An Ignored 'Disparity': Part II By Thomas Sowell

One of the ways of trying to reduce the vast disparities in economic success, which are common in countries around the world, is by making higher education more widely available, even for people without the money to pay for it.

This can be both a generous investment and a wise investment for a society to make. But, depending on how it is done, it can also be a foolish and even dangerous investment, as many societies around the world have learned the hard way.

When institutions of higher learning turn out highly qualified doctors, scientists, engineers and others with skills that can raise the standard of living of a whole society and make possible a better and longer life, the benefits are obvious.

What is not so obvious, but is painfully true nonetheless, is that colleges and universities can also turn out vast numbers of people with credentials, but with no marketable skills with which to fulfill their expectations. There is nothing magic about simply being in ivy-covered buildings for four years.

Statistics are often thrown around in the media, showing that people with college degrees earn higher average salaries than people without them. But such statistics lump together apples and oranges — and lemons.

A decade after graduation, people whose degrees were in a hard field like engineering earned twice as much as people whose degrees were in the ultimate soft field, education. Nor is a degree from a prestigious institution a guarantee of a big pay-off, especially not for those who failed to specialize in subjects that would give them skills valued in the real world.

But that is not even half the story. In countries around the world, people with credentials but no marketable skills have been a major source of political turmoil, social polarization and ideologically driven violence, sometimes escalating into civil war.

People with degrees in soft subjects, which impart neither skills nor a realistic understanding of the world, have been the driving forces behind many extremist movements with disastrous consequences.

These include what a noted historian called the "well-educated but underemployed" Czech young men who promoted ethnic identity politics in the 19th century, which led ultimately to historic tragedies for both Czechs and Germans in 20th century Czechoslovakia.

It was much the same story of soft-subject "educated" but unsuccessful young men who promoted pro-fascist and anti-Semitic movements in Romania in the 1930s.

The targets have been different in different countries but the basic story has been much the same. Those who cannot compete in the marketplace, despite their degrees, not only resent those who have succeeded where they have failed, but push demands for preferential treatment, in order to negate the "unfair" advantages that others have.

Similar attempts to substitute political favoritism for developing one's own skills and achievements have been common as well in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Fiji, Sri Lanka and throughout Central Europe and Eastern Europe between the two World Wars.

Such political movements cannot promote their agendas without demonizing others, thereby polarizing whole societies. Time and again, their targets have been those who have the skills and achievements that they lack. When they achieve their ultimate success, forcing such people out of the country, as in Uganda in the 1970s or Zimbabwe more recently, the whole economy can collapse.

Against this international background, the current class warfare rhetoric in American politics and ethnic grievance ideology in our schools and colleges, can be seen as the dangerous things they are. Those who are pushing such things may be seeking nothing more than votes for themselves or some unearned group benefits at other people's expense. But they are playing with dynamite.

The semi-literate sloganizing of our own Occupy Wall Street mobs recalls the distinction that Milton Friedman often made between those who are educated and those who have simply been in schools. Generating more such people, in the name of expanding education, may serve the interests of the Obama administration but hardly the interests of America.

An Ignored 'Disparity': Part III By Thomas Sowell

Anyone who has ever been in a Third World country, or even in a slum neighborhood at home, is likely to wonder why there can be such dire poverty among some people, while others are prospering.

Both politicians and intellectuals have tended to have simple answers to that question, even if these simple answers have been different in different eras.

A hundred years ago, the prevailing answer was that some people are innately and genetically inferior. Not only was this answer thundered from political platforms in redneck dialect by politicians in the Jim Crow South, the same message was delivered in cultured and lofty tones from academic podiums in the most prestigious colleges and universities across the country.

Nor was this unique to the United States. In Britain, a study of high-achieving families by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, concluded that the reason for their achievements was genetic superiority. From there it was a short step to seeing various races as genetically superior and inferior.

More ominously, Galton saw those who were inferior as a drag on society who should be eliminated. As often happens when a big idea seizes the imagination of the intelligentsia, their strongest argument is that there is no argument — that "science" has already proved what they believe.

As Sir Francis Galton put it: "there exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race."

The idea that those with different views had only "sentiment" on their side, while he had science, was common among intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.

Eugenics — a term Galton coined — became a crusading creed, and eugenics societies were set up by such stellar intellectuals as John Maynard Keynes, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw in England. In the United States there were 376 college courses devoted to eugenics in American colleges and universities in 1928.

