If we want to advance whole peoples from poverty to prosperity we ought
to forget about visions and rhetoric and find out what really works.
Race, culture and equality
By Thomas Sowell
DURING THE 15 YEARS that I spent researching and writing my recently
completed trilogy on racial and cultural issues, I was struck again and
again with how common huge disparities in income and wealth have been
for centuries, in countries around the world—and yet how each country
regards its own particular disparities as unusual, if not unique. Some
of these disparities have been among racial or ethnic groups, some among
nations, and some among regions, continents or whole civilizations.
In the nineteenth century real per capita income in the Balkans was
about one-third that in Britain. That dwarfs intergroup disparities that
many in the United States today regard as not merely strange but
sinister. Singapore has a median per capita income that is literally
hundreds of times greater than that in Burma.
During the recent rioting in Indonesia, much of it directed against
the ethnic Chinese in that country, some commentators found it strange
that the Chinese minority, which is just 5 percent of the Indonesian
population, owned an estimated four-fifths of the capital in the
country. But it is not strange. Such disparities have long been common
in other countries in Southeast Asia, where Chinese immigrants typically
entered poor and then prospered, creating whole industries in the
process. People from India did the same in much of East Africa and in
Fiji.
Occupational differences have been equally unequal.
In the early 1920s, Jews were just 6 percent of the population of
Hungary and 11 percent of the population of Poland, but they were more
than half of all the physicians in both countries, as well as being
vastly over-represented in commerce and other fields. In the early
twentieth century, all of the firms in all of the industries producing
the following products in Brazil's state of Rio Grande do Sul were owned
by people of German ancestry: trunks, stoves, paper, hats, neckties,
leather, soap, glass, watches, beer, confections and carriages.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, just three countries
produced most of the manufactured goods in the world—Britain, Germany,
and the United States. By the late twentieth century, it was estimated
that 17 percent of the people in the world produce four-fifths of the
total output on the planet.
Such examples could be multiplied longer than you would have the
patience to listen.
Why are there such disparities? In some cases, we can trace the
reasons, but in other cases we cannot. A more fundamental question,
however, is: Why should anyone have ever expected equality in the first
place?
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that not only every racial
or ethnic group, but even every single individual in the entire world,
has identical genetic potential. If it is possible to be even more
extreme, let us assume that we all behave like saints toward one
another. Would that produce equality of results?
Of course not. Real income consists of output and output depends on
inputs. These inputs are almost never equal—or even close to being
equal.
During the decade of the 1960s, for example, the Chinese minority in
Malaysia earned more than a hundred times as many engineering degrees as
the Malay majority. Halfway around the world at the same time, the
majority of the population of Nigeria, living in its northern provinces,
were just 9 percent of the students attending that country's University
of Ibadan and just 2 percent of the much larger number of Nigerian
students studying abroad in foreign institutions of higher learning. In
the Austrian Empire in 1900, the illiteracy rate among Polish adults was
40 percent and among Serbo-Croatians 75 percent—but only 6 percent among
the Germans.
Given similar educational disparities among other groups in other
countries—disparities in both the quantity and quality of education, as
well as in fields of specialization—why should anyone expect equal
outcomes in incomes or occupations?
Educational differences are just one source of economic disparities.
Even at the level of craft skills, groups have differed enormously, as
they have in urbanization. During the Middle Ages, and in some places
long beyond, most of the population of the cities in Slavic Eastern
Europe were not Slavs. Germans, Jews, and other non-Slavic peoples were
the majority populations in these cities for centuries, while the Slavs
were predominantly peasants in the surrounding countrysides. Prior to
the year 1312, the official records of the city of Cracow were kept in
German—and the transition that year was to Latin. Only decades later did
Poles become a majority of the population of Cracow. Only over a period
of centuries did the other cities of Slavic Eastern Europe acquire
predominantly Slavic populations. As late as 1918, 97 percent of the
people living in the cities of Byelorussia were not Byelorussians.
Until this long transition to urban living took place among the
Slavs, how could the wide range of skills typically found in cities be
expected to exist in populations that lived overwhelmingly in the
countryside? Not only did they not have such skills in Eastern Europe,
they did not have them when they immigrated to the United States, to
Australia, or to other countries, where they typically worked in low-level occupations and earned correspondingly low incomes. In the early
years of the twentieth century, for example, immigrants to the United
States from Eastern and Southern Europe earned just 15 percent of the
income of immigrants from Norway, Holland, Sweden, and Britain.
