Discrimination and Disparities Page 2
Against this background, expectations or assumptions of equal or comparable outcomes from children raised in such different ways have no basis. Nor can different outcomes in schools, colleges or employment be automatically attributed to those who teach, grade or hire them, when empirical evidence shows that how people were raised can affect how they turn out as adults.
It is not simply that they may have different levels of ability as adults. People from different social backgrounds may also have different goals and priorities—a possibility paid little or no attention in many studies that measure how much opportunity there is by how much upward movement takes place,31 as if everyone is equally striving to move up.
Most notable achievements involve multiple factors—beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, and a willingness to do what it takes, without which all the native ability in an individual and all the opportunity in a society mean nothing, just as the desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability.
What this suggests, among other things, is that an individual, a people, or a nation may have some, many or most of the prerequisites for a given achievement without having any real success in producing that achievement. And yet that individual, that people or that nation may suddenly burst upon the scene with spectacular success when whatever the missing factor or factors are finally get added to the mix.
Poor and backward nations that suddenly moved to the forefront of human achievements include Scotland, beginning in the eighteenth century, and Japan beginning in the nineteenth century. Both had rapid rises, as time is measured in history.
Scotland was for centuries one of the poorest, most economically and educationally lagging nations on the outer fringes of European civilization. There was said to be no fourteenth-century Scottish baron who could write his own name.32 And yet, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a disproportionate number of the leading intellectual figures in Britain were of Scottish ancestry—including James Watt in engineering, Adam Smith in economics, David Hume in philosophy, Joseph Black in chemistry, Sir Walter Scott in literature, and James Mill and John Stuart Mill in economic and political writings.
Among the changes that had occurred among the Scots was their Protestant churches’ crusade promoting the idea that everyone should learn to read, so as to be able to read the Bible personally, rather than have priests tell them what it says and means. Another change was a more secular, but still fervent, crusade to learn the English language, which replaced their native Gaelic among the Scottish lowlanders, and thereby opened up far more fields of written knowledge to the Scots.
In some of those fields, including medicine and engineering, the Scots eventually excelled the English, and became renowned internationally. These were mostly Scottish lowlanders, rather than highlanders, who continued to speak Gaelic for generations longer.
Japan was likewise a poor, poorly educated and technologically backward nation, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. The Japanese were astonished to see a train for the first time, that train being presented to them by American Commodore Matthew Perry, whose ships visited Japan in 1853.33 Yet, after later generations of extraordinary national efforts to catch up with the Western world technologically, these efforts led to Japan’s being in the forefront of technology in a number of fields in the latter half of the twentieth century. Among other things, Japan produced a bullet train that exceeded anything produced in the United States.
Other extraordinary advances have been made by a particular people, rather than by a nation state. We have become so used to seeing numerous world-class performances by Jewish intellectual figures in the arts and sciences that it is necessary to note that this has been an achievement that burst upon the world as a widespread social phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even though there had been isolated Jewish intellectual figures of international stature in some earlier centuries.
As a distinguished economic historian put it: “Despite their vast advantage in literacy and human capital for many centuries, Jews played an almost negligible role in the history of science and technology before and during the early Industrial Revolution” and “the great advances in science and mathematics between 1600 and 1750 do not include work associated with Jewish names.”34
Whatever the potentialities of Jews during the era of the industrial revolution, and despite their literacy and other human capital, there was often little opportunity for them to gain access to the institutions of the wider society in Europe, where the industrial revolution began. Jews were not admitted to most universities in Europe prior to the nineteenth century.
Late in the eighteenth century, the United States became a pioneer in granting Jews the same legal rights as everyone else, as a result of the Constitution’s general ban against federal laws that discriminate on the basis of religion. France followed suit after the revolution of 1789, and other nations began easing or eliminating various bans on Jews in various times and places during the nineteenth century.
In the wake of these developments, Jews began to flow, and then to flood, into universities. By the 1880s, for example, Jews were 30 percent of all the students at Vienna University.35 The net result in the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century, was a relatively sudden proliferation of internationally renowned Jewish figures in many fields, including fields in which Jews were virtually non-existent among the leaders in earlier centuries.
From 1870 to 1950, Jews were greatly over-represented among prominent figures in the arts and sciences, relative to their proportion of the population in various European countries and in the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century, with Jews being less than one percent of the world’s population, they received 22 percent of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, 32 percent in medicine and 32 percent in physics.36
Here, as in other very different contexts, changes in the extent to which prerequisites are met completely can have dramatic effects on outcomes in a relatively short time, as history is measured. The fact that Jews rose dramatically in certain fields after various barriers were removed does not mean that other groups would do the same if barriers against them were removed, for the Jews already had various other prerequisites for such achievements—notably widespread literacy during centuries when illiteracy was the norm in the world at large—and Jews needed only enough additional prerequisites to complete the required ensemble.
