One of Thomas Sowell’s earlier books, ‘Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?’ is a book about the Regression Fallacy. Simply put, this fallacy states that it is logically impermissible to claim that a change in the states of affairs X occurred because of a change in policy or behavior, Y. It is a derivative of the famous logical fallacy: Post hoc ergo propter hoc. The book contains many chapters, all questioning the civil rights narrative, claiming that the progressive policies are the social events that changed the ancien regime into the current ‘better’ state of affairs. The fallacy applies to trends more so than to singular events. For example, when we say that bloodletting diminished because of legislation that bans it, we tend to forget that the practice of bloodletting was already diminishing due to the advent of modern medicine. Causality ought to be carefully attributed to any one thing: Generally, we say that A causes B, when A is a sufficient cause for B, and A happens before B. But that is truly not enough — consider this scenario. Imagine being stabbed in the liver. That is sufficient to kill you, and it would, of course, have to happen before your death to have caused it. That is not enough to attribute your death to the shivving. Suppose right after you were shivved, you suffered a shotgun blast to the head. Now, we have to remedy our theory of causality to include both the deterministic thesis, that every event has a cause, and that causality can only be attributed in the absence of more pressing competing sufficient causes.

The book’s first chapter discusses Thomas Sowell’s idea of the overarching narrative: He defines ‘The Civil Rights Vision’ as that vision that seeks to remedy society’s perceived ills through policies and legislation. Nowadays, many people think that the only solution to our problems is legislation, regardless of how much legislation would drain resources and create perverse incentive structures and also unintended consequences. ‘Well, something has to be done about X,’ one would say, not paying careful attention that that something can really be anything and that many things can not only make the situation worse but create more problems that are in greater need of attention.

The middle chapter deals with some of the solutions that turned out to be worse than the problems themselves, like the attempt to create equal opportunities or to enforce an affirmative action scheme. Other solutions concern ‘desegregation’ and busing. Let us consider these solutions individually, starting with the equality of opportunity. People are born unequal, and naturally, they will have unequal opportunities. For us to equalize opportunities, we can either bring the disadvantaged upwards or push the advantaged downwards. But helping those crippled with physical or mental retardation is limited by many factors, that would be best solved at either the level of the individual or the family, or the community. It is impossible to solve such problems at the federal level without severely limiting the freedoms of almost all individuals. Moreover, even if these schemes do not work, they are extremely costly and would drain the resources from the community in such a way that would make it extremely hard to accommodate any upcoming problems. An immediate problem that comes to mind is the problem of lockdowns in the year 2020. They aimed to solve an urgent and pressing problem, which is the transmissivity of a deadly virus at a time when the vaccines were not available. But such lockdowns imposed much greater costs to citizens, and to small businesses, and finally, retarded production in such a way that food production around the world stagnated, resulting in food shortages in the poorest societies in the world. It just might be the case that more people died from starvation in the years 2020 and 2021, than people would ever die from Coronavirus from its inception until the end of time. “11 people are likely dying every minute from hunger, now outpacing COVID-19 fatalities, warns Oxfam.” That is also, without including the cases of deaths from despair, or the allocation of resources into warding off COVID instead of treating cancers in their inception, and so on.

We turn now to the problem of affirmative action: The book harshly criticizes affirmative action on both, ethical, and practical grounds. Affirmative action creates such a burden on employers in areas where it is harder to find local women or blacks, and with the level of expertise needed for the job. Sometimes, all of the applicants might be black or women, and therefore, blacks and women will be overrepresented — basketball players would be one such profession for blacks, and nurses for women. In universities, this means that universities often have to accept students who would not normally qualify just to fill up a quota, leading to the failure of such students and a mismatch of academic choices (these students may be among the top 1% of American students, say, but Harvard’s levels need students who are among the 0.1% or better — such students would have excelled if they were accepted into a slightly easier university, and would have had astonishing careers, had they graduated). On ethical grounds, the problem of affirmative action, even though it cannot accomplish its goals of racial and gender assimilation, or improving the social fabric, is that it enforces a will onto private individuals and private firms, and it encroaches on the freedoms of people. It would be outrageous if your neighbor imposed his will onto yours, but for some mystical reason, it is ethically permissible if a bureaucrat does it. It is also unethical in that it forces nondiscriminant people to discriminate between people based on their race or sex, to achieve a faux sense of vaguely defined social justice.

