, and Hispanics in Major League Baseball. In professional hockey, where there are more teams in the United States than in Canada, there are more Canadian players than American players— even though the population of the United States is more than eight times the population of Canada. There are also more hockey players from Sweden— nearly 4,000 miles away— in the NHL than there are hockey players from California, even though the population of California is nearly four times the population of Sweden.2
Different climates are among the many other things that are not equal. Colder climates, with waterways frozen for months at a time, offer more opportunities for more people to grow up developing the ice-skating skills essential for hockey. Such climates are far more common in Canada and Sweden than in the United States in general or California in particular.
Climate differences are among numerous other differences that can facilitate the development of some capabilities in particular peoples and impede the development of other capabilities.
At the heart of the social justice vision is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities, these disparities are evidence or proof of the effects of such human vices as exploitation and discrimination.
These vices are in fact among the many influences that prevent different groups of people— whether classes, races or nations— from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms or other terms. But human vices have no monopoly as causes of economic and other disparities.
It is especially difficult to make the case that inequalities of outcomes can be automatically assumed to have been caused by discrimination by dominant majorities against subordinate minorities, when in fact many subordinate minorities have economically outperformed dominant majorities in many countries around the world and in many periods of history.
A study of the Ottoman Empire, for example, found that none of the 40 private bankers listed in Istanbul in 1912 was a Turk, even though Turks ruled the empire. Nor was any of the 34 stockbrokers in Istanbul a Turk. Of the capital assets of 284 industrial firms in the Ottoman Empire, employing five or more workers, 50 percent of these firms were owned by Greeks and another 20 percent were owned by Armenians.3
The Ottoman Empire was by no means unique. Racial or ethnic minorities who have owned or operated more than half of whole industries in particular nations have included the Chinese in Malaysia,4 Germans in Brazil,5 Lebanese in West Africa,6 Jews in Poland,7 Italians in Argentina,8 Indians in East Africa,9 Scots in Britain,10 Ibos in Nigeria,11 and Marwaris in India.12
By contrast, we can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of the proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition— in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history.
Among the many factors that can prevent equal human potentialities from producing equally developed capabilities are factors over which humans have very little control— such as geography13— and other factors over which humans have no control at all, such as the past. There are innumerable things that can create unequal chances, some of which are worth examining in some detail.
To begin with a very mundane example of a demonstrable inequality of capabilities, most of the leading brands of beer in the United States were created by people of German ancestry.14 China’s Tsingtao beer was also created by people of German ancestry.15 Germans have also been prominent among beer producers in Argentina,16 Brazil17 and Australia.18 In Europe, Germany has long been the leading producer of beer.19
It so happens that Germans were producing beer back in the days of the Roman Empire.20 When a particular people has been doing a particular thing for more than a thousand years, is it surprising if they tend to be more successful in that particular endeavor than others who have had no such history?
Here we are not discussing innate potential for achievements in general, but developed capabilities for doing very specific things. Whatever the combination of circumstances that may have led Germans to begin brewing beer in ancient times, the skills they developed over the many centuries since then are a fact of life today. The same is true of other groups that have developed particular skills in other particular endeavors in the past. One of many things that no individual, no institution and no society has any control over is the past. The past is irrevocable. And, as a noted historian said: “We do not live in the past, but the past in us.”21
Germans are by no means unique in having particular things that they do better than many other peoples. Conversely, there are some things that other peoples do better than Germans. It is common, for example, to hear people speak of “French cuisine” or “Italian cuisine.” But seldom— if ever— do people speak of “German cuisine” or “English cuisine.” Yet these are all peoples in countries clustered together in Europe. Rome and Berlin are about the same distance from each other as New York and Chicago, while London and Paris are closer to each other than Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The point here is that, in what might seem like very similar circumstances, there can be very different histories, cultures and outcomes in particular endeavors. Particular groups having particular skills in particular kinds of endeavors have been a common fact of life over the centuries and in countries around the world.22 Even if two groups happen to live in identical tangible surroundings today, how likely would they be to have had the same environmental influences throughout all the scores of millennia of human existence?
