MMMMMM
07-24-2004, 09:41 AM
Two very interesting articles:
"The grand fallacy
Thomas Sowell (archive)
July 22, 2004 | Print | Send
A record-breaking new class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart claims that this retail chain discriminates against women, for which of course vast millions of dollars are being demanded. The New York Times aptly summarized the case -- "about 65 percent of the company's hourly-paid workers are women, but only 33 percent of its managers are."
The grand fallacy of our times is that various groups would be equally represented in institutions and occupations if it were not for discrimination. This preconception has undermined, if not destroyed, the crucial centuries-old legal principle that the burden of proof is on the accuser.
Wal-Mart is only the latest in a long series of employers who have been hit with charges of discrimination on the basis of statistical differences among members of their workforce -- differences between women and men in this case.
Back during the 1980s a similar charge was brought against Sears, even though no one could find a single woman in all the hundreds of Sears stores who had been discriminated against -- just numbers that were different as between women and men.
When you broke down the numbers, it turned out that women were not equally represented among people who sold automotive equipment or construction materials. It also turned out that many women had no interest in selling automotive equipment or construction materials, and had turned down opportunities to do so.
In many other situations, women have avoided jobs that demand such long hours of work, or so much travel, that it would make taking care of their children virtually impossible. The biggest difference in income is between married women and everyone else. Women who never married have long held their own economically.
The most blatant fact about male-female differences is often ignored by those on the hunt for discrimination: Women have babies.
That usually means interruptions in careers and different choices of careers beforehand, because some occupations can stand interruptions better than others.
It is hardly surprising that women work part-time more often than men, drop out of the labor force more often than men, specialize in a different mix of jobs, and major in a different mix of subjects in college and postgraduate education.
Seldom are the data sufficiently detailed to permit comparisons of women and men who are the same on all the variables that matter. But the more detailed the data, the higher is a woman's income relative to that of a comparable man, sometimes surpassing that of men.
Male-female differences in incomes and occupations rose or fell throughout the 20th century as women's age of marriage and childbearing rose and fell. But such mundane facts carry little weight with lawyers or social crusaders on the hunt for discrimination.
Once a lawsuit is under way, the pressure is on the accused employer to settle, rather than risk bad publicity that could hurt profits. And, once they settle, that is taken as proof of guilt, no matter what anybody says.
People without the slightest knowledge of economics or the slightest experience running a business will boldly assert that women are paid only 75 percent -- or some other percent -- of what men make for doing exactly the same work.
Think about it. If an employer could hire four women for the price of hiring three men, why would he ever hire men at all?
Even if the employer was the world's biggest sexist, he could still not survive in business if his competitors were getting one-third more output from their employees for the same money.
Sheer dogmatic repetition has pounded into our minds the notion that all groups have similar capabilities, when in fact they do not necessarily have even the same interest in developing the same capabilities.
Potential may be the same but developed capabilities depend on a lot more, including interest and circumstances. Yet those who start with the preconception of equal capabilities are quick to seize upon numbers showing group differences in results as proof that someone else has done something wrong. That is the grand fallacy of our time.
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20040722.shtml
The grand fallacy: Part II
Thomas Sowell (archive)
The sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart raises questions with implications that reach far beyond this one retail giant. Too many people in the media, in academia, and even in courts of law, act as if numbers plus a preconception equals proof. The preconception is that various groups -- by race, sex, or whatever -- would be evenly represented in occupations or institutions if it were not for discrimination.
There is no evidence for this notion -- and tons of evidence against it, from countries around the world.
American men are struck by lightning six times as often as American women. Who is discriminating? Men are just 54 percent of the labor force but they suffer more than 90 percent of all deaths on the job. Discrimination?
Is it discrimination against whites when Asian Americans have their applications for mortgage loans approved a higher percentage of the time than whites do, just as whites are approved a higher percentage of the time than blacks are?
Discrimination has joined a long list of charges, including sexual harassment and child molestation, in which those who are accused are expected to try to prove their innocence. When it is impossible to prove a negative, the accused loses -- or else settles out of court, in effect paying legalized extortion, to avoid dragging out the bad publicity.
