“...we must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes.” Lionel Trilling
“People who may share many of the same basic concerns that social justice advocates have do not necessarily share the same vision or agenda, because they do not make the same assumptions about options, causation, or consequences.”
Milton Friedman:
“Everywhere in the world there are gross inequities of income and wealth. They offend most of us. Few can fail to be moved by the contrast between the luxury enjoyed by some and the grinding poverty suffered by others.”
F.A. Hayek:
“It has of course to be admitted that the manner in which the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many instances have to be regarded as a very unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people.”
-Hayek saw life in general as unfair, even with the free markets he advocated
-it is not the same as saying that he saw society as unfair
-society was “an orderly structure,” but not a decision-making unit, or an institution taking action
-neither society nor government comprehends or controls all the many and highly varied circumstances
-there is a large element of luck that can influence fate of individuals classes, races, or nations
Fate:
-a facetious headline in The Economist magazine–”Choose your parents wisely”
-it highlighted an important truth about inequalities, illustrated with this impossible advice
-there are circumstances that are beyond our control including major factors in economic and other inequalities
***the totality of circumstances around us Hayek called a “cosmos” or the universe
-others call this “social justice” or “cosmic justice”
-it is what would be required to produce the results sought by many social justice advocates
“Differences in human fates for which clearly no human agency is responsible” (Hayek).
-we cannot demand justice from the cosmos
-no human beings, either singly or collectively, can control the cosmos
-the whole universe of circumstances surrounding us and affecting everyone’s chances in life
***the large element of luck in all our lives means that neither society nor government has either causal control or moral responsibility extending to everything that has gone right or wrong in everybody’s life
-nor surrogate decision-makers control such things
-they are either a “self-made man” or surrogate saviors of other people or the planet–operate in dangerous territory, littered with human tragedies and national catastrophes
***if the world around us happened to provide equal chances for all people in all endeavors– whether as individuals or as classes, race or nations
-whether called social justice or cosmic justice
-ideals tell us nothing about our capabilities and their limits–or the dangers of trying to go beyond those limits
Ex. the earliest American Progressives onward, there has been an ideal of applying criminal laws in a manner individualized to the criminal, rather than generalized from the crime
-before considering if this is desirable, there is first the question of whether human beings are even capable of doing such a thing
***were would officials acquire such sweeping, intimate and accurate knowledge about a stranger, much less have superhuman wisdom to apply it in the incalculable complications of life
Ex. a murderer may have had an unhappy childhood, but does that justify gambling on people’s lives, but turning him loose among them in the name of “rehabilitation”
-Hayek’s key insight was that all the consequential knowledge essential to the functioning of a large society exists in its totality nowhere in any given individual, class or institution
-the functioning and survival of a large society requires coordination among innumerable people with innumerable fragments of consequential knowledge
-Hayek was in opposition to various systems of centrally directed control
***no to centrally planned economy, systems of comprehensive surrogate decision-making in the interests of social justice, or presumptions of “society” being morally responsible for all its inhabitants’ good or bad fates, when nobody has the requisite knowledge for such responsibility
-the fact that we cannot do everything does not mean that we should do nothing
-it does suggest that we need to make very sure that we have our facts straight
-we do not make things worse while trying to make them better
-in a world of ever-changing facts and inherently fallible human beings, that means leaving everything we say or do be open to criticism
-dogmatic certitudes and intolerance of dissent have often led to major catastrophes
Edmund Burke:
-there is a fundamental distinction between his ideals and his police advocacies
“Preserving my principles unshaken,” and “I reserve my activity for rational endeavours”
***having high ideals did not imply carrying idealism to the extreme of trying to impose those ideals at all costs and oblivious to all dangers
-pursuing high ideals at all costs has already been tried by twentieth-century creations of totalitarian dictatorships, often based on egalitarian goals with the highest moral principles
-powers conferred for the finest reasons can be used for the worst purposes
Friedman:
“A society that puts equality–in the sense of equality of outcome–ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”
-Hayek having lived through the era of the rise of totalitarian dictatorships in the twentieth-century Europe
-he did not regard social justice advocates as evil people, plotting to create totalitarian dictatorships
-he said that leading advocates of social justice included individuals whose unselfishness was “beyond question”