Scots have long been internationally renowned for the quality of the whisky they produce, as the French have been for their wines. But the Scots cannot match the French in producing wine, because the grapes that grow in France do not thrive in Scotland’s colder climate. There is no reason whatever why the Scots should be expected to be equal to the French in producing wine— or either of them equal to the Germans in producing beer.
Neither race nor racism, nor any other form of discrimination, is necessary to account for such reciprocal inequalities. Nor have those who automatically invoke discriminatory biases, as explanations for unequal outcomes, been able to cite any country, anywhere in the world, that has had the proportional demographic representation which they have made a criterion.
RECIPROCAL INEQUALITIES
While group equalities in the same endeavors are by no means common, what is common are reciprocal inequalities among groups in different endeavors. The equality among different groups of human beings— presupposed by those who regard disparities in outcomes as evidence or proof of discriminatory bias— might well be true as regards innate potentialities. But people are not hired or paid for their innate potentialities. They are hired, paid, admitted to colleges or accepted into other desired positions on the basis of their developed capabilities relevant to the particular endeavor. In these terms, reciprocal inequalities might suggest equal potentialities, without providing any basis for expecting equal outcomes.
Even groups lagging in many kinds of achievement tend nevertheless to have some particular endeavors where they do not merely hold their own but excel. Groups lacking in their educational backgrounds, for example, may lag in many other endeavors, for which such a background is essential— and yet such generally lagging groups have often excelled in some other endeavors, where personal talent and dedication are key factors. Sports and entertainment have long been among such endeavors with high achievements for such American groups rising out of poverty as the Irish, blacks and Southern whites.23
While group equality— in either incomes or capabilities— is hard to find, it is also hard to find any ethnic or other large social group that has no endeavor in which it is above average.
Reciprocal inequalities abound— even when equality does not. As we have seen, different ethnic groups dominate different American sports. One consequence of this is that the degree of inequality of group representation in American sports as a whole is not as severe as in each individual sport. A similar principle applies, for similar reasons, in other endeavors, because of reciprocal inequalities.
If one looks at wealthy, historic individuals in commerce and industry, for example, one could find Jews far more widely represented among historic leaders in retailing, finance and garment production and sales than in the steel industry, automobile production or coal mining. In the professions as well, groups that have similar representation in the professions as a whole can have very different representations in particular professions, such as engineering, medicine or the law. Asian American professionals are not necessarily concentrated in the same professions as Irish American professionals.
Because of reciprocal inequalities, the more narrowly defined the endeavor, the less likely are different groups to be comparably represented. Yet crusaders for social justice often decry uneven representation of groups in an individual company, as evidence or proof of employer discrimination in that particular company.
When different peoples evolve differently in very different settings and conditions, they can develop different talents that create reciprocal inequalities of achievements in a wide range of endeavors, without necessarily creating equality, or even comparability, in any of those endeavors. Such reciprocal inequalities lend no support to theories of either genetic determinism or discriminatory biases as automatic explanations of inequalities.
Many assumptions and phrases in the social justice literature are repeated endlessly, without any empirical test. When women are statistically “under-represented” in Silicon Valley, for example, some people automatically assume that to be due to sex discrimination by Silicon Valley employers. It so happens that the work done in Silicon Valley is based on an application of engineering skills, including computer software engineering— and American women receive less than 30 percent of the degrees in engineering, whether at the college level or the postgraduate level.24
When American men receive less than 20 percent of the undergraduate degrees in education, and only 22 percent and 32 percent of master’s degrees and doctoral degrees, respectively, in the same subject,25 is it surprising that men are under-represented among school teachers and women are under-represented in engineering occupations?
Comparing the statistical representation of women and men in either of these occupations is like comparing apples and oranges, when their educational specializations are so different. These educational specialization decisions were usually made individually, years before either the women or the men reached an employer to begin a professional career.