By the end of the 20th century, the pendulum had swung to the opposite end of the spectrum. Now differences in achievements among classes, races or the sexes were seen as being a result of discriminatory treatment.

And, again, as with the intelligentsia of the Progressive era, those with different views were dismissed with a word — often "racist" now, as compared to "sentimental" in the earlier period. But in neither era were views different from the crusading creed of the day seriously engaged.

In our supposedly more enlightened time, it became dangerous even to express differing views on the subject on leading college and university campuses.

A very fundamental question was seldom asked, in either the earlier or the later period: Was there ever any realistic reason to expect the same achievements among races, classes or other subdivisions of the human species?

Could we really have expected Eskimos to have the same ability to grow pineapples as the people of Hawaii had? Could the Bedouins of the Sahara really know as much about fishing as the Polynesians of the Pacific? Could the people of the Himalayas have the same seafaring skills as people living in ports around the Mediterranean?

On a more general level, could people living in isolated mountain valleys realistically be expected to develop their own intellectual potential as fully as people living in cities that were international crossroads of commerce, cultures and ideas from around the world?

When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the 15th century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level. Isolation and backwardness have gone together in many parts of the world, regardless of the race of the people involved.

Historical happenstances — the fact that the Romans invaded Western Europe but not Eastern Europe, for example — left a legacy of written languages in Western Europe that people in Eastern Europe did not have until centuries later.

But the innumerable factors affecting human achievements are not only complex and hard to untangle, they offer neither politicians nor intellectuals the opportunity to simply be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. Factors which present no opportunity to star in a moral melodrama have often been ignored in favor of factors that do.

An Ignored 'Disparity': Part IV by Thomas Sowell

Different histories, geography, demography and cultures have left various groups, races, nations and civilizations with radically different abilities to create wealth.

In centuries past, the majority population of various cities in Eastern Europe consisted of people from Western Europe — Germans, Jews and others — while the vast majority of the population in the surrounding countrysides were Slavs or other indigenous peoples of the region.

Just as Western Europe was — and is — more prosperous than Eastern Europe, so Western Europeans living in Eastern European cities in centuries past were more prosperous than the Slavs and others living in the countrysides, or even in the same cities.

One of the historic advantages of Western Europe was that it was conquered by the Romans in ancient times — a traumatic experience in itself, but one which left Western European languages with written versions, using letters created by the Romans. Eastern European languages developed written versions centuries later.

Literate people obviously have many advantages over people who are illiterate. Even after Eastern European languages became literate, it was a long time before they had such accumulations of valuable written knowledge as Western European languages had, due to Western European languages' centuries earlier head start.

Even the educated elites of Eastern Europe were often educated in Western European languages. None of this was due to the faults of one or the merits of the other. It is just the way that history went down.

But such mundane explanations of gross disparities are seldom emotionally satisfying — least of all to those on the short end of these disparities. With the rise over time of an indigenous intelligentsia in Eastern Europe and the growing influence of mass politics, more emotionally satisfying explanations emerged, such as oppression, exploitation and the like.

Since human beings have seldom been saints, whether in Eastern Europe or elsewhere, there were no doubt many individual flaws and shortcomings among the non-indigenous elites to complain of.

But those shortcomings were not the fundamental reason for the economic disparities between Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans. More important, seeing those Western European elites in Eastern Europe as the cause of the economic disparities led many Eastern Europeans into the blind alley of ethnic identity politics, including hostility to Germans, Jews and others — and a romanticizing of their own cultural patterns that were holding them back.

What happened in Eastern Europe, including many tragedies that grew out of the polarization of groups in the region, has implications that reach far beyond Europe, and in fact reach all around the world, where similar events have produced similar polarizations and similar historic tragedies.

Today, in America, many denounce the black-white gap in economic and other achievements, which they attribute to the same kinds of causes as those to which the lags of Eastern Europeans have been attributed. Moreover, the persistence of these gaps, years after the civil rights laws were expected to close them, is regarded as something strange and even sinister.

Yet the economic disparities between Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans remains to this day greater than the economic disparities between blacks and whites in America — and the gap in Europe has lasted for centuries.