-his argument was that the kind of world idealized by social justice advocates–a world with everyone having equal chances of success in all endeavors–was not only unattainable, but that its fervent but futile pursuit can lead to the opposite of what its advocates are seeking
***it was not the social justice advocates would create dictatorships, but that their passionate attacks on existing democracies could weaken those democracies to the point where others could seize dictatorial powers
-social justice advocates themselves obviously do not share the conclusions of their critics, such as Friedman and Hayek
-the differences in their conclusions are not necessarily differences in fundamental moral values
-their differences tend to be at the level of fundamentally different beliefs about circumstances and assumptions about causation that can produce very different conclusions
-they envision different worlds, operating on different principles, and describe these would with words that have different meanings within the framework of different visions
***when visions and vocabularies differ so fundamentally, an examination of facts offers at least a hope of clarification
Visions and Vocabularies:
-words are just the containers in which meanings are conveyed from some people to other people
-words can sometimes contaminate their contents
-a word like “merit” has various meanings
-this word has contaminated many discussions of social policies, whether it has been used by advocates or critics of the social justice vision
Merit:
-each individual should be judged by that individual’s own merit
-”merit” in this context seems to mean individual’s own capabilities that are relevant to the particular endeavor
-merit in this sense is simply a factual question, and the validity of the answer depends on the predictive validity of the criteria used to compare different applicants’ capabilities
***social justice advocates see not only a factual issue, but also a moral issue, in the concept of merit
William Godwin, social justice advocate:
-concerned not only about unequal outcomes, but especially “unmerited” advantage
George Bernard Shaw, Fabian socialist pioneer:
“Enormous fortunes are made without the least merit”
-he noted that not only the poor, but also many well-educated people “see successful mean of business, inferior to themselves in knowledge, talent, character, and public spirit, making much larger incomes
-here merit is no longer simply a factual question about who has the particular capabilities relevant to success in a particular endeavor
-now it is a moral question as to how those capabilities were acquired
-a result of some special personal exertion or were just some “unmerited advantage”
-being born into unusually more favorable circumstances than the circumstances of most other people
Merit:
-in this sense, with a moral dimension, raises very different questions, which can have very different answers
Ex. Do certain German families or German communities deserve to inherit the benefits of the knowledge, experience and insights derived from more than a thousand years of Germans brewing beer?
***clearly they do not!
-their possession of this valuable knowledge is a fact of life today, whether we like it or not
-nor is this kind of situation peculiar to Germans or to beer
Ex. U.S. Air Force General Benjamin O. Davis Jr. was the son of the first Black American to become a general in the U.S. Army, so did he have advantages growing up in a military family?
Ex. General Douglas MacArthur’s father was a young commanding officer in the Civil War
Ex. Quarterback Archie Manning has two sons, Peyton and Eli, who became NFL quarterbacks, so when a quarterback is selected who did not have a quarterback father was he just chosen in order to equalize social justice?
-the advantages that some people have, in a given endeavor, are not just disadvantages to everyone else
-these advantages also benefit people who pay for the product or services provided by that endeavor
-it is not a zero-sum situation
-mutual benefit is the only way the endeavor can continue, in a competitive market, with vast numbers of people free to decide what they are willing to pay for
**in a free-market economy, progress based on new advances inevitably means bad news for those whose goods or services are no longer the best
-demographic “inclusion” requires some surrogate decision-makers, empowered to over-rule what consumers want
Ex. a country fighting for its life, on the battlefield, cannot afford the luxury of choosing its generals, on the basis of demographic representation
-that is especially so if the country wants to win its military victories without more losses of soldiers’ lives than necessary
***in social justice literature, unmerited advantages tend to be treated as if they are deductions from the well-being of the rest of the populations
-there is no fixed or predestined amount of well-being whether measured in financial terms or in terms of spectators enjoying a sport, or soldiers surviving a battle
President Barack Obama:
“The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income, it now takes half.”
-that would clearly be a deduction from other people’s incomes if there were a fixed or predestined among of total income
-it matters greatly whether people with high incomes are adding to, or subtracting from, the incomes of the rest of the population
-insinuations are a weak basis for making decisions about a serious issue
-Is the average American’s income higher or lower because of the products created and sold by some multi-billionaire?
