Discrimination and Disparities by Tomas Sowell.
I just finished reading Thomas Sowell's book Discrimination and Disparities. It is the second book I have read by this author; the first was Basic Economics. I would recommend them both.
The main theme of this book is that disparities among people groups arise from many reasons. He argues that malevolent discrimination exists but is by no means the only or even the dominant factor creating disparities in wealth, and position in society. The book is filled with scholarly references which include examples from history and statistical analyses going back a century.
Thomas Sowell, is one of the leading intellectuals in America today, and one of the few not parroting Neo-Marxist ideology. He writes in a measured, deliberate, non-ideological style, once the standard in the best American academic writing. Much of what he writes flies in the face of mainstream thinking about discrimination. He points out that some of the most successful people groups have been those most discriminated against such as the Chinese in Malaysia, the Jews in Europe and the Indians in Uganda. He refutes both those who say that the level of performance in a society is due to innate genetics and those who say it is due to prejudicial treatment. Instead he goes through the multiple factors that lead to success or failure, including geography, culture, and incentives and disincentives to work and achieve built into a society. He points out that Black American families went from 80% one parent families in the 1940s to 40% in the 1990s, and he lays the blame squarely on the the revamped welfare system design supposedly to help them that was put in place in the 1960s. He writes that people have always sorted themselves into groups based on commonalities, and no society has ever produced a system where all groups are represented equally in all places in the economy.
This book will make you take a second look at things you never questioned before.
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