Equity: The Thief of Human Potential - Thomas Sowell

foreign I guess the first thing to do is to Define what Cosmic Justice is as distinguished from whatever other kind of Justice we may be familiar with uh traditional Justice I guess we can summarize at least in the American tradition as applying the same rules and the same standards to everybody Cosmic Justice is very different it means equalizing the prospects of everybody and those two things are not only different in concept they're wholly incompatible with one another if you apply the same rules and standards to everybody in baseball Mark McGuire is going to hit 70

home runs and they're going to be other people who will spend an entire career without hitting 70 home runs including people in the Hall of Fame like Luke Appling who twice won the batting championship so if you want the one thing or the other you can go for it but the one thing you cannot do is pursue the two things simultaneously or rather you cannot successfully do that the Supreme Court has been pursuing the two things simultaneously but quite a quite a while leading to a lot of five to four decisions uh and inconsistent decisions

the requirements for the two kinds of Justice are very different the requirement for treating everyone the same is very simple it's mass produced the requirements for Cosmic Justice must be handmade and tailored to each individual case it's much more complex and it requires a much larger amount of government power some third party must intervene to determine whether the outcomes are right whether the prospects are right the very same words have entirely different meanings within these two Frameworks in fact as I mentioned the preface to the book what really set me off a few years ago

to finish it up was a discussion with one of my colleagues at Stanford University who shall be anonymous in deference to the libel laws uh who talked about a Level Playing Field and it became plainfully clear that what he called the Level Playing Field is what I would have called a tilted playing field tilted so as to produce the results that he wanted when we talk about a fair fight that means very different things in these two Within These two Frameworks a fair fight by traditional standards means that both boxers observe the Marcus of Queensbury

rules and the fight is fair whether it ends up in a draw or one-sided beating from the other point of view from the cosmic perspective it's fair only when the two fighters enter the ring with the same prospects of winning John Rawls has uh sort of summarized and epitomized of these two differences he distinguishes what he calls Fair equality of opportunity from merely formal equality of opportunity uh traditional Justice or fairness by roles and standards means simply that people are judged by the same rules but genuine equality of opportunity as he calls it cannot be

achieved by this uh by this method instead he says undeserved inequalities call for redress and obviously someone must have power in order to do that or redress now what's called what I call Cosmic justice has been called by some people's social justice but I think they're unduly modest because they're trying to correct not only the inequities that they see in society they're trying to owe to correct the oversights of God or the defects of the cosmos when some people are born with physical or mental handicaps they want to counterbalance that and of course that's not

always caused by Society so that when moral says that undeserved inequalities he includes all sorts of things and that opens up a very large area for others you can find this perspective on uh justice the rosian perspective in many places from the street corner Community activists right up to the chambers of the Supreme Court for example a few years ago a an admissions director at Stanford University wrote a book in which she pointed out that during all her years as an administrative director she had never required students to submit achievement tests because some of those

students she said true no fault of their own attended schools where they could not have acquired the skills necessary to do well on such tests so she's trying to redress the inequalities and therefore she would simply not require such tests the educational testing service is currently engaging in a renorming of test scores to take into account the social backgrounds and handicaps of the students so the school will then again redress pre-existing inequalities rather than applying the same standards to everybody whenever I hear the Notions of fairness and education I think back to my own education

and I think thank God my teachers were unfair to me when I was a kid growing up in Harlem one of these teachers was a lady named Miss Simon who belonged to what might be called The General Patton School of Education uh I cannot even imagine that Mrs Simon gave a momentous thought to my self-esteem every word that we misspelled in her class had to be written 50 times not in class but as part of our homework and there was always plenty of other homework from her and other teachers and so you misspelled four or

five words and you had quite an evening ahead of you very little chance of listening to the London Ranger now was this fair in rosian terms and the answer is no like many of the children in Harlem at that time I came from a home where nobody had gone beyond Elementary School I still remember what a big fuss was made when I was promoted to the seventh grade because I'd go on further than anyone else uh in later years when I graduated from Harvard there was no such fuss they expected me to fairness was never

an option there was nothing Miss Simon or anybody else could do about the fact that we came from homes where we did not have books and magazines and we were not as familiar with those words as people from other neighborhoods might have been so that was never an option nothing that schools could have done would have changed that it would have been an irresponsible self-indulgence for them to have pretended to make things fair if there's anything worse than unfairness it is make-believe fairness they could like the College Board apparently is trying to do pretended that

we knew more than we did and that would have made them feel good it would not have done much for us instead they forced us to meet standards that were a little harder for us to meet than there were for some other kids but far more necessary for us to meet because that was the only way out of poverty many years later I happened to run into one of the other kids from Harlem who went to that same school at the same time and by now he was a psychiatrist he owned a home in the