-there is no fixed or predestined total amount of income or wealth to be shared
-people are creating more wealth than they are receiving as income, then they are not making other people poorer
-creating products or services that are worth less than the income they receive
-equally clearly they are making other people poorer
-if some people’s high incomes were deducted from some fixed or predestined total income– leaving less for others
***cleverness is not wisdom
-artful insinuations are no substitute for factual evidence, if your goal is knowing the facts
***Lie: if your goals are political or ideological, there is no question that one of the most politically successful messages of the twentieth century was that the rich have gotten rich by taking from the poor
-Marxism message of “exploitation” helped sweep communists into power in countries around the world in the twentieth century, at a pace and on a scale seldom seen in history
-Communists are just one of the ideological groups to use it successfully for their own purposes, despite how disastrously that turned out to be for millions of other human beings living under communist dictatorships
Ex. the very possibility that poor Americans are having a rising standard of living because of progress created by people who are getting rich
Herman Kahn:
-would be anathema to social justice advocates
-hypothesis would vindicate those who advocate social justice
-it seems even less likely that social justice advocates would put that hypothesis to an empirical test
-for people seeking facts, rather than political or ideological goals, there are many factual tests that might be applied
-the wealth of the wealthy is derived from the poverty of the poor
Ex. Americans living in conditions officially defined as poverty usually have a higher standard of living than that of most of the people in Africa and the Middle East
-factual tests might include examining the history of prosperous ethnic minorities, who have often been depicted as “exploiters”
-such minorities have been either expelled by governments or driven out of particular cities or countries by mob violence or both
Ex. this has happened to Jews a number of times over the centuries in various parts of Europe
Ex. the overseas Chinese have had similar experiences in various southeast Asian countries
Ex. Indians and Pakistanis expelled from Uganda in East Africa
Ex. Chettiar money-lenders in Burma, after that country’s laws confiscating much of their property in 1948, drove many of them out of Burma
Ex. Uganda economy collapsed in the 1970s, after the government expelled Asian business owners
-interest rates in Burma went up, not down, after the Chettiars were gone
-Philippines, where 23,000 overseas Chinese were massacred in the 17th century after which there were shortages of the goods produced by the Chinese
Ex. Jews in Europe to be driven out–denounced as “exploiters” and “blood suckers” whether forced out by government edict or move violence or both
-Jews were invited back to some of the places from which they had been expelled
EX. Catherine the Great banned Jews from immigrating into Russia
-later her efforts to attract much-needed foreign skills from Western Europe, including “some merchant people”
-her officials that people in the occupations being sought should be given passports to Russia
-Jews began to be recruited as immigrants to Russia
-even though “throughout the whole transaction any reference to Jewishness was scrupulously avoided”
***in short, even despotic rulers may seek to evade their own policies, when it is impolitic to repeal those policies, and counterproductive to follow them
***prevailing social vision does not have to produce any factual test. When rhetoric and repetition can be sufficient to accomplish their aims, especially when alternative views can be ignored and/or suppressed
-suppression which is a key factor
-it is already a large and growing factor in academic, political and other institutions in our own times
Today:
-most prestigious educational institutions at all levels, to to literally from kindergarten to a Ph. D., without ever having to read a single article–much less a book by someone who advocated free-market economics or who opposes gun control laws
***reason why education has become indoctrination, but for whose benefit?
-most students have ahead of them: what they will need then, in order to sort out the new controversial issues, is an education to confront and analyze opposing views and subject those views to scrutiny and systemic analysis?
