>> Peter Robinson: Two events in the life of today's guest. He just turned 93, and he just published his latest book, Thomas Sowell on Uncommon Knowledge now. [MUSIC] >> Peter Robinson: Welcome to uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson. After growing up in Harlem, Thomas Sowell served in the United States Marine Corps, then received an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master's degree from Columbia, a doctorate from the University of Chicago.
After teaching at universities that included Cornell, Brandeis, and UCLA, Dr. Sowell became a fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1977. Thomas Sowell is the author of some 40 books, including his newest volume, Social Justice Fallacies and this past spring, he turned 93. Tom, welcome back to Uncommon Knowledge. >> Thomas Sowell: Good being here.
>> Peter Robinson: I can't help thinking, reading your background, if only you'd been a little bit more industrious, you might have been able to make a name for yourself. Social justice Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963, quote, I have a dream. >> [APPLAUSE]. >> Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: My poor little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, I have a dream today.
>> Peter Robinson: And you write, Dr. King's message was equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race. In the years that followed, the goal changed to equal outcomes for groups, what now rose to dominance was the social justice agenda. If the social justice, those backing the social justice agenda could have everything they wanted, what would the country look like? >> Thomas Sowell: We'd be killing each other. >> Peter Robinson: All right, can you give me intermediate steps?
In other words, what is the social justice agenda? What do they want? >> Thomas Sowell: They want everybody to have equal outcomes or as close as they can get to it. Unfortunately, you don't have the preconditions for that, even in the same family. One of the examples I use in the book is among, among five child families, the national Merit finalist is the firstborn just over half the time. That is, more often than the other four siblings combined, the fifth born is 6% of the time.
And so it was even where you have almost ideal conditions. They're born to the same parents, raised under the same roof, and they are not the same. >> Peter Robinson: Because all kinds of things matter, including birth order. >> Thomas Sowell: Absolutely, absolutely. >> Peter Robinson: All right, let's you take on various fallacies here, let's take on a couple of them. The equal chances fallacy, even in a society, I'm quoting you, social justice fallacies.
Even in a society with equal opportunity, people from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things. In American sports, blacks are very overrepresented in professional basketball, whites in professional tennis, and Hispanics in major league baseball. Why is that telling? >> Thomas Sowell: Because the implicit assumption, and sometimes explicit assumption is that in a world where everything was fair, where everyone was treated fairly.
You would have things would be representative of the population demographics as a whole, and all these various activities. Imagine a black kid born in Harlem, and he's born with a body identical that of Rudolf Nureyev, the great ballet dancer. The odds are 1000 to one that he'll become a ballet dancer, much less Rudolf Nureyev. I mean, he would be looked at strangely by all his friends in the neighborhood if he even wanted to do that. >> Peter Robinson: What you mean?
>> Thomas Sowell: He wouldn't even think about it? >> Peter Robinson: Right, so you mean to say that when you tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, you tried out for the pitching position in the Brooklyn Dodgers and they didn't hire you, you were not being discriminated against? >> Thomas Sowell: [LAUGH] Actually, I was trying out off of phrase base. And the real reason I messed up was that my position was center field.
But in order to be a good center fielder, I need hours and hours of practice, and it was a very bad spring. I got very little practice and so I figured, at least I won't go out and make an idiot of myself and send it to feel. So I made an idiot of myself at first base. >> Peter Robinson: Right, chess pieces fallacy, the chess pieces fallacy, explain that one.
>> Thomas Sowell: Well, Adam Smith had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who imagine that they can control a whole society with the ease with which one puts chess pieces where you want them on a chessboard. And so there's this notion of this inert mass of people down there, and then the wonderfully brilliant people at the top who ought to be telling them what to do.
And there's no thought that, first of all, those at the top don't even know the people's individual conditions, who are very different from themselves. And when they try to help, they can make things disastrous. >> Peter Robinson: You discuss a theory of justice, this is under knowledge balance. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: A theory of justice, which is in certain circles, certain circles.