Focusing attention and attacks on people who have greater wealth-generating capacity — whether races, classes or whatever — has had counterproductive consequences, including tragedies written in the blood of millions. Whole totalitarian governments have risen to dictatorial power on the wings of envy and resentment ideologies.

Intellectuals have all too often promoted these envy and resentment ideologies. There are both psychic and material rewards for the intelligentsia in doing so, even when the supposed beneficiaries of these ideologies end up worse off. When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Both politicians and intellectuals have made their choice.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Sara Palin Weighs In On Newt And Media

 

Palin: "Dumb Arses" In Media Overplayed Their Hand With Gingrich

Sarah Palin talks about the media and Newt Gingrich on Sean Hannity's radio show: “I call them ‘dumb arses. They think by trotting out this old Gingrich divorce interview — that’s old news and it does feature this disgruntled ex- that claimed that it would destroy a campaign. All this does is, Sean, is incentivize conservatives and independents who are so sick of the politics of personal destruction because it’s played so selectively by the media."

Savage Defends US Marines

    Michael Savage: Don't punish brave Marines

 Most of the "men" in the news media — the same journalists orchestrating the attack on Marines who allegedly urinated on Taliban terrorists they killed in battle — have never even been in a fistfight, let alone a firefight. And yet here they are, piling on the real men who have the guts to go into combat against 15th century radical Islamist throwbacks.

The piling on our Marines has done far more damage to the morale of our fighting men than our soldiers' actions. And yet we hear Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos calling the act "inconsistent with (our) high standards of conduct," then whining about our commitment to "upholding the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war and our own core values."

This in the face of Taliban atrocities — car-bombings, beheadings, the murder of women and children — that flout the Geneva Conventions and yet are routinely ignored by the media and our military higher-ups, who also downplayed the Fort Hood massacre by Maj. Nidal Hasan.

Our fighting men must be supported at all costs at a time like this. How can we in good faith ask them to put their lives on the line against the vilest, most extreme of enemies while at the same time we attack them in the press at every turn?

I'm not saying that what these Marines did isn't a violation of military code. But unlike murderers who are granted appeal after appeal, these Marines have already been tried and found guilty in the media.

The desecration of war dead is universally condemned, but it is as old as war itself. These boys are not the devils. The Taliban fighters are the devils.

Our Marines are heroes. They should be rewarded for having the guts to go into combat, not punished for stepping over the line.

It's the latest attempt by the liberal news media and the increasingly timid military brass to destroy the few, the proud, the brave, the Marines. Remember, "to err is human, to forgive divine."

Michael Savage is a conservative radio talk show host and author. His most recent book is Abuse of Power.

Commentary

The Savage Man telling it like it is

Mr.Speaker Goes Off On CNN

Newt Gingrich mauls CNN’s John King for asking about ‘open marriage’

Thursday's Republican debate in Charleston, South Carolina started off with a bang when CNN moderator
John King asked Newt Gingrich if he wanted to respond to allegations made by his second wife that he asked for an open marriage.
"No," Gingrich retorted to audience applause. "But I will."
"The destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that," Gingrich said. You can watch video of his complete answer above.


Commentary

Newt telling it like it is I love it CNN be damed and ABC (All Bull Crap)

ABC Interviews Speaker's Ex

ABC to air interview with Gingrich ex-wife

By Associated Press
Thursday, January 19, 2012

NEW YORK — ABC News interviewed Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich's second wife — with whom he's said he has no relationship — and is likely to air the segment Thursday on "Nightline," an ABC News executive told The Associated Press.

That's two days before the South Carolina primary, where the former House speaker is trying to topple GOP front-runner Mitt Romney by casting himself as the more conservative option.

The ABC News executive did not indicate what the ex-wife, Marianne Gingrich, said in the interview. The executive spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans for airing the interview were tentative.

The interview, should it air before Saturday's primary, would shine a spotlight on a part of Gingrich's past that could turn off Republican voters in a state filled with religious and cultural conservatives who may cringe at Gingrich's two divorces and acknowledged infidelity.

Marianne Gingrich has said Gingrich proposed to her before the divorce from his first wife was final in 1981, and they were married six months later. Marianne's marriage to Gingrich ended in divorce in 2000, and Gingrich admitted he'd already taken up with Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide who would become his third wife. The speaker who pilloried President Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky was himself having an affair at the time.

Commentary

It's all about the timing by the establishment liberal media right before South Carolina primary this week