Key insights from
Discrimination and Disparities
Audio available
13 minute read
Published Mar 20, 2018
What you'll learn
Economist Thomas Sowell argues that single-factor explanations of disparities between individuals and groups (e.g., genetics, discrimination, or exploitation) fail to take life’s complexity or basic probability into account. Sowell reviews studies across numerous disciplines to build a case that misunderstanding the causes and acting on half-baked definitions of discrimination have often led to policies that harm the very people those policies were designed to help.
Key insights
- • What you'll learn
- 1 We should not be surprised that outcomes are not randomly or perfectly proportionate—disparities are the rule rather than the exception.
- 2 Our internal sense of expected outcomes is off, which creates dissonance with reality.
- 3 We are not discriminating enough in our definitions of “discrimination.”
- 4 Some types of discrimination are ideal but not always possible; others are useful but not always accurate; still others are neither useful nor accurate.
- 5 Employers were actually more likely to hire young black males when they were allowed to do background checks.
- 6 The poor do pay more, but the causes can’t always be extrapolated from the statistics themselves.
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