***they do no get when being indoctrinated with whatever is currently in vogue today
“Education” sets up whole generations to biome easy prey for whatever clever demagogues come along, with heady rhetoric that can manipulate people’s emotions
John Stuart Mill:
-described is precisely what most students today do not get, in even our most prestigious educational institutions
-they are getting pre-packaged conclusions, wrapped securely against the intrusion of other ideas
-facts inconsistent with the prevailing narratives
-prevailing narratives of our time, someone else’s good luck is your back luck
-a "problem" to be “solved”
-when someone has, however undeservedly, acquired some knowledge and insights that can be used to design a product which enables billions of people around the world to use computers
-add trillions of dollars’ worth of wealth to the world’s existing supply of wealth
George Bernard Shaw, British socialist
-may lament that the producer of this product may not have either the academic credentials or the personal virtues which Shaw seems to attribute to himself, and to others like himself
-it is obvious why a third-party’s laments should be allowed to affect transactions which are not doing the third party any harm
-sainthood is not the norm in business, any more than in politics, in the media or on academic campuses
-this is why we have laws
-it is not a reason to create ever more numerous and sweeping laws to put every more power in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong, regardless of how high a price is paid by others who are subject to their power
***slippery worlds like “merit” with multiple and conflicting meanings–can make it hard to clearly understand what the issues are, much less see how to resolve them
Racism:
“Racism” may be the most powerful word in the social justice vocabulary
-there is no question that racism has inflicted an enormous amount of needless suffering on innocent people, punctuated by unspeakable horrors, such as the Holocaust
-racism might be analogized to some deadly pandemic disease
-it may be worth considering the consequences of responding to pandemics in different ways
-we certainly cannot simply ignore the disease and hope for the best
-we cannot go to the opposite extreme, and sacrifice every other concern–including other deadly diseases–in hopes of reducing fatalities from the pandemic
-during the Covid-19 pandemic, death rates from other diseases went up because people feared going to medical facilities (FEAR)
-even the most terrible pandemics can subside or end
-we continued to be preoccupation with the pandemic disease can then cause more dangers and death from other diseases
-life stresses resulting from continued restrictions which were counterproductive on net balance afterwards
-everything depends on what the specific facts are at a given time and place
-special interests have benefitted politically or financially from the pandemic restrictions, and therefore have every incentive to promote the belief that those restrictions are still urgently needed
-it can be especially hard to know about the current incidence and consequences of racism when racists do not publicly identify themselves
***people who have incentives to maximize fears of racism include politicians to win votes by claiming to offer protections from racists, or leaders of ethnic protest movements who can use fear, more donations and more power
-no sane person believes that there is zero racism in American society, or in any other society
“Preserving my principles, I reserve my activity for rational endeavours” (Edmund Burke).
-our principles can reject racism completely
“But neither a racial minority nor anyone else has unlimited time, unlimited energy or unlimited resources to invest in seeking out every possible trace of racism–or to invest in the even less promising activity of trying to morally enlighten racists.”
Ex. we already know from history of American hillbillies–who physically indistinguishable from other white people, and therefore face zero—that even this is not enough to prevent poverty
Ex. black married-couple families who are not exempt from racism, have had poverty rates in single digits every year for more than a quarter of a century
Ex. racists today cannot prevent black young people from becoming pilots in the Air Force or even generals in the Air Force, becoming millionaires, billionaires, or President of the United States
“Just as we recognize when the power of a pandemic has at least subsided, so that we can use more of our limited time, energy, and resources against other dangers, so we also need to pay more attention to other dangers besides racism.”
***the younger generation needs to deal with the problems and dangers actually confronting them, rather than remain fixated on the problems and dangers of the generations before them
Education:
-if racists cannot prevent today’s minority young people from becoming pilots, the teachers union can
-by denying them a decent education, in schools whose top priorities are iron-clad job security for teachers, and billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions
Work:
-we have already seen that minimum wage laws have done, by denying black teenagers the option of taking jobs that employers are willing to offer, as pay that teenagers are willing to accept
-another “benefit” for minorities, from those with the social justice vision and agenda is “affirmative action”
-the harm done to people who would have gotten particular jobs, college admissions or other benefits, if these had been awarded on the basis of qualifications, rather than demographic representation
***the counter to the prevailing social justice agenda and its narrative about the sources of black American’s advancement:
-blacks rise out of poverty was due to the civil rights laws and social welfare policies of the 1960s, including affirmative action
Affirmative Action:
-socioeconomic progress of black Americans, statistical data have been cited, showing declining proportions of the black population living in poverty after the 1960s, and rising proportions of the black population employed in professional occupations, as well as having rising incomes
Statistical data:
-annual rate of poverty among black Americans were to be presented beginning in 1940
(20 years before civil rights laws and expanded social welfare state policies of the 1960s)
-1940: poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% to 47% over the next 2 decades
(before the major civil rights laws and social welfare policies of the 1960s)
-1971: poverty rate among blacks fell an additional 17% to 30%
-1980: poverty rate among blacks fell to 29%
Presidents:
-John F. Kennedy used the phrase “affirmative action” first in 1961
