Taking on the 'invincible fallacy'

Economist Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has been one of the pre-eminent thinkers in America for decades. His latest book, Discrimination and Disparities, is an examination of what he calls the "invincible fallacy" that improper discrimination must be to blame for different outcomes between people of different races or sexes, or those sorted almost any other way.

This is refuted again and again by empirical evidence, Prof. Sowell tells Editorial Director Hugo Gurdon, in an interview for the Washington Examiner's "Modern Conservatives" series. Politicians, mostly on the Left, manufacture grievances and win over voting groups with promises of policies that won't work and often do enormous damage.

The video interview with Sowell can be viewed on the Washington Examiner website. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview:

Hugo Gurdon: I'm delighted to be joined today by Prof. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a renowned conservative economist. Prof. Sowell, I want to congratulate you first on your book, Discrimination and Disparities, which is a fascinating read. If I understand it rightly, the thesis of the book, contained in the title, is that discrimination and disparities are two distinct things and that there is what you call an invincible fallacy which suggests that any difference in outcome between different groups, whether they be races, or the sexes, or nations, must be due either to discrimination or to genetic deficiencies. The argument you make is that all the evidence suggests this is absolutely wrong. So first of all, correct me if I'm wrong on the thesis of the book, and then tell us about what you have laid out here.

Sowell: You're absolutely right. It's amazing whenever you look for facts, when you do research either about people or about nature, you find skewed distributions everywhere. But when you listen to people talk, especially in the academic world, the underlying assumption is that people all have the same capability, and that therefore any differences in their outcomes must be due to other people in some way doing them wrong. It's amazing because if you think just of an individual, the same man does not have the same capability. He's not even equal to himself at different stages of life, much less being equal to all other people. They're highly varying stages of their lives.

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