The Invincible Dogma
by Thomas Sowell
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by Thomas Sowell: The
Death of Mrs. G
A long-standing
legal charade was played out again recently, when Federal Express
paid $3 million to settle an employment discrimination case brought
by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Federal Express
was accused of both racial discrimination and sex discrimination.
FedEx denied it.
Why then did
they pay the $3 million? Because it can cost a lot more than $3
million to fight a discrimination case. Years ago, the Sears department
store chain spent $20 million fighting a sex discrimination charge
that took 15 years to make its way through the legal labyrinth.
In the end, Sears won – if spending $20 million and getting nothing
in return can be called winning.
Federal Express
was apparently not prepared to spend that kind of money and that
kind of time fighting a discrimination case. The net result is that
the government and much of the media can now claim that race, sex
and other discrimination are rampant, considering how many anti-discrimination
cases have been "won."
At the heart
of these legal charades is the prevailing dogma that statistical
disparities in employment – or mortgage lending, or anything else
– show discrimination. In both the Federal Express case and the
earlier Sears case, statistical differences between the mix of the
workforce and the population mix were the key evidence presented
to show discrimination.
In the Sears
case, there was not even one woman who worked in any of the company's
900 stores who claimed to have been discriminated against. It was
all a matter of statistics – and of the arbitrary dogma that statistical
disparities show discrimination.
Once statistical
disparities have been demonstrated, the burden of proof shifts to
the employer to prove his innocence, contrary to centuries of legal
tradition that the burden of proof in on the accuser.
No burden of
proof whatever is put on those who argue as if there would be a
random distribution of racial and other groups in the absence of
discrimination.
Happenstances
may be random but performances seldom are. Most people are right-handed
but, among major league hitters with lifetime batting averages of
.330 and up, there have been 15 left-handed batters and only 5 right-handed
batters since the beginning of the 20th century. All the best-selling
beers in the United States were created by people of German ancestry.
Anyone who follows professional basketball knows that most of the
leading stars are black.
Some years
ago, a study of National Merit Scholarship finalists found that
more than half were first-born children, even in five-child families.
Jews are less than one percent of the world's population but they
won 14 percent of the Nobel Prizes in literature and the sciences
during the first half of the 20th century, and 29 percent during
the second half.
It would be
no problem at all to fill this whole column – or this entire page
– with examples from around the world of gross statistical disparities
in outcomes, in situations where discrimination was not involved.
But those who take the opposite view – that numbers show discrimination
– do not have to produce one speck of evidence to back up that sweeping
conclusion.
Human
beings are not random events. Individuals and groups have different
histories, cultures, skills and attitudes. Why would anyone expect
them to be distributed anywhere in a pattern based on statistical
theories of random events? Much less make the absence of such a
pattern become a basis for multimillion dollar lawsuits?
However little
evidence or logic there may be behind the belief that an absence
of random distribution shows discrimination, there are nevertheless
strong incentives for some people to cling to that belief anyway.
Those who lag behind – whether educationally, economically or otherwise
– have every incentive to think of themselves as victims of those
who are more successful.
Those who want
their votes have every incentive to go along, or even to actively
promote that idea. So do those who want to see issues as moral melodramas,
starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces
of evil. The net result is an invincible dogma – and a polarized
country.
April
4, 2012
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
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