A more general question arises when the incomes of women as a whole are compared to the incomes of men as a whole. This leaves out many specific differences in the life patterns of women and men.26 One of the most basic of these differences is that women are full-time, year-round workers significantly less often than men. U.S. Census Bureau data show that, in 2019, there were 15 million more male, full-time, year-round workers than female, full-time, year-round workers.27 The work patterns of women include more part-time work, and some whole years when many women are out of the labor force entirely, often due to staying home to take care of young children.28
When these and other differences in work patterns are taken into account, male-female differences in income shrink drastically, and in some cases reverse.29 As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since leaving school were earning slightly more than men of the same description.30
When there are statistical differences in the representation of various ethnic groups, different patterns within these groups themselves are likewise often overlooked. A typical example of equating differences in demographic representation with employer discrimination was a headline in a San Francisco newspaper:31
Why are Black and Latino people
still kept out of tech industry?
Are Asians “kept out” of professional basketball or Californians “kept out” of the National Hockey League? Is equal demographic representation so widespread or so automatic in other endeavors that its absence in a particular endeavor can only be due to someone keeping particular people out?
As in the case of sex differences in demographic representation in an engineering endeavor, ethnic differences in educational qualifications for an engineering career are blatant. Asian Americans have more college degrees in engineering than either blacks or Hispanics,32 each of whom outnumbers Asian Americans in the U.S. population. At the Ph.D. level, Asian Americans’ engineering degrees outnumber the engineering Ph.D.s of blacks and Hispanics put together.33
Such ethnic disparities in engineering degrees are by no means peculiar to the United States. In Malaysia during the 1960s, members of the Chinese minority received 408 engineering degrees, while members of the Malay majority received just 4.34
When comparing different ethnic groups in a given endeavor, we are again comparing apples and oranges in terms of specialized education or other specialized preparations. In these circumstances, equal opportunity— in the sense of applying the same standards to everyone— does not produce equal outcomes, even if no one is “kept out.” There is no way that the Chinese in Malaysia could “keep out” Malay students in universities run by Malays, and subject to the authority of the Malaysian government, also run by Malays.
The “disparate impact” standard, used by courts of law for determining employer discrimination, implicitly assumes something that no one can seem to find anywhere— equal demographic representation of different groups. Any number of scholarly international studies have found gross disparities common in countries around the world.35 One of these studies concluded: “In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally.”36
Nevertheless, some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have accepted “disparate impact” statistics as evidence or proof of employer discrimination, even though the Supreme Court itself has had statistical disparities more extreme than the disparities used to charge employers with discrimination. For eight consecutive years— from 2010 to 2017— all Supreme Court Justices were either Catholic or Jewish,37 in a country where Protestants outnumber Catholics and Jews combined.38 Yet one of the most obvious reasons for doubting any negative intention or conspiracy is that these Justices were appointed by Presidents of both political parties, and all those Presidents were Protestants.
None of this denies that employer biases are a factor that can be, and has been, responsible for some disparities in employment outcomes. But human biases have no monopoly among the many things that prevent “equal chances.”
ORIGINS OF INEQUALITIES
The question whether different social groups have equal or unequal capabilities in various endeavors is very different from the question whether racial or sexual differences create inherently different mental potential determined by genes. The genetic determinism assumption that reigned supreme among American intellectuals of the Progressive era in the early twentieth century is an irrelevant issue in this context, though it will be dealt with in Chapter 2, and has been dealt with more extensively elsewhere.39
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that every social group— or even every individual— has equal mental potential at the moment of conception, that would still not be enough to guarantee even equal “native intelligence” at birth, much less equally developed capabilities after growing up in unequal circumstances and/or being culturally oriented toward different goals in different fields.