“Take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
-point affirmative action meant equal opportunity, not equal outcomes (original intent)
-Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon made numerical group outcomes the test of affirmative action by the 1970s (distorted intent)
***affirmative action now transformed from equal individual opportunity to equalized group outcomes, many people saw this as a more beneficial policy for blacks and other low-income racial or ethnic groups to whom this principle applied
-affirmative action meant group preferences or quotas, goes completely counter to the prevailing narrative
-affirmative action as group preferences, the prevailing narrative defended affirmative action as a major contributor to black progress
-concensus of the elites are rationales and incentives behind support for failed social policies
-the massive ghetto riots across the nation began during the Lyndon Johnson administration
-the riots subsided after that administration ended its “war on poverty” programs
-Reagan’s administration rejected the whole approach so there were no massive waves of riots
***politicians have every incentive to depict black progress as something for which politicians can take credit and so do social justice advocates who supported these policies
-blacks lifted themselves out of poverty during the decades when blacks did not yet have even equal opportunity, much less group preferences
-the federal government, the media, nor intellectual elites paid anything like the amount of attention to blacks that they did from the 1960s
-during the 1940s-1950s governments in Southern states were racially discriminatory in their laws and policies at that time
-blacks escaped from poverty in the 1940s-1950s was migrating out of the South
-they gained better economic for adults and better education for their children in the North
-the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overdue major factor in ending the denial of basic Constitutional rights to blacks into the South
***the rate of the rise of blacks into the professions more than doubled from 1954-1964–that is, before the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964
-the left cannot act as if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was solely their work
-the Congressional Record shows that a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Act
Rise over poverty:
“That is, it was primarily a result of the individual decisions made by millions of ordinary people, on their own initiative, and owed little to charismatic group leaders, to government programs, to intellectual elites or to the media publicity.”
-Affirmative Action in the United States group preference policies like any other country seldom provided much benefit for people in poverty
-a typical teenager in a low-income minority community in the United States, having usually gotten a very poor education in such neighborhoods
-both in the U.S. and in other countries with group preferences policies, benefits created for poorer groups have often gone disproportionally to the more prosperous members of these poorer groups.
***the central premise of affirmative actions is that group “under-represented” is the problem, and proportional representation of groups is the solution
-this is a fairy tale: all segments of a society had equal capabilities in all endeavors
-neither social justice advocates, nor anyone else, seems able to come up with an example of any such society today, or in the thousands of years of recorded history
Facts:
“consider the basic facts as the extent to which affirmative action has been beneficial or harmful, on net balance, for those it was designed to help–in a world where specific developed capabilities are seldom equal, even when reciprocal inequalities are common.”
Ex. College & Universities
-affirmative action in college admission policies has been widely justified on the grounds that few students educated in public schools in low-income minority neighborhoods have the kind of test scores that would not meet the top-level college entrance admissions qualifications
***so preferences in admissions are thought to be the solution
-despite the implicit assumption that students will get a better education at a higher-ranked institution
-professors tend to teach at a pace and level of complexity appropriate for the particular kinds of students they are teaching
-even a fully qualified student being admitted can feel overwhelmed by the pace and complexity of courses taught at an elite institution (these students test at the top ten percent nationwide on the SAT test)
-admitting students who scored in the 80th percentile on the ACT just because the student is a member of a minority group can turn someone who is fully qualified for success into a frustrated failure
-many young people from a low-income minority community may be the first member of their family to go to college
“Given the low academic standards in most public schools in low-income minority communities, the supposedly lucky student may have been getting top grades with ease in high school, and can be heading for a nasty shock when confronted with a wholly different situation at the college level.”
***what is at issue is not whether the student is qualified to be in college, but whether that student’s particular qualifications are a match or a mismatch with the qualifications of the other students at the particular college or university that grants admissions
(Empirical evidence suggests that this can be a crucial factor)
Examples:
UC Berkeley:
-affirmative action admissions policies admitted black and Hispanic students whose scores were slightly above the national average
-white students SAT scores were 200 points higher
-Asian students SAT scores were higher than white student scores
***in this setting most black students failed to graduate
-in the 1980s, the number of black students admitted increased, but the number of graduating decreased
-California voters put an end to affirmative action admissions in the University of California system
-the same amount of minorities were being accepted but there was “a radical redistribution of minority students among the different campuses across the state”
-there was a drastic reduction in the number only going to two top ranked campuses
-students with similar academic backgrounds and had more in common ended up in increasing graduation rates 63% with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher
“The minority students who fail to graduate under affirmative action admissions policies are by no means the only ones who are harmed by being admitted to institutions geared to students with better pre-college educational backgrounds.”