Every university in the country, the philosophy department, political science, you'll get it in sociology. This is the big book on social justice written by John Rawls, philosopher at Harvard. I'm quoting you Tom, Rawls refers to things that society should arrange. You quote him arrange, that's the word he uses. And then Tom Sowell says, interior decorators arrange, governments compel. It is not a subtle distinction, explain that.
>> Thomas Sowell: Well, if you're going to try to get some kind of result, you have to specify through what kinds of mechanism you expect to get that result. And different mechanisms whether it's the government, the market, the Red Cross, whatever. They have their own individual things that they're good at and not so good at and so you can't get the social justice result that you want unless you have the kind of institution that's likely to produce that result.
Politics is not that kind of institution. >> Peter Robinson: And yet they all implicitly rely on government. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: Redistribution of wealth, adjusting, using legal regimes to adjust the proportions of various groups that get certain jobs. They all rely on government and what's distinctive about government is it's the one institution that can send you to jail.
>> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: All right and the point is that's dangerous, we shouldn't want more hands in the power of the politicians. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah, one of the real problems is you have people making decisions for which they pay no price when they're wrong, no matter how high a price other people pay. And right now the homicide rates are beyond anything that were around, let's say, prior to 1960.
And I mentioned 1960 in this case because that's when the Supreme Court remade the criminal law. They discovered rights in the Constitution that no one had noticed for over a century and they were impervious to evidence. >> Peter Robinson: So contrast your neighborhood in Harlem when you were an eight and nine and ten year old boy with what we see in neighborhoods in Chicago today. >> Thomas Sowell: My gosh. People are astonished when I tell them I grew up in Harlem.
I can't remember ever hearing a gunshot and then I've checked with my relatives who grew up in similar neighborhoods in Washington and down in North Carolina. They never heard us gunshot when they were growing up. I remember going back to Harlem some years ago to do some research at high school and I looked out the window and there's this park there near the high school.
And I mentioned in passing that when I lived in Harlem as a kid I would take my dog for a walk in that park and looks of horror came over the students faces. People have no idea how much has retrogressed over the years in the black community and how much of what progress has been made has not been made by politicians or by charismatic leaders. One of the things that drives me crazy are people who cite trends over time without deciding where they're going to start the time period.
For example, as I said, all sorts of wonderful things happened in the 1960s and beyond and especially for the minorities and the poor and so forth. So what I did, I said no. If you still have the data in 1960, we don't know how much was a result of that and how much was a result of other things. That also applies in other things. For one simple one, many people say Rolf native wrote this book in 1965.
And as about the automobile safety and so on, as a result, there were laws by the government and the death rates went down after that which is true in itself. But the death rate went down at a far higher rate prior to his writing the book and this was the continuation of a trend that went back another 20 or 30 years. >> Peter Robinson: Because the market, car manufacturers when it came right down to it had very little interest in getting people killed.
>> Thomas Sowell: Yes, if you kill off your customers your chances are you won't sell as many. >> Peter Robinson: The big fallacy, at least I take this as in many ways the heart of the book, racial fallacies. Now, in this section, in this chapter on racial fallacies, you begin almost all of this book is addressed to the current moment. But in racial fallacies, you start by going back about 100 years to lay out the progressive position in the 1910s and twenties and for some years afterward.
I'm quoting you in addressing the massive increase in immigration from eastern and southern Europe. This begins this massive increase in immigration begins toward the end of the 19th century and carries on through the 1920s. In addressing the massive increase in immigration, progressives claimed that these new immigrants were inherently genetically and therefore permanently inferior.
So your argument is that a century or so ago, progressives believed roughly the same about polish and Italian immigrants that whites in the south had long believed about blacks. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: All right, social justice fallacies, I'm going to read a quotation, then I'd like you to take us through this material. With the passing years, more and more evidence undermined the conclusion of the genetic determinists.