Groups also differ demographically. It is not uncommon to find some
groups with median ages a decade younger than the median ages of other
groups, and differences of two decades are not unknown. During the era
of the Soviet Union, for example, Central Asians had far more children
than Russians or the peoples of the Baltic republics, and so had much
younger median ages. At one time, the median age of Jews in the United
States was 20 years older than the median age of Puerto Ricans. If Jews
and Puerto Ricans had been absolutely identical in every other respect,
including their cultures and histories, they would still not have been
equally represented in jobs requiring long years of experience, or in
retirement homes, or in activities associated with youth, such as sports
or crime.
Nothing so intractably conflicts with our desires for equality as
geography. Yet the physical settings in which races, nations, and
civilizations have evolved have had major impacts on the cultures
developed within those settings. At its simplest and crudest, the
peoples of the Himalayas have not had an equal opportunity to acquire
seafaring skills. Nor have Eskimos had an equal opportunity to acquire
knowledge and experience in growing pineapples or other tropical crops.
Too often the influence of geography on wealth is thought of
narrowly, in terms of natural resources that directly translate into
wealth, such as oil in the Middle East or gold in South Africa. But,
important as such differences in natural wealth are, geography
influences even more profound cultural differences among the people
themselves.
Where geography isolates people, whether in mountain valleys or on
small islands scattered across a vast sea, there the cultural exposures
of those people to the outside world are very limited and so, typically,
is their technological advancement. While the rest of the world
exchanges goods, knowledge and innovations from a vast cultural
universe, isolated peoples have been largely limited to what they alone
have been able to develop.
Few, if any, of the great advances in human civilization have come
from isolated peoples. As the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel
put it, the mountains almost always lag behind the plains—even if the
races in the two places are the same. Potatoes and the English language
both reached the Scottish lowlands before they reached the highlands.
Islam reached North Africa's Rif mountains long after the people in the
plains had become Moslems.
When the Spaniards invaded the Canary Islands in the fifteenth
century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a Stone-Age
level. So were the Australian aborigines when the British discovered
them.
Geographically imposed cultural isolation takes many forms and exists
in many degrees. Cities have long been in the vanguard of human
progress, all over the world, but cities do not arise randomly in all
geographic settings. Most of the great cities of the world have
developed on navigable waterways—rivers or harbors—but such waterways
are by no means equally or randomly distributed around the world. They
are very common in Western Europe and very rare in sub-Saharan Africa.
Urbanization has long been correspondingly common in Western Europe and
correspondingly rare in sub-Saharan Africa. One-third of the land mass
of Europe consists of islands and peninsulas but only one percent of the
land mass of South America consists of islands and peninsulas.
Navigable waterways have been economically crucial, especially during
the millennia of human history before the development of railroads,
trucks and airplanes. Before the transcontinental railroad was built, it
was both faster and cheaper to reach San Francisco from a port in China
than from Saint Louis. People in the city of Tbilisi bought their
kerosene from Texas—8,000 miles away across water—rather than from the
Baku oil fields, less than 400 miles away across land.
Such vast differences in costs between water transport and land
transport affect what can be transported and how far. Gold or diamonds
can repay the costs of transport across thousands of miles of land, but
grain or coal cannot. More important, the size of a people's cultural
universe depends on how far they can reach out to other peoples and
other cultures. No great civilization has developed in isolation.
Geography in general and navigable waterways in particular set the
limits of a people's cultural universe, broadly or narrowly. But these
limits are by no means set equally for all peoples or all civilization.
For example, when the British first crossed the Atlantic and
confronted the Iroquois on the eastern seaboard of what is today the
United States, they were able to steer across that ocean in the first
place because they used rudders invented in China, they could navigate
on the open seas with the help of trigonometry invented in Egypt, their
calculations were done with numbers invented in India, and their general
knowledge was preserved in letters invented by the Romans. But the
Iroquois could not draw upon the knowledge of the Aztecs or the Incas,
whose very existence they had no way of knowing. The clash was not
between the culture created by the British versus the culture created by
the Iroquois. It was a clash between cultural developments drawn from
vast regions of the world versus cultural developments from a much more
circumscribed area. The cultural opportunities were unequal and the
outcomes were unequal. Geography has never been egalitarian.