-after affirmative action in admissions was banned in the University of California system, not only did more minority students graduate, the number of graduating with degrees in the STEM fields rose by 51%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
-showed black students there had an average SAT math scores at the 90th percentile
-although they were in the top 10 percent of American students in mathematics they were in the bottom 10 percent of students at MIT who were at the 99th percentile
-24% of these extremely well-qualified black students failed to graduate at MIT
***we need to stop implicitly assuming that students automatically get a better education at a higher-ranked institution
“However, we cannot dismiss the possibility that these students may learn less where the pace and complexity of the education is geared to students with an extraordinarily stronger pre-college educational background.”
U.S. Medical Licensing Examination Study
-found that the black-white difference in passing was correlated with the black-white difference on the medical college admission test before entering school
(meaning blacks trained at medical schools where there was little difference between black and white students–in their scores on the test that got them admitted to medical school)
“The success or failure of blacks on these tests after graduation was correlated more with whether they were trained with other students whose admissions test scores were similar to theirs, rather than being correlated with whether the medical school was highly ranked or lower ranked.”
***apparently they learned better where they were not mismatched by affirmative action admission policies
George Mason University vs. Howard University Law Schools
-GM, as a whole had higher law school admissions test scores than the admission test scores of Howard
-Howard is a predominantly black institution
-black students at both institutions had law school admissions test scores similar to each other
-30% of black students graduated and passed the bar on the 1st try at GM
-57% of black students graduated and passed the bar on the 1st try at Howard
***this is another example of where students who were not mismatched seemed to learn better when taught in classes where the other students had educational preparation similar to their own
-this is data that the institutions refuse to release
-without honest date, it is impossible to test whether affirmative action admissions policies produced more black lawyers or fewer black lawyers
***Academic institutions across the country, that proclaim the benefits of affirmative action “diversity,” refuse to release data that would put such claims to the test
-studies declare affirmative action admissions policies a success, but no on is allowed to see the raw data which they reached this conclusion
-damaging information about the actual consequences of affirmative action admissions policies are brought to light and create a scandal are hit with denouncing the person who revealed the scandalous facts as “racist”
Example:
Professor Bernard Davis of the Harvard medical school
“That black students there, and at other medical schools, were being granted diplomas on a charitable basis. It is cruel to admit students unlikely to meet medical school standards, and even more cruel to abandon those standards and allow the trusting patients to pay for our irresponsibility.”
-Davis was denounced as a “racist”
Walter E. Williams, a black economist stated that he had heard about such practices not just in Harvard but elsewhere so he acknowledged that what Davis stated had points of truth
Georgetown student
-a student had revealed data showing that the median score at which black students were admitted to the law school was lower than the test score at which any white students was admitted
-he was denounced and called a “racist” instead of concentrating on the serious issue raised by that revelation
“Being a failure at an elite institution does a student no good. But the tenacity with which academic institutions fiercely resist anything that might force them to abandon counterproductive admissions practices suggests that these practices may be doing somebody some good.”
What good does having a visible minority student presence on campus do, if most of them do not graduate?
-the factual question is simply whether there are institutional interests being served by having a visible demographic representation of minority students on campus, whether those students get an education and graduate or not
“Hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money that comes into an academic institution annually can be put at risk if ethnic minorities are seriously “under-represented” among the students, since that raises the prospect of under-representation being equated with racial discrimination. And that issue can be a legal threat to vast amounts of government money.”
-affirmative action admissions policies that are damaging to the very groups supposedly being favored
-even though the data showed that this was not in the minority students’ own best interests
-the reigning social justice fallacy that statistical disparities in group representation mean racial discrimination has major impacts
-minority students on campuses are like human shields used to protect institutional interests–and casualties among human shields can be very high
-social policies help some groups while harming other groups
-affirmative action in academia manages to inflict harm on both the students who were not granted admissions, despite their qualifications
-many of those students who were admitted to institutions where they were more likely to fail, even when they were fully qualified to succeed in other institutions
“Ideological crusades are not readily abandoned by people who are paying no price for being wrong, and who could pay a heavy price–personally and socially–for breaking ranks under fire and forfeiting both a cherished vision and cherished place among fellow elites.”