Inequalities Among Individuals
Unequal circumstances begin in the womb. Research has shown nutritional differences among pregnant women reflected later in IQ differences among their children, when these children were old enough to be tested.40 Mothers’ intakes of various substances can have positive or negative effects on a child’s IQ and general well-being.41
Even where we might reasonably expect to find the greatest equality of developed capabilities— among children born to the same parents and raised in the same home— research going back as far as the nineteenth century, and including countries on both sides of the Atlantic, has shown that children who are the first-born in their family have, as a group, higher average IQs,42 a higher rate of college completion,43 and are over-represented among high achievers in a variety of endeavors.44
In the United States, for example, a study found that more than half the National Merit Scholarship finalists were a first-born child, even in five-child families, as well as in two-child, three-child and four-child families.45 In other words, in five-child families, the first-born was the finalist more often than the other four siblings combined. Other measures of educational success or career success have likewise shown the first-born— and an only child— to be over-represented among the top performers in various endeavors, whether in the United States or among top performers in other countries surveyed.46
The first-born, or an only child, can have the undivided attention of both parents during a child’s crucial earliest development. This is something which later siblings obviously cannot have. Conversely, children raised where there is only one parent present have been found in a number of studies to have a higher incidence of many social problems— again, both in the United States and on the other side of the Atlantic.47 Studies of boys raised without a father present have found them very much over-represented among people with pathologies ranging from truancy to murder.48
As one study put it, these pathologies were more highly correlated with fatherlessness than with any other factor, “surpassing even race and poverty.”49 Fatherless boys had a higher than average rate of incarceration, whether they were black or white, though the incidence of fatherless boys has been higher among blacks.50 Not all differences between races are due to race— either in the sense of genetics or in the sense of racial discrimination.
Clearly, there were no “equal chances” for these boys, whether they were treated fairly or unfairly by people they encountered in institutions ranging from schools to police departments. Girls were also affected negatively, as reflected in such things as higher rates of teenage pregnancy, when raised by one parent.51 Very similar patterns of pathology were found in England, where the ethnic makeup of the underclass population is very different from that in the United States.52 In England, the underclass is predominantly white, but it shows many social patterns very similar to the social patterns of low-income blacks in the United States,53 even though the English underclass has no “legacy of slavery” to be used as an automatic explanation.
When American children are raised in different social classes, with different child-rearing practices, the chances of these children growing up with equal capabilities in adulthood can be seriously reduced. Research has shown that children raised by parents with professional occupations hear more than three times as many words per hour as children raised in families on welfare. Moreover, these are far more often positive and encouraging words when the parents are professionals, and more often negative and discouraging words when the family is on welfare.54
Can anyone seriously believe that children spending their formative years growing up in homes this different are likely to be the same as others in school, on a job or elsewhere?
In putting assumptions to the test of facts, a clear distinction must be maintained between equal potentialities at the beginning of life and equally developed capabilities later on. Some social justice advocates may implicitly assume that various groups have similar developed capabilities, so that different outcomes appear puzzling. But, when it comes to actual performance capabilities, a man is not even equal to himself— either physically or mentally— at different stages of his life, much less equal to all other people in their varying stages of life.
Inequalities Among Groups
The seemingly invincible fallacy at the heart of the social justice vision is that large categories of people— classes, races, nations— would tend to be either equal, or at least comparable, in their outcomes in various endeavors, if it were not for some discriminatory bias that has intervened to produce the large disparities we see around us.
Yet different groups, with different median ages— varying by a decade or two— are unlikely to be equal in endeavors requiring either the physical vitality of youth or the experience that comes with age. When Japanese Americans have a median age of 52 and Mexican Americans have a median age of 28,55 their different representation in different occupations and at different income levels is hardly surprising. If these two groups were identical in every other respect, age differences alone would still be enough to make them differ in incomes, since middle-aged Americans have higher median incomes than Americans in their twenties.56
With nations— as with classes, races or ethnic groups— age differences alone are enough to make equal economic or other outcomes very unlikely. There are whole nations whose populations have a median age over 40 (Germany, Italy, Japan), and other nations whose median ages are under 20 (Nigeria, Afghanistan, Angola).57 Why should anyone expect a nation where half the population are infants, young children and teenagers to have the same work experience and education— the same human capital— as a nation where half the population is 40 years old or older?
Different nations are also located in different geographic, climatic and other settings, with different advantages and disadvantages. Even if their populations had identical potential, they could hardly be expected to have equally developed capabilities, after centuries of being confronted with the task of surviving and evolving in very different settings around the world.