Jews, who had scored low on the 1917 Army mental test, began to score above the national average on various tests as they became a more English-speaking group. A study showed that black orphans raised by white families had significantly higher average IQs than other black children, close quote. So in the century since this, you call them genetic determinants, which is one way of putting it, they were racist. They believed that some races were permanently inferior.
>> Thomas Sowell: Yes, and should be eliminated. >> Peter Robinson: And we've learned that's total nonsense. But even more than that, we've learned that IQ is malleable, is that correct? >> Thomas Sowell: I'm not sure what you mean by malleable. >> Peter Robinson: Well, that is to say that this ranking of. >> Thomas Sowell: The ranking changed. >> Peter Robinson: Jews are stupid in 1917 because they score badly on tests, but these tests are written in English.
Okay. >> Thomas Sowell: And people who spoke English did better on those tests. >> Peter Robinson: Or that blacks have a certain fixed IQ ranking and then you have black orphans raised by white families. In other words, a different cultural. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah, but even before that, that study wasn't done until 1976. >> Peter Robinson: That's a lot. >> Thomas Sowell: But even as of the time of world war one, the data show that black soldiers scored below white soldiers.
And this is one of the reasons it's so. You need people with contrary opinions to be able to be free to attack things. The people who believe that this was genetically determined, they said, that's it. That's the answer and they moved on. Some other people said, let's look at it more closely.
And they discovered that black soldiers from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and one or two other states scored higher than white soldiers from Mississippi, Alabama, etc, etc. And as I mentioned in the book, people's genes do not change when they cross a state line. The problem is when you have people who are crusading for some idea, whatever the idea is, and they find some data that fits what they believe that's the end of the story as far as they're concerned.
Which is fine if there are other people with contrary ideas who will look closer for something that goes the other way. >> Peter Robinson: And then get listened to. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: By the way, you describe in the book the Flynn effect discovered by your friend the late James Flynn. Can you describe that? That's fascinating.
>> Thomas Sowell: Well, the idea of the genetic determinist is that you had to rid the country of these inferior races because otherwise the national IQ would go down over time because the poorer people had more children than the richer people. And so that went on. Here again, the IQ data that the genetic determinists were relying on looked like it supported what they said. But Jem Flynn decided that, well first of all, you have to understand how an IQ score is arrived at.
Whatever number of questions answered correctly is the average at a given time is given the number 100. Because when you do these tests especially with children, if a 6 year old child scores the same as a 12 year old child, that means the 60 year old child is either much brighter than usual or the 12 year old child is a lot less than usual. And so you compare all the 6 year old children and whatever the 6 year old children how many questions they answer correctly, that becomes 100.
And then similarly for all the other ages. >> Peter Robinson: Right. >> Thomas Sowell: So you can do that. And adulthood at some point you simply say adult and non-adult, all right? Now that sounds very innocent in itself, but what happens when people start answering more questions correctly than before, the next generation answers more questions. Now the number of questions answered by the second generation becomes 100.
And so over time, as more and more people, black, white, and whatever, are answering more and more questions correctly, the tests are renorm. So, having an IQ of 100 in 1925 is not the same thing as having an IQ of 100 in 1935 or 1950. >> Peter Robinson: And this is exactly what was going on. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: People of all different kinds were getting smarter, to put it crudely.
>> Thomas Sowell: But once Jim Flynn decided to go back to the raw data, not just take the IQs, how many questions was this? And he discovers that the number of questions being answered correctly was increasing by large amounts, roughly one statistical deviation from one generation to the next. >> Peter Robinson: Which is big. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes, and so the number of questions that the blacks were answering, say around 2000, and having an IQ of 85 would have been an IQ of 104 back in 1947.
And so all this information was being ignored because people took the IQ test as if that was a fixed number of questions I answered correctly. >> Peter Robinson: And so you take the lid off that one the Flynn effect. >> Thomas Sowell: Shows that the opposite was happening, that instead of the national IQ going down, it was going up.