***surrogate decision-makers are supposedly helping, it seldom gets much attention when the good results have been achieved independently of surrogate decision-makers
-intellectual elites, politicians, activists and “leaders”---took credit for the black progress that supposedly began in the 1960s
-group preference policies in other countries did little for people in poverty
-affirmative action did little for black Americans in poverty
Implications:
Where, fundamentally, did social justice vision go wrong?
-the painful reality is that no human being has either the vast range of consequential knowledge, or the overwhelming power, required to make the social justice ideal become a reality
***fortunate societies have seen favorable factors come together to create basic prosperity and common decency among free people
-But that is not enough for many social justice crusaders
-intellectual elites many imagine that they have all the consequential knowledge required to create the social justice world they seek, despite considerable evidence to the contrary
-even if the were to somehow able to handle the knowledge problem, there still remains the problem of having enough power to do all that would need to be done
-that is not just a problem for intellectual elites
-it is an even bigger problem and danger for the people who might give them that power
-the history of totalitarian dictatorships that arose in the 20th century, were responsible for the deaths of millions of their own people in peacetime
-this should be an urgent warning against putting too much power in the hands of any human beings
-some of these disastrous regimes were established with the help of many sincere and earnest people
-the same people seeking high ideals and a better life for the less fortunate
-but who do not take into account relevant warnings and dangers of social justice
*** there is no power exercised by human beings over other human beings that has not been abused
-we cannot just keep surrendering more and more of our freedoms to politicians, bureaucrats and judges
-we need to stop ignoring rhetoric and start testing what is thrown out to be as facts
***facts that need to be checked is that actual track record of crusading intellectual elites, seeking to influence public policies and shape national institutions, on a range of issues extending from social justice to foreign policies and military conflict
-intellectual elites who have produced a wide variety of policies that claim to help the poor, have shown a great reluctance to put the actual consequences of those policies to any empirical test
-they have been hostile to others who have put these policies to some empirical test
-social justice advocates have had the power to do so, but they often block access to data sought by scholars who want to do empirical tests on the consequences of such policies as affirmative action academic admissions policies
***many social justice advocates have shown little or no interest in remarkable examples of progress by the poor
-when the progress was not based on the kinds of policies promoted in the name of social justice
-the striking progress made by black Americans in the decades before the 1960s has been widely ignored
-the demonstrable harm suffered by black Americans after the social justice policies of the 1960s
-a sharp reversal of homicide rate decline and a quadrupling of the proportion of black children born to unmarried women
-Government policies made fathers a negative factor for mothers seeking welfare benefits
-social justice advocates who denounce elite public high schools that require entrance examinations for admissions do not pay attention that black student admissions to such school were much higher in the past
***before the elementary schools and middle schools in black communities were ruined by the kinds of policies favored by social justice advocates
Ex. 1938: the proportion of black students who graduated from elite Stuyvesant High School was almost as high as the proportion of blacks in the New York City population
1971: there were more black students than Asian students at Stuyvesant
1979: blacks were 12.9% of the students at Stuyvesant
1995: blacks dropped to 4.8%
2012: blacks dropped to just 1.8%
-over the span of 33 years, the proportion of black students at Stuyvesant High School fell to less than one tenth of what it had been before
-was it genetics or racism that can explain this drop
-there is no evidence of soul-searching by social justice advocates for how their ideas might have played a role in al this
-the social justice vision often fail to show any serious interest in the progress of the less fortunate, when it happens in ways unrelated to the social justice agenda
-socioeconomic progress of black Americans before the 1960s is a classic example
***achievements of prosperity can’t be dealt with rhetorically, by calling their achievements “privilege”
-there are many examples of peoples and places around the world that lifted themselves out of poverty in the 2nd half of the twentieth century
***The common denominator in all these places was that their rise out of poverty began after government micro-managing of the economy was reduced
“With social justice advocates supposedly concerned with the fate of the poor, it may seem strange that they seem to have paid remarkably little attention to places where the poor have risen out of poverty at a dramatic rate and on a massive scale.”
-the social justice advocates’ priorities are the poor themselves or the social justice advocates’ own vision of the world and their own role in that vision
“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises, and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.”
