BuM: Thomas Sowell on Equality
Michael Barnett OAM
Thomas Sowell on Equality
Moral and mental clarity on a much-misunderstood concept:
In certain senses we are all equal: we are all equal in God’s eyes, being made in his image, deserving dignity and respect. And we should all be equal under the law. But in so many areas we are not all equal, and trying to force equality only results in inequality and a loss of freedom.
As Thomas Jefferson is said to have put it: “Nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.” Equality of opportunity is one thing, while equality of outcomes is quite another, given that we all differ in terms of desires, temperament, skills, aptitude, ability, work ethic, motivation, and so on.
The world famous Black American economist and social commentator Thomas Sowell has written extensively on such matters. Let me share a number of brief quotes from various sources, and then offer some extended quotes.
“The fundamental difference between equal treatment and equal performance is repeatedly confused. In performance terms, virtually no one is equal to anyone. The same individual is not even equal to himself on different days.”
“If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.”
“Equality of rights does not mean equality of results. I can have all the equal treatment in the world on a golf course and I will not finish within shouting distance of Tiger Woods.”
“If you cannot achieve equality of performance among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions?”
“If you believe in equal rights, then what do ‘women’s rights,’ ‘gay rights,’ etc. mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.”
“I’ve been doing studies now for 20 years of programs designed to increase equality—they increase inequality. Because even when the programs are designed for disadvantaged groups, they help the affluent members of the disadvantaged groups, while the lower members of those groups fall further behind than ever before.”
“Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.”
“Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal.”
“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.”
“Equality before the law is a fundamental value in a decent society. But equality of treatment in no way guarantees equality of outcomes. On the contrary, equality of treatment makes equality of outcomes unlikely, since virtually nobody is equal to somebody else in the whole range of skills and capabilities required in real life. When it comes to performance, the same man may not even be equal to himself on different days, much less at different periods of his life.”
Fuller quotes
Critics of disparities often either explicitly or implicitly call for some kind of approximation of equality. But when we speak of ‘equality’ among human beings, what do we mean? We certainly cannot all sing like Pavarotti, think like Einstein or land a commercial airliner safely in the Hudson River like pilot ‘Sully’ Sullenberger. Clearly we cannot all be equally capable of doing concrete things. In terms of specific capabilities in real life, a given man is not even equal to himself at different stages of life—sometimes not even on different days—much less equal to all others who are in varying stages of their own lives.
Even if we all had equal potential at birth, or at conception, too many factors are at work—and at work differently from one individual to another, even within the same family—for us to develop the same capabilities to the same degree. If we cannot have equality of capabilities, then we are left to define equality in some other way. These might include equality of rewards, so breaking the link between productivity and reward has had an unpromising track record in many times and places. Rewarding people for their merit is another possibility, though not one free of pitfalls. (Discrimination and Disparities, pp. 187-188)
Much of what is said in the name of “social justice” implicitly assumes three things: (1) the seemingly invincible fallacy that various groups would be equally successful in the absence of biased treatment by others, (2) the cause of disparate outcomes can be determined by where statistics showing the unequal outcomes were collected, and (3) if the more fortunate people were not completely responsible for their own good fortune, then the government—politicians, bureaucrats and judges—will produce either efficiently better or morally superior outcomes by intervening.
When we look at facts in the real world, we repeatedly find skewed distributions of outcomes, whether among human beings or in nature. But, when we look at social visions or political agendas, we find equal outcomes to be the prevailing presumption, and the norm to be imposed by government policies when that presumption is not met. If some social categories of people are not equally represented in particular occupations, institutions or income brackets, that is regarded as someone’s fault that the supposedly natural equality of outcomes has been thwarted. This is the seemingly invincible fallacy behind much that is said and done. (Discrimination and Disparities, pp. 215-216)
Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? by Sowell, Thomas (Author) 
Those who carry the civil rights vision to its ultimate conclusion see no great difference between promoting equality of opportunity and equality of results. If there are not equal results among groups presumed to have equal genetic potential, then some inequality of opportunity must have intervened somewhere, and the question of precisely where is less important than the remedy of restoring the less fortunate to their just position. The fatal flaw of this kind of thinking is that there are many reasons, besides genes and discrimination, why groups differ in their economic performances and rewards. Groups differ by large amounts demographically, culturally, and geographically – and all talk of these differences have profound effects on incomes and occupations. (Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, p. 42)
The battle for civil rights was fought and won – at great cost, many years ago. Like any fundamental human achievement, these rights cannot be taken for granted and must be safeguarded. But civil rights are not protected or enhanced by the growing practice of calling every issue raised by “spokesmen” for minority, female, elderly, or other groups, “civil-rights” issues. The right to vote is a civil right. The right to win is not. Equal treatment does not mean equal results. Everything desirable is not a civil right. Nor are the institutions or methods that produced civil rights likely to produce all the other things required to advance minorities, women, or others. (Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, p. 109)
Regardless of the extent to which economic equality can or cannot be achieved or approximated, making equality a moral touchstone has meant fomenting resentments of others who are better off, in whatever way and for whatever reasons. In addition to worldwide examples of resentments toward high-achieving minorities, even when they created businesses and industries where these had not existed before, benefiting the larger society around them, there has also been hostility toward fellow members of lagging groups who are acquiring educational and other prerequisites for overcoming their lags. This has been common on both sides of the Atlantic, among low-income whites in England and among ghetto blacks in the United States, among others.