Recently Gerald Amirault was released from prison in Massachusetts after spending 18 years behind bars on child molestation charges that today virtually no one believes. Those who have examined the evidence -- whether lawyers, laymen or judges -- have expressed amazement that such stuff had been taken seriously as evidence in a court of law.
That is what happens when people start with a preconception and seize upon anything that looks consistent with it. Statistical disparities have been a major source of such fallacies.
Back in the 19th century, Dr. Marcus Whitman, for whom Whitman College is named, worked on the western frontier and treated both whites and American Indians who had been stricken with measles. The whites recovered and the Indians died.
This statistical disparity caught the attention of local Indians, who massacred Dr. Whitman and other whites. But the reason for the disparity was quite simple: Measles had never existed in the Western Hemisphere before Europeans brought it here, so the indigenous people had no biological resistance.
One of the reasons given by Earl Warren for supporting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was that they lived clustered around military bases to an extent that greatly exceeded what could be accounted for by random chance.
If you start with the preconception that Japanese Americans were likely to try to sabotage the American war effort against Japan and then add a statistical anomaly, you are following the same procedure that leads in many other situations to the grand fallacy that preconception plus numbers equals proof.
In reality, the Japanese Americans, who were largely farmers in those days, lived where they did for the same reason that the military built bases there: The land was cheap. In fact, the Japanese Americans were there first and the military then came in and built bases in their midst.
It is so easy to go so wrong when numbers are added to preconceptions.
The fundamental problem is that our legal system allows one side to impose huge costs on the other, at little cost to themselves. When a false charge of discrimination can force the accused to mobilize teams of high-priced lawyers, but making that false charge brings no penalty to the accuser, this is virtually a guarantee of a flourishing industry of legalized extortion.
If I can spend $10,000 and impose a million dollars worth of costs on you, then the law is in effect enabling me to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from you to go away.
Wal-Mart has in the past resisted such lawsuits. Given the huge size of this one and the huge public relations hit that Wal-Mart could take if they go to trial, they may be advised to settle out of court. Let's hope they resist any such advice, so as not to encourage more legalized extortion throughout American society.
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20040723.shtml
"The grand fallacy
Thomas Sowell (archive)
July 22, 2004 | Print | Send
A record-breaking new class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart claims that this retail chain discriminates against women, for which of course vast millions of dollars are being demanded. The New York Times aptly summarized the case -- "about 65 percent of the company's hourly-paid workers are women, but only 33 percent of its managers are."
The grand fallacy of our times is that various groups would be equally represented in institutions and occupations if it were not for discrimination. This preconception has undermined, if not destroyed, the crucial centuries-old legal principle that the burden of proof is on the accuser.
Wal-Mart is only the latest in a long series of employers who have been hit with charges of discrimination on the basis of statistical differences among members of their workforce -- differences between women and men in this case.
Back during the 1980s a similar charge was brought against Sears, even though no one could find a single woman in all the hundreds of Sears stores who had been discriminated against -- just numbers that were different as between women and men.
When you broke down the numbers, it turned out that women were not equally represented among people who sold automotive equipment or construction materials. It also turned out that many women had no interest in selling automotive equipment or construction materials, and had turned down opportunities to do so.
In many other situations, women have avoided jobs that demand such long hours of work, or so much travel, that it would make taking care of their children virtually impossible. The biggest difference in income is between married women and everyone else. Women who never married have long held their own economically.
The most blatant fact about male-female differences is often ignored by those on the hunt for discrimination: Women have babies.
That usually means interruptions in careers and different choices of careers beforehand, because some occupations can stand interruptions better than others.
It is hardly surprising that women work part-time more often than men, drop out of the labor force more often than men, specialize in a different mix of jobs, and major in a different mix of subjects in college and postgraduate education.
Seldom are the data sufficiently detailed to permit comparisons of women and men who are the same on all the variables that matter. But the more detailed the data, the higher is a woman's income relative to that of a comparable man, sometimes surpassing that of men.
Male-female differences in incomes and occupations rose or fell throughout the 20th century as women's age of marriage and childbearing rose and fell. But such mundane facts carry little weight with lawyers or social crusaders on the hunt for discrimination.
