A Potential Worthy Successor To Thomas Sowell?
/In Monday’s post on the subject of the futility of attempting to use government coercion and spending programs to equalize economic outcomes between and among ethnic groups, I referred to some of the work of Thomas Sowell on that issue. Readers will not be surprised to learn that I would put Sowell right at the top among the greatest economists of my lifetime. He’s not only highly insightful, but also extraordinarily prolific.
I’d like to say that I’ve read most of Sowell’s works, but that would be impossible. Here on his own website he has compiled a list of his writings. There are 46 (!) full length books, and then another ten books of collected essays. He helpfully provides links if you want to buy one or a few. Although he announced a “retirement” over three years ago at the age of 86, he has written several new books since then, including one, Charter Schools and Their Enemies, that is just out, and that he is currently promoting. He’s still going strong at the age of 90.
Until his “retirement,” Sowell had a syndicated column that appeared frequently in hundreds of newspapers. One of the things he was best known for in the columns was rummaging around in government statistics to come up with various data to puncture holes in the notion that all differences in economic outcomes among ethnic groups must be blamed solely on privilege, racism or oppression. Examples included things like the economic success of Japanese Americans in the face of overt discrimination against them; or the huge over-representation of Jews among doctors and lawyers; or the predominance of African Americans among highly-paid professional athletes.
So now that Sowell has moved on, at least for the moment, to the charter school issue, who is going to pick up the job of searching through the statistics to see whether they really support — versus contradict — the narrative of racism and oppression? You might say that this task would be perfect for the Manhattan Contrarian, and I’m happy to pitch in. But if you think about it, you wil realize that this particular task is one for which a “person of color” (or maybe now it’s a “BIPOC”) has an obvious comparative advantage.
In the opinion section of the New York Post from Sunday there appears a piece occupying two full pages with the headline “The Fallacy of White Privilege.” The author is Rav Arora, who identifies himself as a 19 year old Sikh, brought by his parents to Canada from India at the age of 4. The family started in Canada with nothing (“[M]y family suffered tremendous economic hardships and cultural challenges. My father drove a taxi at night and my mom worked many menial jobs as a cook, housecleaner, barista and motel cleaner.”) but is now economically successful just 15 years later.
After going through his personal background, Arora then proceeds to start citing various government statistics that sharply undermine the “white privilege” narrative. Examples:
“[T]he concept of white privilege can’t explain why several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. Take Japanese Americans, for example: For nearly four decades in the 20th century (1913 – 1952), this group was legally prevented from owning land and property in over a dozen American states. Moreover, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. But by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores and incarceration rates.”
“According to median household income statistics from the US Census Bureau, several minority groups substantially out-earn whites. These groups include Pakistani Americans, Lebanese Americans, South African Americans, Filipino Americans, Sri Lankan Americans and Iranian Americans (in addition to several others). Indians, the group I belong to, are the highest-earning ethnic group the census keeps track of, with almost double the household median income of whites.”
“[S]everal black immigrant groups such as Nigerians, Barbadians, Ghanaians and Trinidadians & Tobagonians have a median household income well above the American average. Ghanian Americans, to take one example, earn more than several specific white groups such as Dutch Americans, French Americans, Polish Americans, British Americans and Russian Americans. Do Ghanaians have some kind of sub-Saharan African privilege?”
“[S]uicide rates are disproportionately high among the white population. In 2018, whites had the highest suicide rate of 16.03 per 100,000. The New York Times has reported that whites are dying faster than they are being born in a majority of US states — in large part due to high rates of substance abuse and suicide. In comparison, black Americans had a suicide rate less than half of whites (6.96). . . .”
“If we look at health outcomes reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we find that African Americans are less likely than whites to die of several health conditions such as bladder cancer, leukemia, esophageal cancer, lung cancer, . . . brain cancer and skin cancer, to take a few arbitrary examples. But no one in their right mind would protest any ‘health privilege’ enjoyed by African Americans in these instances.”
There are several more such examples if you read the full article. Note that Mr. Arora gives links back to his sources for the data, which include the Census Bureau, CDC, and (in one instance) the New York Times. As someone who often goes looking for statistics such as these, I can tell you that the government does not have user-friendly web sites, and a project like this can take a substantial amount of work, even though the data are in theory readily available to the public.
So welcome, Mr. Rav Arora, to the fray of trying to confront the ridiculous progressive narratives of privilege and oppression with actual facts and data. You are a potential worthy successor to the great Thomas Sowell. Of course, you have a huge amount of work to do to match Sowell’s 46 books and hundreds of columns, but you are off to a terrific start.
Meanwhile, don’t look for the purveyors of the “white privilege” narrative to deal any time soon with data such as the higher median incomes of Nigerian and Ghanaian Americans over white Americans. They think that they can just get away with ignoring such facts. And maybe, for now, they can.