Similar things can be said about school desegregation and busing. When the Department of Education, say, chooses an optimal amount of persons from category X in any school, the school can no longer shoot for a certain goal. I cannot run a school on integrity and merit if I require that students get an average grade of B+ if I cannot choose my students based on informed expectations and cannot even suspend them if they weren’t up to the academic level required. Moreover, many of the studies done on schooling or education are inherently fallacious since either they flimsily employ ideologies to guide their theories — shoehorning the axioms of the ideology into the conclusion section — or their arguments cannot be proven — say, are built to prove counterfactual claims. The case for busing was quite bizarre and was extremely costly. The idea was to put white, black and Asian children in a bus and go over every house so that the time the kids would be together was maximized. The bus back home would also take hours. So much time, which could have been spent otherwise, was wasted, to force the children of all races to be put together on the bus. As Walter Williams puts it, it was as if there was the notion that the other races would benefit from being exposed to white children. This is, of course, an extremely racist idea in the true sense of the word, and yet it was put as a hypothesis and has failed after costing millions of taxpayer dollars. It’s one of the strangest episodes in the history of the United States.

There were two chapters, by the end of the book, which focused on the special case of blacks and the special case of women, in economics and sociology. Much of the scholarship concerning these two groups was riddled with errors. They are too much to count, so I will select a few at random. Consider the case of the wage gap that women suffered from. The whole idea was that for the same amount of work, women were paid an X% of what men were paid That would not pass the smell test: If employing women for the same job, and for the same amount of work, and for the same quality of work, costs X% of what hiring similar men, then economic pressure would drive those men out of these jobs and women would be hired in their place. That, of course, did not happen. Therefore, this is easily demonstrated to be false using economic theory. But the issue can be further studied: Women and men who were investigated in that survey reported working for over 35+ hours a week. But 36, as well as 60, both fall into the 35+ category. So, the comparison is flawed from the start. That is not to say that women are not paid more or less, but that I cannot conclude this result from the given propositions. Moreover, the same is said about African-American professors. However, upon further analysis, we see that most African American professors hold a degree in education (perhaps %50+), and Caucasians choose more varied disciplines that pay more. Women hold the majority of seats in psychology and sociology departments, whereas men hold most seats in physics and mathematics departments. Jews and Asians might more readily choose the hard physical sciences, and excel the most among their peers. It was erroneous from the start to assume that people’s preferences are not skewed towards their ethnicities, cultures, religious predispositions, and so on. One final example is the case of both Blacks and women, whom the author considers at length in these two chapters: When comparing between averages, medians, and so on, one should understand the limitations of such data. If the limitations are not integrated into one’s analysis, one is bound to fall into all types of errors. If men, on average, are paid more than women, then it might be the case that many women who are by themselves not poor, and who have husbands who work overtime, choose low-paying but flexible jobs to accommodate the family. To include her in the sample, as well as her husband, would by necessity change the average (albeit by a small amount) since we’re not dealing with infinite quantities. The humanities and the social sciences are ill-equipped to process statistical data, and often the surveys don’t accurately represent the data, and in the end, the analysis of the data is not always waterproof which leads to the many errors that plague these disciplines.

I would recommend this book to all those who do not see through the rhetoric of civil rights, and the progressive movement, in hopes that real discussion — unlike the scholars who attacked Sowell (even in his prime) — could take place regarding these issues.

Rochester, New York,
February, 2022.