Equality of outcomes as a fact in the real world is not what poses a danger. It is the perpetually frustrated attempts to achieve this unachievable goal which produce such poisonous by-products as unprovoked lashing out at people who have more….
There is of course no need to promote Inequality of achievement or reward, nor to accept it as anything other than a fact of life, resulting from geographic, cultural and other influences, some within human control and some not. However commendable the desire to extend more opportunities to those born into less promising circumstances, what is less commendable— indeed, irresponsible— is to pretend to have more power than we do to create equality of achievement for all! What is truly reprehensible are attempts to pull down those who have achieved more, instead of facilitating the rise of those less fortunate who seek to rise through their own achievements. The idea that those who have less can be presumed to be victims of those who have more is an idea whose consequences have a worldwide history written in the blood of millions. (Wealth, Poverty and Politics, pp. 421-422)
In other words, if everyone were equal in their many capabilities, the whole species would be no more capable or insightful or resistant to diseases than one individual. Our chances of surviving or progressing would be a lot less than they are now. Even the enjoyment we get from watching Tiger Woods play golf or Pavarotti sing would be lost, for we would all be mediocrities in golf and singing and a thousand other things.
A recent book on the publishing industry showed that 63 out of 100 best-sellers had been written by just six authors. It is not uncommon in baseball for just two players to hit more than half the home runs hit by the whole team.
Ironically, the fact that nearly two-thirds of the best-sellers were written by the likes of Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel was revealed by a man who was one of the founders of the left-wing New York Review of Books. Yet one of the key assumptions of the left is that statistical disparities are suspicious, if not sinister, especially if these are differences in income and wealth.
But if people differ radically in performance, why is it surprising that they also differ radically in the rewards they receive? And if we are determined to equalize, can we equalize upward or only downward? Can you make a mediocre golfer another Tiger Woods or only penalize Tiger Woods for being better?
Where the desire for equality turns from a quixotic hope to a dangerous gamble is in politics. To create even the semblance of “equality” [of results] requires a concentration of power in the hands of political leaders. And, as the history of the 20th century has shown repeatedly and tragically, in countries around the world, once concentrated power is put into the hands of political leaders, they can use it for whatever purpose they have in mind — regardless of what others had in mind when they granted them that power.
Becoming the pawns of politicians is a high price to pay for letting demagogues stir up our envy and beguile us with promises to equalize. (Controversial Essays, pp. 252-253)
Anyone who questions or opposes equality is almost certain to be regarded as someone who believes in inequality – in “inferiority” and “superiority.” But all of these concepts suffer from the same problem: For equality, inferiority, or superiority to have any meaning, what is being compared must first be commensurable. A symphony is not equal to an automobile. Nor is it inferior or superior. They are simply not commensurable.
Much of the emotional struggle to make women “equal” to men suffers from the same problem. So long as women have babies and men do not, the many ramifications of that difference cannot be ignored and nothing can make them commensurable. However unisex one’s language may be, women are seldom very good men and men cannot be women at all.
We may regard the happiness and well-being of women as equally important as the happiness and well-being of men—and probably most people do, despite shrill cries to the contrary—but that is a statement about our value system, not about some empirical reality of women and men.
With many groups as well, the fundamental difference between equal treatment and equal performance is repeatedly confused. In performance terms, virtually no one is equal to anyone. The same individual is not equal to himself on different days.
Much of the moral heartburnings, social engineering, and legal entanglements of our times comes from the simple fact that statistics for different groups are different in different occupations, institutions, or income levels. It is too often assumed automatically that only different treatment before the fact can explain different results after the fact.
This dogma is so deeply imbedded that it seems almost Utopian to attempt a rational discussion of it. Yet it was wholly arbitrary to have expected performance equality in the first place – and compounded pigheadedness to want to punish someone because it didn’t happen. But there is a whole class of people who believe that when the world doesn’t conform to their theory, that shows that something is wrong with the world. (The Thomas Sowell Reader, pp. 51-52)
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