>> Peter Robinson: It was going up and so we have this fascinating discovery that somehow or other, the conditions of modern life that requires more abstract thinking somehow it's bringing in- >> Thomas Sowell: The whole group is rising. >> Peter Robinson: The whole group is rising. All right, from the progressive position a century ago to the progressive position today, racial assertions have ranged from the genetic determinism that we just discussed.
Which proclaimed that race is everything as an explanation of group differences, to the opposite view, that racism is the primary explanation of group differences. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: How did this happen? >> Thomas Sowell: It happened because a lot of people arrived at the same conclusion and they had high IQs and PhDs, and that was the end of the story as far as many people were concerned. >> Peter Robinson: All right.
>> Thomas Sowell: I mean, a high IQ and low information is a very dangerous combination. >> Peter Robinson: I have to, sorry, but you once told me, I'm talking to a Harvard man of course I'm very conscious of this. And you once told me, Peter, the main advantage of earning a Harvard degree is that you never again in all your life have to be intimidated by anyone who has a Harvard degree.
>> Thomas Sowell: [LAUGH] >> Peter Robinson: Listen, Tom, for the most, as I read this book, for the most part, it's objective. It's objective throughout. It's calm. It's analytical. But when you take on this modern, progressive position that racism accounts for anything, there are passages in which you're angry. I felt that there are passages. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: In which there's emotion that is very close to this. So let me just read a little bit.
>> Thomas Sowell: Okay. >> Peter Robinson: Median black family income has been lower than median white family income for generations. But the median per capita income of Asian groups is more than 15,000 a year, higher than the media per capita income of white Americans. Is this the white supremacy we're so often warned about for more than a quarter of a century? In no year has the annual poverty rate of black married couple families, married couple families been as high as 10%.
And in no year has the poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10%. If black poverty is caused by systemic racism, do racists make an exception for blacks who are married? I guess you're allowed to be angry. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes, my lord yes. >> Peter Robinson: So do you have the feeling, when you're addressing this notion that racism accounts for everything? Do you have the feeling that the arguments are subtle, it's persuasive. You can forgive someone for buying that argument.
Or do you have the feeling that it's willful, that the case is so clearly mistaken, that there's a willfulness about it? >> Thomas Sowell: No, I think that people don't look for certain evidence, and therefore they don't find it. And so on the basis of what they know at a given time, this may be very plausible. The problem is that what you really need are other people with different orientation who are skeptical and who will then look for things and find things that are very different from that.
One of the things that I found interesting was the fact that there are various counties in the United States which are among the poorest counties in the country. And six of those counties have a population that ranges from 90% white to 100% white. >> Peter Robinson: Appalachian counties. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: Kentucky. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: Kentucky, and Ohio, as I recall. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah, but mainly it's the hillbilly communities.
>> Peter Robinson: Right. >> Thomas Sowell: And of course, there was that great book that was written in hillbilly elegy. It was on the best seller list for more than a year, consecutively. >> Peter Robinson: JD White is now Senator Vance. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes and these are people who have faced zero racism. >> Peter Robinson: They are white. >> Thomas Sowell: And they are white and zero racism.
And also, back in the thirties, when they did IQ studies, their IQs were not only at the same level as those of blacks, they had the same pattern. Namely, that the young people, whether they were black or hillbilly, would have an IQ very close to the national average at age six. But by the time they were teenagers it just kept going down and down cause it's relative to the other people of that age group and they simply were falling behind. So it was clearly not biological.
It was social but despite that these hillbilly counties had incomes that were not only lower than the national average, they were lower than the average of black incomes for a period of half a century. It may have been longer than that because I only went through half a century but in every study that was done over that half century they scored lower. Their family incomes were lower than the family incomes of blacks.