Whole continents differ greatly from one another. Although Africa is more than twice the size of Europe, the European coastline is thousands of kilometers longer than the African coastline.58 This might seem to be almost impossible. But the European coastline has innumerable twists and turns, creating harbors where ships can dock safely, sheltered from the rough waters of the open seas. These harbors are an even bigger advantage than the longer coastline as such.
The European coastline is also increased by the many islands and peninsulas that make up more than one-third of that continent’s total land area.59 By contrast, the African coastline is smooth, with far fewer harbors and far fewer islands and peninsulas— which make up only 2 percent of Africa’s land area.60
Is it surprising that Europeans have long had the benefit of far more maritime trade than Africans? Adam Smith noted this geographic difference back in the eighteenth century,61 and he also rejected claims that Africans were racially inferior.62 Other scholars have likewise described the numerous and severe geographic handicaps of sub-Saharan Africa especially.63 Distinguished French historian Fernand Braudel concluded: “In understanding Black Africa, geography is more important than history.”64
Harbors are just one of the various kinds of navigable waterways with major implications for the economic and social development of human beings. That is because of the enormous difference in costs between water transportation and land transportation. In the ancient world, for example, the cost of transporting a cargo across the length of the Mediterranean Sea—more than 2,000 miles— was less than the cost of transporting that same cargo just 75 miles inland.65 This meant that people living on the coast had a vastly larger range of economic and social interactions with other coastal people and places than people living inland had with other people living inland or with their coastal compatriots.
A geographic treatise noted that, in ancient times, Europe’s Mediterranean hinterland was “lingering in a backward civilization as compared with the Mediterranean coastland.”66 Nor was this peculiar to the Mediterranean region. It has been common in various parts of the world that “the coasts of a country are the first part of it to develop, not an indigenous or local civilization, but a cosmopolitan culture, which later spreads inland from the seaboard.”67 There have been special exceptions, but this has been a general pattern.68
This pattern reflected the great difference between the cost of water transportation and land transportation, which in turn affects economic prospects in many ways. Most of the large cities around the world are located on navigable waterways, because transporting the huge volume of food required to keep people fed in those cities would be enormously more expensive if all food had to be transported solely over land— especially before the modern invention of railroads and trucks during the past two centuries. Even today, places with access to navigable rivers have great economic advantages, especially if these are navigable rivers that connect to coastal areas.69
Climate is another aspect of nature that can influence the economic and social development of human beings. Fertile soils are found more often in the temperate zones than in the tropics.70 This obviously affects the productivity of agriculture. But its effects do not end there. Urbanization depends on food supplied from outside urban communities, with agriculture usually being the primary source. Over the centuries, a wholly disproportionate share of advances in science, technology and other endeavors have originated in urban communities.71
An empirical study at Harvard’s Center for International Development found that places in the temperate zone, with fertile soil and located within 100 kilometers of the sea, were 8 percent of the world’s inhabited land area. But such places had 23 percent of the world’s population and produced 53 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product.72 This is reflected in worldwide differences in income per person between such places and the rest of the world.73
This is just one of many differences among the world’s geographic regions. When Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere, the indigenous peoples had no horses, oxen, camels or elephants, nor any other heavy-duty draft animals or beasts of burden to provide transportation for people and cargoes, such as animals provided in much of the Eastern Hemisphere. Llamas existed in the Inca empire in part of South America, where they were used as beasts of burden. But even in that fraction of South America where llamas existed, they were not large enough to be comparable to the animals used in the other half of the world.
The dearth of draft animals and beasts of burden in the Western Hemisphere had wider economic implications. By making land transportation even more costly than usual, the lack of animals limited the distances where it was economically feasible to transport cargoes. This in turn also limited the size of vessels for water transportation. Canoes were common in the Western Hemisphere. But vessels of the size of European ships, or the even larger ships in China during Europe’s Middle Ages, were not economically viable without animals to transport the vast cargoes, from miles around, required to fill such ships.