A network of rivers in Western Europe flows gently through vast
plains, connecting wide areas economically and culturally. The rivers of
tropical Africa plunge a thousand feet or more on their way to the sea,
with cascades and waterfalls making them navigable only for stretches
between these natural barriers—and the coastal plain in Africa averages
just 20 miles. Regular rainfall and melting snows keep the rivers of
Western Europe flowing throughout the year, but African rivers have
neither—and so rise and fall dramatically with the seasons, further
limiting their usefulness. The two continents are at least as
dramatically different when it comes to natural harbors. Although Africa
is more than twice the size of Europe, it has a shorter coastline. That
is because the European coastline continually twists and turns, creating
innumerable harbors, while the African coastline is smooth, with few
harbors. How surprising is it that international commerce has played a
much smaller role in the economic history of Africa than in that of
Europe in general and Western Europe in particular?
These particular geographic disparities are by no means exhaustive.
But they are suggestive of some of the many ways in which physical
settings have expanded or constricted the size of the cultural universe
available to different peoples. One revealing indication of cultural
fragmentation is that African peoples are 10 percent of the world's
population but have one-third of the world's languages.
In controversies over "nature versus nurture" as causes of economic
and other disparities among peoples and civilizations, nature is often
narrowly conceived as genetic differences. Yet geography is also nature—
and its patterns are far more consistent with history than are genetic
theories. China, for example, was for many centuries the leading nation
in the world—technologically, organizationally and in many other ways.
Yet, in more recent centuries, China has been overtaken and far
surpassed by Europe. Yet neither region of the world has changed
genetically to any extent that would account for this dramatic change in
their relative positions. This historic turnaround also shows that
geographic limitations do not mean geographic determinism, for the
geography of the two regions likewise underwent no such changes as could
account for the reversal of their respective positions in the world.
Back in the fifteenth century, China sent ships on voyages of
exploration longer than that of Columbus, more than half a century
before Columbus, and in ships more advanced than those in Europe at the
time. Yet the Chinese rulers made a decision to discontinue such voyages
and in fact to reduce China's contacts with the outside world. European
rulers made the opposite decision and established worldwide empires,
ultimately to the detriment of China. In short, geography sets limits,
but people determine what they will do within those limits. In some
parts of the world, geographic limits have been set so narrowly that the
peoples of these regions have never had the options available to either
the Europeans or the Chinese. Isolation has left such regions not only
lagging economically but fragmented culturally and politically, making
them prey to larger, more prosperous and more powerful nations.
We have seen how cultural handicaps have followed Eastern Europeans
as they immigrated overseas, leading to lower levels of income than
among immigrants from Western Europe who settled in the same places,
whether North America or Australia. If Africans had immigrated
voluntarily to the Western Hemisphere, instead of in bondage, is there
any reason to believe that their earnings would have achieved an
equality that the Slavic immigrants failed to achieve?
There is no question that Africans and their descendants faced the
additional barrier of color prejudice, but can we measure its effects by
assuming that black people would have had the same income and wealth as
white people in the absence of this factor—especially in view of the
large disparities among different groups of white immigrants, not to
mention the rise of some nonwhite groups such as Chinese Americans and
Japanese Americans to incomes above the national average?
Put differently, geography has not only cheated many peoples of equal
cultural opportunities, it has also cheated all of us today of a simple
criterion for measuring the economic and social effects of other
variables, such as prejudice and discrimination. Nothing has been more
common in human history than discrimination against different groups,
whether different by race, religion, caste or in innumerable other ways.
Moreover, this discrimination has itself been unequal—more fierce
against some groups than others and more pervasive at some periods of
history than in others. If there were not so many other powerful factors
creating disparities in income and wealth, it might be possible to
measure the degree of discrimination by the degree of differences in
economic outcomes. Even so, the temptation to do so is seductive,
especially as a means of reducing the complexities of life to the
simplicities of politics. But the facts will not fit that vision.
The size of a people’s cultural universe depends on how far they can
reach out to other peoples and other cultures. No great civilization has
developed in isolation.