Napa Valley and property out there in fact now he's uh retired living overseas with servants while yours truly is still trying to make a living but as we reminisced about things that had happened in the old days and what had happened in between one of the things he mentioned was that over the years his various secretaries had commented on the fact that he seldom misspelled a word I told him that my secretaries had made that very same observation and that if they knew Miss Simon there would be no mystery as to why we did not

misspell words now it so happens I became a high school dropout but what I was taught before I dropped out was enough for me to score higher on the verbal s.a.t than the average Harvard student which may have had something to do with my being admitted to Harvard and in the era before affirmative action was even thought of what if the teachers had all those of that era had been imbued with the present-day conception of fairness where would my school made an IB today on welfare in prison perhaps in a halfway house if we were

lucky and would that not have been an injustice to take individuals capable of independent self-supporting and self-direct being self-directed women and men with pride in their own achievements and turn them into dependence clients supplicants mascots now the primary purpose of mascots is to ministers to symbolize something that makes other people feel good the actual fate of the mascot himself is seldom a major consideration the argument here is not against Real Justice or real equality both of these things are desirable in themselves the only argument is that some versions of these things are simply impossible and

that trying the impossible has costs and real dangers as well after all the people who man the communist movement around the world before the Soviet Union was established didn't devote themselves to this cause for the sake of creating gulags and secret police and territorial aggrandizement they did it because they were seeking social justice but what actually happened shows some of the costs and some of the dangers of that most ordinary Americans still have the traditional conception of Justice and that means the people who have this Cosmic notion of Justice must misrepresent what is happening as

being a violation of traditional Justice and therefore they must for example misrepresent test results as being either arbitrary barriers to advancement or deliberate efforts to perpetuate inequalities as Joseph Trumpeter once said the first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie the next thing he will do and this is my addendum is character assassination those people who disagree with those with the vision of cosmic Justice must be stopped in their view by all means necessary and that of course includes character assassination they must be bought to use a verb of our time now

the people who are the victims of this atmosphere of character assassination are not simply those we're targeted the whole society is a victim because you're not going to be able to attract into the public Arena people who value their privacy who value protecting their families from humiliations uh if in fact this agreements become simply grounds for smears in a sense the people who are caught up in the vision of cosmic Justice are also victims because once having demonized other people they really cannot go back to square one and re-examine the evidence and find out whether

what they've been advocating has been producing the results they want while producing totally different results and so they're locked into the vision they have too much of a stake in it to ever think think about doing something different I have a chapter in the book called The Tyranny of visions about how people how the vision becomes more real to people than any empirical reality a classic example was one described by Paul Johnson Lennon and Johnson pointed out that Lenin although he spoke of himself as a representative of the proletariat had in fact never set foot

in a working class neighborhood and any of the Cities he'd ever been in inside or outside of Russia he had never talked with the workers and had no idea what they believed about anything he also after becoming the ruler of Russia never set foot in Soviet Central Asia which is an area larger than all of Western Europe and in which all these doctrinaire schemes from Moscow were imposed for nearly three quarters of a century with devastating results what he was devoted to was the vision not flesh and blood people a flesh and blood people were

a complication on the road to realize in the vision and as it turned out if he had to kill a few million of those that was just so much too bad and of course we've seen Hitler Mao and others with the same approach now fortunately we have thus far in this country had much more milder versions of this but you can see also this notion of looking for visions and the abstractions that go with those Visions rather than with flesh and blood people the vision of cosmic Justice is very beneficial to the people who hold

it even if it's not beneficial to Those whom it's intended to benefit and I think that's one of the reasons that their people are so reluctant to give it up because they feel wonderful I'm sure that if we had the kinds of teachers that we have today and they had lowered the standards to all of us as we were coming through the school and we all ended up going out into the world for doomed of failure those teachers would have felt wonderful about themselves because they say hey we're not leaning on these poor kids we're

taking into account that they come from backgrounds that are deprived I mean particularly in education this is devastating because it's been shown again and again that in one generation people can do remarkable things with a decent education uh Jaime escalanti did this out in California where the Hispanic kids who scored so high on the calculus test that the educational testing service could not believe it uh so an awful lot can be done language is same thing the whole notion that you have to have bilingualism well it's known from a lot of research that the child's

brain is better able to assimilate languages in those first half dozen years than they will ever be able to do in later life the brain itself metamorphosis and uh if you if you don't learn a foreign language until you're 30 you're never going to speak it as well as if you learned it when you were five and so all these things can be done uh but they're not going to be done as long as third parties think that the purpose of the educational system is to make them feel good about themselves [Music] thank you [Music]