Nor were wheeled vehicles used in the Western Hemisphere before Europeans arrived. The wheel has sometimes been considered an epoch-making invention for economic development. But wheeled vehicles, without animals to pull them, had no such potential. The Mayans invented wheels, but they were used on children’s toys.74 Had the Mayans been in communication with the Incas and their llamas, conceivably wheeled vehicles, pulled by animals, might have become an economic asset in the Western Hemisphere. But geographic limitations on the size of a cultural universe in the Western Hemisphere at that time prevented the creation of such a development.
When the British confronted the Iroquois in North America, these were peoples drawing upon very different-sized cultural universes. Although the Iroquois were a confederation of tribes living in a large area, the animals present on the vast Eurasian landmass— and absent in the Western Hemisphere— gave the British access to the inventions, discoveries and knowledge from far wider regions of the world. The British were able to navigate across the ocean by using the compass, invented in China, steering with rudders invented in China, doing calculations with mathematical concepts from Egypt, using a numbering system invented in India, and writing on paper invented in China, using letters created by the Romans.
The Iroquois had no comparable access to the cultural achievements of the Incas or the Mayans.75 Nor did they have as wide an exposure to the many diseases that spread across the vast Eurasian landmass— spanning more than 10,000 kilometers— creating devastating epidemics in centuries past, but leaving the surviving populations in Europe with biological resistance to many diseases, whose germs they took with them to the Western Hemisphere. There those diseases devastated many indigenous populations, who lacked biological resistance to those diseases. Death rates, sometimes exceeding 50 percent or more, among the indigenous peoples facilitated the European conquest of North and South America.
Neither with geographic factors nor other aspects of nature can we automatically assume either equal or random outcomes among human beings. There are too many factors at work to expect them all to be equal, or to have remained equal over the thousands of years in which human beings have developed economically and socially.
Nature— as exemplified by such things as differences in geography, climate, diseases and animals— has not been egalitarian, despite Rousseau’s claim that nature produced equality. As distinguished economic historian David S. Landes put it, “nature like life is unfair”76 and “The world has never been a level playing field.”77
Numerous geographic influences, varying from place to place, do not imply geographic determinism. These and other factors interact with human knowledge and human errors, as these have developed in different eras. Famines have occurred in places where there was very fertile land that produced food surpluses for export, both before the famine and after the famine.78 The supply of natural resources is not fixed, because what is a natural resource depends on what human beings know how to use, and that changes with changes in human knowledge from one era to the next.
Western Europe and Northern Europe have long had more of the natural resources used in an industrial revolution— iron ore and coal, for example— than did Eastern Europe or Southern Europe. But none of that mattered during the many thousands of years before human beings’ knowledge developed to the point where they were capable of creating an industrial revolution. Which part of Europe was more advantaged or disadvantaged varied with particular eras, and the human knowledge available in those eras.
Nature has been no more fair between the sexes than in its treatment of other social groups, societies or nations. Human double standards of sexual behavior for women and men have been a pale reflection of nature’s more fundamental double standards. No matter how reckless, selfish, stupid or irresponsible a man may be, he will never become pregnant. The plain and simple fact that women have babies has meant that they may not have equal chances in many other aspects of life, even when some human societies offer equal opportunity for people with the same developed capabilities.79
The seemingly invincible fallacy that only human bias can explain different economic and social outcomes among peoples is belied repeatedly by hard facts in societies around the world. Whatever the condition of human beings at the beginning of the species, scores of millennia had already come and gone before anyone coined the phrase “social justice.”
During those almost unimaginably vast expanses of time, different peoples evolved differently in very different settings around the world— developing different talents that created reciprocal inequalities of achievements in different endeavors, without necessarily creating equality, or even comparability, in any of those endeavors.
Environment and Human Capital
Environment cannot be defined as simply the current tangible surroundings. Nor can human capital be defined as simply education or skills. Qualities such as honesty are not only moral virtues for individuals, but human capital for communities, their cultures and their economies.