Anyone familiar with the history of race relations in the Western
Hemisphere would find it virtually impossible to deny that blacks in the
United States have faced more hostility and discrimination than blacks
in Latin America. As just one example, 161 blacks were lynched in one
year in the United States, but racial lynching was unknown south of the
Rio Grande. Perhaps the strongest case against the predominance of
discrimination as an explanation of economic disparities would be a
comparison of blacks in Haiti with blacks in the United States. Since
Haiti became independent two centuries ago, Haitian blacks should be the
most prosperous blacks in the hemisphere and American blacks the
poorest, if discrimination is the overwhelming factor, but in fact the
direct opposite is the case. It is Haitians who are the poorest and
American blacks who are the most prosperous in the hemisphere—and in the
world.
None of this should be surprising. The fact that discrimination
deserves moral condemnation does not automatically make it causally
crucial. Whether it is or is not in a given time and place is an
empirical question, not a foregone conclusion. A confusion of morality
with causation may be politically convenient, but that does not make the
two things one.
We rightly condemn a history of gross racial discrimination in
American education, for example, but when we make that the causal
explanation of educational differences, we go beyond what the facts will
support. Everyone is aware of times and places when the amount of money
spent educating a black child was a fraction of what was spent educating
a white child, when the two groups were educated in separate systems,
hermetically sealed off from one another, and when worn-out textbooks
from the white schools were then sent over to the black schools to be
used, while new and more up-to-date textbooks were bought for the white
children. The number of days in school sometimes differed so much that a
black child with nine years of schooling would have been in class the
same number of days as a white child with only six years of schooling.
It seems so obvious that such things would account for disparities in
test scores, for example.
But is it true?
There are other groups to whom none of these factors apply—and who
still have had test score differences as great as those between black
and white children in the Jim Crow South. Japanese and Mexican
immigrants began arriving in California at about the same time and
initially worked in very similar occupations as agricultural laborers.
Yet a study of a school district in which their children attended the
same schools and sat side-by-side in the same classrooms found IQ
differences as great as those between blacks and whites attending
schools on opposite sides of town in the Jim Crow South. International
studies have found different groups of illiterates—people with no
educational differences because they had no education—with mental test
differences larger than those between blacks and whites in the United
States. Nor is this necessarily a matter of genetics. During the First
World War, black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and
Pennsylvania scored higher on mental tests than did white soldiers from
Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi.
What is "the" reason? There may not be any such thing as "the"
reason. There are so many cultural, social, economic, and other factors
interacting that there was never any reason to expect equal results in
the first place. That is why plausible simplicities must be subjected to
factual scrutiny.
Back in 1899, when the schools of Washington, D.C. were racially
segregated and discrimination was rampant, there were four academic high
schools in the city—three white and one black. When standardized tests
were given that year, the black academic high school scored higher than
two of the three white academic high schools. Today, nearly a century
later, even setting such a goal would be considered hopelessly utopian.
Nor was this a fluke. That same high school was scoring at or above the
national average on IQ tests during the 1930s and 1940s. Yet its
physical plant was inadequate and its average class size was higher than
that in the city's white high schools.
Today, that same school has a much better physical plant, and per-pupil expenditures in the District of Columbia are among the highest in
the nation. But the students' test scores are among the lowest. Nor was
this school unique in having had higher academic achievements during a
period when it seemingly lacked the prerequisites of achievement and yet
fell far behind in a later period when these supposed prerequisites were
more plentiful.
This is obviously not an argument for segregation and discrimination,
nor does it deny that counter-examples might be found of schools that
languished in the first period and did better in the second. The point
here is much more specific—that resources have had little or nothing to
do with educational quality. Numerous studies of schools in general have
shown that, both within the United States and in international
comparisons. It should be no surprise that the same applies to black
schools.
Resources have had little or nothing to do with the quality of education.
Numerous studies have shown that, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Politically, however, the disbursement of resources is by no means
inconsequential. The ability to dispense largess from the public
treasury has for centuries been one of the signs and prerogatives of
power in countries around the world. In electoral politics, it is vital
as an element in reelection. But the ultimate question is: Does it in
fact make people better off? How that question is answered is much less
important than that it be asked—that we not succumb to social dogmas,
even when they are intellectually fashionable and politically
convenient.