So obviously there must be other things that cause people to be poor other than racism. >> Peter Robinson: All right people in low income American hillbillies counties already face zero racism because they are virtually all white. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: They have lower incomes than blacks just as you were saying. In other words some behavior patterns seem to pay off. Now this book is dedicated to fallacies, to showing errors in premises and errors in analysis.
It's not dedicated to an alternative explanation. Nevertheless, you've got this argument lurking in here that it's the way people live, it's the way culture patterns. So what are the patterns that pay off? >> Thomas Sowell: Well, my heaven, that's a much larger book than those. >> Peter Robinson: Well, you've got time on your hand. >> Thomas Sowell: [LAUGH], In terms of fallacy for public policy, what does not pay off is having charismatic leaders depending upon government to do things.
Because if you look what has happened to blacks before and after, there was a massive government effort on their behalf. The poverty rate among blacks, if you start in 1940 instead of 1960, cuz 1960 is the magic number for people who are saying, the government, he did all these wonderful things, and blacks advanced because of it. In 1940, the black poverty rate was 87%. By 1960, it was down to 47%. >> Peter Robinson: That's dramatic. >> Thomas Sowell: But from 1960 to 1970, it went down to 30%.
And in 1970, affirmative action was now in place, it went down to 29%. So in the 20 years prior to 1960s, the black poverty rate went down by 40 points, and in the 20 years after 1960, it went down by 18 points. But again, you have the same thing you had with, what was the Rolf Nader effect, you see. >> Peter Robinson: Starting in 1960, you missed this. >> Thomas Sowell: You missed all of that.
>> Peter Robinson: So you've got in this book, this is a point you make again and again in the section on racial fallacies that I started thinking of it. I don't think you use these terms, but this is not an original thought with me. I started thinking of it as a hidden century of black progress. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: From emancipation with the end of the civil war through to 1965, let's say the Civil Rights act of 1964, 65, through the early through the mid 60s.
You've got a century, and you argue black educational attainment rises, black poverty rate drops dramatically. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: And these are people who started with no property, overwhelmingly illiterate. This is from the moment, sort of year zero in 1865 for African-Americans, and they climb. And the other point that you make at a number of places is that the black family is overwhelmingly intact. Right up to 1960, most black people. Go ahead, explain.
>> Thomas Sowell: Yeah, not only do people take credit for things that were not there doing, they overlook the negative things that came in after the 1960s as a result of policy. In 1940, 17% of black children were raised in single parent homes. >> Peter Robinson: 17%. >> Thomas Sowell: 17, I forget the exact date in the 20th century, but after these wonderful reforms were put in, that quadrupled to 68% of black children were being raised in single parent homes.
Now, there's a whole literature on all the bad things that happen to kids who are raised by single parents, whether they are black or white, American or British. The study show the same things. One study said that flawlessness has a bigger effect than even race and poverty.
And certainly, I think back in my own life, I realized how fortunate I was, because even though my biological father died before I was born and I was adopted, I was adopted into a family where I was the only child in a family of four adults. And these are not people who were out having an active social life someplace, the life was there in the home. >> Peter Robinson: They gave you their time.
>> Thomas Sowell: Yes, yes, and I remember years later when I became a parent and like other new parents, I wanted to know, when is the kid supposed to do this, when he's supposed to do that? And I said, how old was I when I started to walk? And this lone surviving member of the family that raised me said, tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you. >> Peter Robinson: [LAUGH], so you had four adults on you.
>> Thomas Sowell: Yes, yes, yes, and that's what, and part of the rise of blacks before was because of things that were done by blacks. Example, I think of a lot was a kid who grew up in Harlem at the same time I did. We were in the same school, lived two blocks from me, and we met many years later by accident on the street in San Francisco, and we talked about the old times.
And one of the things he mentioned to me, because he had gone on, he was making more money than I was, and he would become wealthy, and he lived overseas with servants, and he came back and moved out to the wine country and all that stuff. But one of the things that struck me, he said that he could remember times when he was growing up, when his father would sit at the dinner table watching the children eat and not eat anything himself. Now it's not, that's what.