Where a geographic setting offers only limited and isolated patches of marginally fertile land that can sustain only small communities living close to the margins of subsistence, there is little to gain from deception and everything to lose if the people in that environment do not stick together and be honest with one another, for the sake of the mutual trust and cooperation required for their survival, in circumstances where survival is by no means secure.
People living for centuries in small, poor and isolated communities, with neither police forces nor fire departments, know that any emergency can become a catastrophe, unless they all stick together and come to each other’s rescue. Such circumstances— obvious to those who live in these circumstances— can promote honesty and cooperation more than any preaching or laws. Other people in very different and more favorable circumstances may or may not develop a comparable sense of honesty and cooperation.
In short, honesty is one of many factors that cannot be assumed to be equally present in all places or among all peoples. Nor does empirical evidence suggest an equality in this factor, any more than in many other factors. Among the simple tests used to assess the honesty in various peoples and places have been projects that deliberately left wallets containing both money and personal identification in public places in various cities around the world.
When one such project in 2013 left a dozen wallets in public places, in various cities, the number of wallets returned with the money still in them varied from eleven out of twelve in Helsinki (Finland) to one out of twelve in Lisbon (Portugal). Moreover, the one wallet that was returned in Lisbon was returned by a couple visiting from the Netherlands; no Portuguese returned any.80 An earlier test found 100 percent of the wallets returned in Norway, 67 percent in the United States, 30 percent returned in China and 21 percent returned in Mexico.81
A different test of honesty was a five-year study of which United Nations diplomats paid their parking tickets in New York City, where diplomatic immunity shielded them from prosecution. Egypt, with 24 U.N. diplomats, had thousands of unpaid parking tickets during that five-year period. Meanwhile, Canada— with the same number of U.N. diplomats as Egypt— had no unpaid parking tickets at all during that same five-year period. Nor did Britain, with 31 U.N. diplomats or Japan with 47 U.N. diplomats.82
John Stuart Mill pointed out in the nineteenth century that the level of honesty or dishonesty in a society was a major factor in the development of its economy. Using the high level of corruption in Russia as an example, Mill concluded that it must be “an immense drag on the capabilities of economical improvement.”83 Since then— whether under the czars, the communists or in post-communist Russia— corruption has been pervasive.84 At one time, some individuals were described by fellow Russians as being “as honest as a German”85— a tacit admission that such qualities were not nearly as common among Russians.
Conversely, the industrial revolution in England was aided by investments from foreign countries, whose investors were able to rely on the reputation of British law for honesty and impartiality.
There is no more reason to expect all individuals, groups or nations to be equally honest than there is to expect them to have the same skills, the same wealth or the same IQs.
Even in countries with widespread corruption, where what has been called “the radius of trust” seldom extends beyond the nuclear family, there can be particular groups who have sufficient trust among themselves that they can conduct business on the basis of verbal agreements, without recourse to unreliable legal systems. Marwaris in India and various sub-groups among the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have even been able to engage in international trade with members of their own groups in other countries, on the basis of verbal understandings.86
This can be an enormous competitive economic advantage in countries with unreliable legal and political institutions, when indigenous rivals have to be far more cautious about economic transactions. But, even in a country with more reliable institutions, there are advantages in being able, as Hasidic Jews in New York are, to give each other consignments of jewels to sell, and share the profits on the basis of verbal agreements.87
Whatever the level of honesty in a given society, there is no reason to expect existing disparities in these respects to remain the same forever, when so many other things have changed over the centuries. But, at any given time, honesty is one of many factors that vary, making equal chances for all very unlikely.
In addition to on-going differences among peoples, there have also been unpredictable episodic events— such as wars, famines, and epidemics— that can disrupt the development path of particular peoples. The outcomes of military conflicts can be a matter of chances that are incalculable— and yet able to determine the fate of whole societies or nations for subsequent generations or centuries.
Had Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo, instead of his enemy the Duke of Wellington, the history of peoples and nations across the continent of Europe could have been very different. Wellington himself said afterwards that the outcome of that battle was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”88 It could have gone either way. Had the earlier battle against invading Islamic forces at Tours in 732 or at the siege of Vienna in 1529 gone the other way, Europe would be culturally a very different place today.