It is also important that economic and other disparities be
confronted, not evaded. Bestselling author Shelby Steele says that
whites in America today are fearful of being considered racists, while
blacks are fearful of being considered inferior. Social dogmas may be
accepted because they relieve both groups of their fears, even if these
dogmas neither explain the past nor prepare for the future.
It should be axiomatic that there is not unlimited time, unlimited
resources, nor unlimited good will among peoples—anywhere in the world.
If we are serious about wanting to enlarge opportunities and advance
those who are less fortunate, then we cannot fritter away the limited
means at our disposal in quixotic quests. We must decide whether our top
priority is to smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate,
whether we are looking for visions and rhetoric that make us feel good
for the moment or whether we are seeking methods with a proven track
record of success in advancing whole peoples from poverty to prosperity.
In an era when esoteric theories can be readily turned into hard cash
from the public treasury, our criteria must be higher than what can get
government grants for middle-class professionals. They must instead be
what will rescue that youngster imprisoned, not only in poverty, but
also in a social and cultural isolation that has doomed whole peoples
for centuries in countries around the world. When we promote cultural
provincialism under glittering labels, we must confront the hard
question whether we are throwing him a lifeline or an anchor.
History, geography, and cultures are influences but they are not
predestination. Not only individuals but whole peoples have moved from
the backwaters of the world to the forefront of civilization. The late
Italian author Luigi Barzini asked of Britain: "How, in the first place,
did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world
domination?" The story of Japan's rise from a backward country in the
mid-nineteenth century to one of today's leading economic powers has
been at least equally as dramatic. Scotland was for centuries known for
its illiteracy, poverty, and lack of elementary cleanliness. Yet, from
the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, most of the leading
intellectual pioneers of Britain were Scots, and Scots also become
prominent in business, banking, medicine, and engineering—not only in
Britain but around the world.
These and other dramatic and heartening rises of whole peoples came
from doing things that were often directly the opposite of what is being
urged upon less fortunate groups in the United States today. Far from
painting themselves into their own little cultural corner and
celebrating their "identity," these peoples sought the knowledge and
insights of other peoples more advanced than themselves in particular
skills, technologies, or organizational experience. It took centuries
for the English to absorb the cultural advances brought by such
conquerors as the Romans and the Normans and by such immigrants as the
Huguenots, Germans, Jews, and others who played a major role in
developing the British economy. Their early dependence on outsiders was
painfully demonstrated when the Romans pulled out of Britain in the
fifth century, in order to go defend their threatened empire on the
continent, and the British economy and political structure both
collapsed. Yet ultimately—more than a thousand years later—the British
rose to lead the world into the industrial revolution and controlled an
empire containing one-fourth of the land area of the earth and one-fourth of the human race.
Japan's economic rise began from a stage of technological
backwardness that was demonstrated when Commodore Perry presented them
with a gift of a train. Here was their reaction:
"At first the Japanese watched the train fearfully from a safe
distance, and when the engine began to move they uttered cries of
astonishment and drew in their breath. Before long they were inspecting
it closely, stroking it, and riding on it, and they kept this up
throughout the day."
A century later, the Japanese "bullet train" would be one of the
technological wonders of the world, surpassing anything available in the
United States. But, before this happened, a major cultural
transformation had to take place among the Japanese people. A painful
awareness of their own backwardness spread through Japan. Western
nations in general and the United States in particular were held up as
models to their children. Japanese textbooks urged imitation of Abraham
Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin, even more so than Japanese heroes. Many
laments about their own shortcomings by the Japanese of that era would
today be called "self-hate." But there were no cultural relativists then
to tell them that what they had achieved was just as good, in its own
way, as what others had. Instead, the Japanese overcame their
backwardness, through generations of dedicated work and study, rather
than redefining it out of existence.
Both the British and the Japanese became renowned for their ability
to absorb the ideas and the technology of others and to carry them
forward to higher levels. So did the Scots. At one time, it was common
for Scots to blindly imitate the English, even using an English plow
that proved to be unsuitable for the soil of Scotland. Yet, once they
had absorbed what the English had to offer, the Scots then surpassed the
English in some fields, notably medicine and engineering.
History does not offer blueprints for the present but it does offer
examples and insights. If nothing else, it can warn us against becoming
mesmerized by the heady visions and soaring rhetoric of the moment.
This article was adapted from a speech made by Dr. Sowell at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on June 18, 1998.