>> Peter Robinson: And now the father isn't even there. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes, that's right, that's right. So those kinds of things are what do it right. >> Peter Robinson: Social justice fallacies, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major factor in ending the denial of basic constitutional rights to blacks in the South. But there is no point trying to make that the main source of the black rise out of poverty. Nor can the left act as if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was solely their work.
A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the act, close quote. So this is, you're saying something here which is- >> [CROSSTALK]. >> Peter Robinson: It is, it's shocking, it's heretical. You're saying, well, you're saying the Civil Rights Act ensured equality before the law that was overdue, it was necessary, it was just. That's an accomplishment in American history.
>> Thomas Sowell: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: But at about the same time, we get the creation of a vast expansion of the welfare state and it does people harm. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: It harms the African-American family. It leads to fatherless, have I got your argument right? >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: And you want to stand by that? >> Thomas Sowell: And the other thing, too, the Civil Rights Act was not what got blacks into professional occupations.
In the decade prior to 1964, the number of blacks in professional occupations doubled. So this is not the result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. >> Peter Robinson: All right, Tom, a few closing questions here. First of all, may I read to you? This is a note to readers from the New York Times in 2020. The nationwide protests over racism and police violence have prompted a renewed focus on a longstanding debate whether to capitalize the term Black.
We here at the New York Times have talked to more than 100 staff members. The feedback has been thoughtful and nuanced, thoughtful and nuanced, mind you. We've decided to start using uppercase black to describe people and cultures of African origin, close quote. The New York Times capitalizes black, but you don't, Thomas Sowell, how dare you engage in this act of defiance?
>> Thomas Sowell: [LAUGH] It is amazing the things that people can focus on, it may seem to be a big issue to the New York Times. I suspect that people who are being murdered in these big cities, like New York and Chicago, may have a somewhat different view of what is capitalized and not capitalized. >> Peter Robinson: Tom, let me read a few single sentences from social justice fallacies, I'll read a sentence, you tell us what you meant.
Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. >> Thomas Sowell: That is so my gosh, think of the catastrophes of the 20th century, you mentioned genetic determinism. They drew the conclusion from their reasoning that you had to put an end to certain races because they had what they call eugenics, but what was later called genocide.
And so that idea originated with the progressives, and there was a progressive who wrote a book with that theme, which was translated into German, and Hitler called it his Bible. And so this Holocaust,- >> Peter Robinson: You draw a line from the progressive eugenicists to Adolf Hitler? >> Thomas Sowell: He drew the line. He drew the line and wrote a letter, a fan mail letter to the author of that book, saying that that book was his Bible, and we see what that led to.
During the 1920s, in reaction to World War I, which was so bad, the idea arose among the intellectual elites that the way to prevent war was to stop arming. You see, disarmament was the way to avoid a war. No evidence made the slightest impression on them, and they blundered the west into a war that probably would never have happened, because the totalitarian dictatorships, the start of that war.
Were well aware that the United States, Britain, and France had an industrial capacity greater than theirs. And you wouldn't ordinarily attack countries that have greater industrial capacity than yours unless you thought that they were gutless and were foolish enough not to remain armed. And for three years of that war, the Axis powers won every single battle, the western democracies lost in Europe and Asia, wherever they fought.
In 1942, Winston Churchill made a speech in which he said, we have a new experience, we have victory. And when they won that victory in El Alamein in northern Africa, that was the first battle won by the western democracies in a war that was already three years old. And from that point on, especially when the United States came in and the American productive capacity was mobilized, then it turned around.
Today, people who are trying to say, we need to disarm in order to have peace don't understand. In a nuclear age, you're not gonna get three years to figure out what's going on. You're either gonna be ready on the first day of that war, or you are gonna lose it. >> Peter Robinson: In politics, the goal is not truth, but votes. >> Thomas Sowell: Absolutely. >> Peter Robinson: And why does that matter?