Once a lawsuit is under way, the pressure is on the accused employer to settle, rather than risk bad publicity that could hurt profits. And, once they settle, that is taken as proof of guilt, no matter what anybody says.
People without the slightest knowledge of economics or the slightest experience running a business will boldly assert that women are paid only 75 percent -- or some other percent -- of what men make for doing exactly the same work.
Think about it. If an employer could hire four women for the price of hiring three men, why would he ever hire men at all?
Even if the employer was the world's biggest sexist, he could still not survive in business if his competitors were getting one-third more output from their employees for the same money.
Sheer dogmatic repetition has pounded into our minds the notion that all groups have similar capabilities, when in fact they do not necessarily have even the same interest in developing the same capabilities.
Potential may be the same but developed capabilities depend on a lot more, including interest and circumstances. Yet those who start with the preconception of equal capabilities are quick to seize upon numbers showing group differences in results as proof that someone else has done something wrong. That is the grand fallacy of our time.
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20040722.shtml
The grand fallacy: Part II
Thomas Sowell (archive)
The sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart raises questions with implications that reach far beyond this one retail giant. Too many people in the media, in academia, and even in courts of law, act as if numbers plus a preconception equals proof. The preconception is that various groups -- by race, sex, or whatever -- would be evenly represented in occupations or institutions if it were not for discrimination.
There is no evidence for this notion -- and tons of evidence against it, from countries around the world.
American men are struck by lightning six times as often as American women. Who is discriminating? Men are just 54 percent of the labor force but they suffer more than 90 percent of all deaths on the job. Discrimination?
Is it discrimination against whites when Asian Americans have their applications for mortgage loans approved a higher percentage of the time than whites do, just as whites are approved a higher percentage of the time than blacks are?
Discrimination has joined a long list of charges, including sexual harassment and child molestation, in which those who are accused are expected to try to prove their innocence. When it is impossible to prove a negative, the accused loses -- or else settles out of court, in effect paying legalized extortion, to avoid dragging out the bad publicity.
Recently Gerald Amirault was released from prison in Massachusetts after spending 18 years behind bars on child molestation charges that today virtually no one believes. Those who have examined the evidence -- whether lawyers, laymen or judges -- have expressed amazement that such stuff had been taken seriously as evidence in a court of law.
That is what happens when people start with a preconception and seize upon anything that looks consistent with it. Statistical disparities have been a major source of such fallacies.
Back in the 19th century, Dr. Marcus Whitman, for whom Whitman College is named, worked on the western frontier and treated both whites and American Indians who had been stricken with measles. The whites recovered and the Indians died.
This statistical disparity caught the attention of local Indians, who massacred Dr. Whitman and other whites. But the reason for the disparity was quite simple: Measles had never existed in the Western Hemisphere before Europeans brought it here, so the indigenous people had no biological resistance.
One of the reasons given by Earl Warren for supporting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was that they lived clustered around military bases to an extent that greatly exceeded what could be accounted for by random chance.
If you start with the preconception that Japanese Americans were likely to try to sabotage the American war effort against Japan and then add a statistical anomaly, you are following the same procedure that leads in many other situations to the grand fallacy that preconception plus numbers equals proof.
In reality, the Japanese Americans, who were largely farmers in those days, lived where they did for the same reason that the military built bases there: The land was cheap. In fact, the Japanese Americans were there first and the military then came in and built bases in their midst.
It is so easy to go so wrong when numbers are added to preconceptions.
The fundamental problem is that our legal system allows one side to impose huge costs on the other, at little cost to themselves. When a false charge of discrimination can force the accused to mobilize teams of high-priced lawyers, but making that false charge brings no penalty to the accuser, this is virtually a guarantee of a flourishing industry of legalized extortion.
If I can spend $10,000 and impose a million dollars worth of costs on you, then the law is in effect enabling me to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from you to go away.
Wal-Mart has in the past resisted such lawsuits. Given the huge size of this one and the huge public relations hit that Wal-Mart could take if they go to trial, they may be advised to settle out of court. Let's hope they resist any such advice, so as not to encourage more legalized extortion throughout American society.
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20040723.shtml