By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are
studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people
born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between
upward "mobility," defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility
defined as actually having risen.
That distinction is seldom even mentioned in most of the
studies. It is as if everybody is chomping at the bit to get ahead, and the
ones that don't rise have been stopped by "barriers" created by
"society."
When statistics show that sons of high school dropouts
don't become doctors or scientists nearly as often as the sons of Ph.D.s, that
is taken as a sign that American society is not "fair."
If equal probabilities of achieving some goal is your
definition of fairness, then we should all get together -- people of every
race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual preference
-- and stipulate that life has never been fair, anywhere or any time in all the
millennia of recorded history.
Then we can begin at last to talk sense.
I know that I never had an equal chance to become a great
ballet dancer like Rudolph Nureyev. The thought of becoming a ballet dancer
never once crossed my mind in all the years when I was growing up in Harlem. I
suspect that the same thought never crossed the minds of most of the guys
growing up on New York's lower east side.
Does that mean that there were unfair barriers keeping us
from following in the footsteps of Rudolph Nureyev?
A very distinguished scholar once mentioned at a social
gathering that, as a young man, he was not thinking of going to college until
someone else, who recognized his ability, urged him to do so.
Another very distinguished scholar told me that, although
his parents were anti-Semitic, it was the fact that he went to a school with
many Jewish children that got him interested in intellectual matters and led
him into an academic career.
All groups, families and cultures are not even trying to
do the same things, so the fact that they do not all end up equally represented
everywhere can hardly be automatically attributed to "barriers"
created by "society."
Barriers are external obstacles, as distinguished from
internal values and aspirations -- unless you are going to play the kind of
word games that redefine achievements as "privileges" and treat an
absence of evidence of discrimination as only proof of how diabolically clever
and covert the discrimination is.
The front page of a local newspaper in northern
California featured the headline "The Promise Denied," lamenting the
under-representation of women in computer engineering. The continuation of this
long article on an inside page had the headline, "Who is to blame for
this?"
In other words, the fact that reality does not match the
preconceptions of the intelligentsia shows that there is something wrong with
reality, for which somebody must be blamed. Apparently their preconceptions
cannot be wrong.
Women, like so many other groups, seem not to be
dedicated to fulfilling the prevailing fetish among the intelligentsia that
every demographic group should be equally represented in all sorts of places.
Women have their own agendas, and if these agendas do not
usually include computer engineering, what is to be done? Draft women into
engineering schools to satisfy the preconceptions of our self-anointed saviors?
Or will a propaganda campaign be sufficient to satisfy those who think that
they should be making other people's choices for them?
That kind of thinking is how we got ObamaCare.
At least one of the recent celebrated statistical studies
of social mobility leaves out Asian Americans. Immigrants from Asia are among a
number of groups, including American-born Mormons, whose achievements totally
undermine the notion that upward mobility can seldom be realized in America.
Those who preach this counterproductive message will
probably never think that the envy, resentment and hopelessness they preach,
and the welfare state they promote, are among the factors keeping people down.
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