>> Thomas Sowell: It matters because if you can get people to believe that their problems are all due to racists, you will get their votes. But if you look at a lot of data on different things, you discover that's not the case. I'm very doubtful if all the races in the country today have half the negative effect on blacks, as the teachers unions have.
Because the teachers unions keep the schools lousy in areas where the people who send their kids to school do not have the option to send them to a private school if the schools are bad. >> Peter Robinson: You make the point that in Harlem, there were charter schools that rent space in public schools, and there were tests. Well, go ahead, do you know what I'm referring to? >> Thomas Sowell: Yes, in fact, there's a school.
I thought the way to figure out the difference between the public school and the charter schools, regularly public schools and the charter schools is to compare them in the same. When both schools are located in the same buildings, so you have comparability, it's the same group, when you. >> Peter Robinson: Same neighborhood, same building. >> Thomas Sowell: Yeah, everything.
And when you do that, what I found was that the charter school kids in these low income black neighborhoods passed the math test at a rate more than six times as high as that of the public school located in the very same building. >> Peter Robinson: And the main difference between the charter school and the public school,- >> Thomas Sowell: Is that public school is run by the teachers unions, the charter schools do not have unions at all in most cases.
One of the most extreme examples was a school that I went to when I was in Harlem. And in that particular school, only 7% of the regular public school kids passed the math test. In the charter school, 100% passed it, they have different levels. Proficient means you passed, and there's a level above that when you've done more than what is necessary for that.
In that particular school, only 2% of the charter school kids scored as low as proficient, the other 98% were in the top bracket, above proficient. >> Peter Robinson: Last question here, last quotation, Tom, one of many things that no individual, no institution, and no society has any control over is the past. >> Thomas Sowell: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: Why does that matter?
>> Thomas Sowell: Because when we talk about groups and we talk about their environment, we usually mean their tangible, current surroundings. But of course, all the groups have had different paths. When the Irish, the Jews, and the Italian immigrants were coming to America, it was common for Italian and Jewish neighborhoods in New York's Lower east side to be represented by Irish politicians, why is that?
Because if you look at what happened before they ever got to America, you can see that the Irish had reasons to organize in a political kind of way. The Jews and the Italians did not, their circumstances, it wouldn't have made any difference. And now, when they get to New York, they may be living in the same neighborhoods and so forth, and the tangible surroundings are the same, but the whole past of the three groups is very different.
And even when the Italians and the Jews rise to prosperity, it's in different industries, it's in different occupations. >> Peter Robinson: And the past means that we should never expect groups to end up evenly distributed across,. >> Thomas Sowell: But even such a thing as age people don't realize, some American ethnic groups are a decade older than others, and some are more than two decades older than others.
So the Japanese, the difference between blacks and white is not the largest difference in the country. The Japanese Americans are higher than Mexican Americans by an even larger amount. Japanese Americans have a median age of 52, Mexican Americans have it somewhere in the twenties, 52 year old people make more money than 20 year old people. >> Peter Robinson: Tom, would you close our discussion by reading a passage from social justice fallacies?
>> Thomas Sowell: Well, if I still agree with it, do we want the mixture of students who are going to be trained to do advanced medical research, to be representative of the demographic makeup of the population as a whole? Or do we want students with the highest probability of finding cures for cancer and Alzheimer's?
Do you want airline pilots chosen for demographic representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly with pilots who are chosen for their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination? Consequences matter, or should matter, more than some attractive or fashionable theory. More fundamentally, do we want a society in which some babies are born into the world as heirs of pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day.
Blighting both their lives, or do we want to at least leave them the option to work things out better in their lives than we have in ours? >> Peter Robinson: Thomas Sowell, author of some 40 books, including Social Justice Fallacies, thank you. >> Thomas Sowell: Thank you. >> Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson. [MUSIC]