As things turned out, Europe has been far from being a culturally, economically or otherwise homogeneous civilization, with its peoples having the same quantity and kind of human capital across the continent. Instead, the languages of Western Europe acquired written versions centuries before the languages of Eastern Europe.89 This had major implications for the education of the peoples in these two regions, who had little chance to be equal in endeavors requiring the kinds of knowledge and skills taught from books in schools and colleges.
This was not simply an inequality confined to the past, for the evolution to the present began from very different pasts in different places and times. Eastern Europe has been poorer and less industrially developed than Western Europe for centuries,90 and the homicide rate in Eastern Europe has been some multiple of the homicide rate in Western Europe for centuries.91
Nor was this east-west divide the only source of national inequalities within Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, “when only 3 percent of the population of Great Britain was illiterate, the figure for Italy was 48 percent, for Spain 56 percent, for Portugal 78 percent.”92 There were similar disparities in 1900 within the Habsburg Empire, where the rate of illiteracy ranged from 3 percent in Bohemia to 73 percent in Dalmatia.93 Massive scholarly studies have found great differences in both technological development and in the number of leading figures in the arts and sciences in different parts of Europe.94
It was much the same story in Africa, where in 1957 only 11 percent of the children attending secondary school in Nigeria were from the northern part of the country, where a majority of the population lived.95 Someone born in northern Nigeria had nowhere near the same chances as someone born in southern Nigeria— a fact reflected in the different economic success of tribes from these different regions of the country.96
Both in Europe and in Nigeria, different circumstances led different groups to different levels of literacy and different school attendance. In Europe— in centuries past, when people were far poorer— some groups working in agriculture had little need for literacy, but often had great need for the work of children, in order to keep families adequately fed. In such circumstances, children’s education was often sacrificed, depriving them of even second-hand knowledge of a wider world.
In other parts of the world as well, innumerable factors influenced the development of innumerable peoples. It would be an incredible coincidence if all these factors affected all these peoples the same way during the many thousands of years in the past. What is also very unlikely, over vast expanses of time, is that the very same peoples would have been the highest achievers throughout many thousands of years. Just within a fraction of those millennia for which there has been recorded history, the peoples who have been in the forefront of human achievements have changed dramatically.
For centuries, China was far more technologically advanced than any European nation— having cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans.97 The Chinese also had mechanical printing on paper, during centuries when Europeans were still writing by hand on costlier materials.98 Educating most Europeans with costly individual manuscripts, rather than mass-produced books, was not an economically viable prospect. Only after Europeans developed mechanical printing themselves was it feasible for them to educate more than a small fraction of their populations. And only after all the languages of different European peoples developed written versions was an equal education, and the development of equal human capital, even theoretically possible.
Differences in human capital— including honesty and languages, as well as occupational skills and industrial and commercial talents— have been common between nations and within nations. There was no way that people on the short end of these circumstantial disparities had “equal chances” of developing their capabilities, even in a society with equal opportunity, in the sense of open competition for all, and equal standards applied to all.
We might agree that “equal chances for all” would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival.
Do we want the mixture of students who are going to be trained to do advanced medical research to be representative of the demographic make-up of the population as a whole— or do we want whatever students, from whatever background, who have track records demonstrating a mastery of medical science that gives them the highest probability of finding cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s and other devastating diseases? Endeavors have purposes. Is indulging ideological visions more important than ending cancer and Alzheimer’s?
Do you want airlines to have pilots chosen for demographic representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly on planes whose pilots were chosen for their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination? Once we recognize the many factors that can create different developed capabilities, “equal chances for all” becomes very different in its consequences from “equal opportunity.” And consequences matter— or should matter— more so than some attractive or fashionable theory.
More fundamentally, do we want a society in which some babies are born into the world as heirs of pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day— blighting both their lives— or do we want to at least leave them the option to work things out better in their lives than we have in ours?