Conversely, China was for centuries the most technologically advanced nation in the world, especially during what were called the Middle Ages in Europe. The Chinese had cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans.37 A Chinese admiral led a voyage of discovery that was longer than Columbus’ voyage, generations before Columbus’ voyage,38 and in ships far larger and technologically more advanced than Columbus’ ships.39
One crucial decision in fifteenth-century China, however, set in motion a radical change in the relative positions of the Chinese and the Europeans. Like other nations demonstrably more advanced than others, the Chinese regarded those others as innately inferior—as “barbarians,” just as the Romans likewise regarded peoples beyond the domain of the Roman Empire.
Convinced by the exploratory voyages of its ships that there was nothing to be learned from other peoples in other places, the government of China decided in 1433 to not only discontinue such voyages, but to forbid such voyages, or the building of ships capable of making such voyages, and to greatly reduce the influence of the outside world on Chinese society.
Plausible as this decision might have seemed at the time, it came as Europe was emerging from its “dark ages” of retrogression in the wake of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and was now experiencing a Renaissance of progress in many ways—including progress based on developing things that had originated in China, such as printing and gunpowder. Columbus’ ships, though not up to the standards of those once made in China, were sufficient to cross the Atlantic Ocean in search of a route to India—and to inadve
rtently make the world-changing discovery of a whole hemisphere.
In short, Europe had expanding opportunities for progress, both within itself and in the larger world opened up to it by its expansion into the other half of the planet, at a time when China’s rulers had chosen the path of isolation—not total, but substantial, isolation. The strait jacket of isolation, inflicted on many parts of the world by geographic barriers that left whole peoples and nations both poor and backward,40 was inflicted on China by its own rulers.
The net result over the centuries that followed was that China fell behind in an era of great technological and economic progress elsewhere in the world.
In the pitiless international jungle, this meant that other countries not only surpassed China but imposed their will on a vulnerable China, which declined to the status of a Third World country, partly subordinated to other countries in various ways—including a loss of territory, as the Portuguese took over the port of Macao, the British took over the port of Hong Kong and eventually Japan seized much territory on the mainland of China.
What China lost were not the prerequisites represented by the qualities of its people, but the wisdom of its rulers who, with one crucial decision—the loss of just one prerequisite—forfeited the country’s preeminence in the world.
That the qualities of the Chinese people endured was evidenced by the worldwide success of millions of “overseas Chinese” emigrants, who arrived in many countries in Southeast Asia and in the Western Hemisphere, often destitute and with little education—and yet rose over the generations to prosperity, and in many individual cases even great wealth.
The contrast between the fate of China and the fate of the “overseas Chinese” was demonstrated when, as late as 1994, the 57 million “overseas Chinese” produced as much wealth as the billion people living in China.41
Among the more dire national projects that failed among other nations—fortunately, in this case—for lack of one prerequisite was the attempt by Nazi Germany to create a nuclear bomb. Hitler not only had such a program, he had it before the United States launched a similar program. Germany was, at that point, in the forefront of science in nuclear physics. However, it so happened that, at that particular juncture in history, many of the leading nuclear physicists in the world were Jewish—and Hitler’s fanatical anti-Semitism not only precluded their participation in his nuclear bomb project, his threat to the survival of Jews in general led many of these physicists to leave Europe and immigrate to the United States.
It was expatriate Jewish nuclear physicists who brought the threat of a Nazi nuclear bomb to President Roosevelt’s attention, and urged the creation of an American program to create such a bomb before the Nazis got one. Moreover, Jewish scientists—both expatriate and American—played a major role in the development of the American nuclear bomb.42
These scientists were a key resource that the United States had and that Hitler could not have, as a result of his own racial fanaticism. The whole world escaped the prospect of mass annihilation and/or crushing subjugation to Nazi oppression and dehumanization because Hitler’s nuclear program lacked one key factor. He had some leading nuclear physicists, but not enough.
Institutions
China was by no means the only nation to forfeit a superior position among the nations of the world. Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were far more advanced than their British or Scandinavian contemporaries, who were largely illiterate at a time when Greeks and Romans had landmark intellectual giants, and were laying the intellectual and material foundations of Western civilization. As late as the tenth century, a Muslim scholar noted that Europeans grew more pale the farther north you go and also that the “farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.”43
Such a correlation between complexion and ability would be taboo today, but there is little reason to doubt that a very real correlation existed among Europeans as of the time when this observation was made. The fact that Northern Europe and Western Europe would move ahead of Southern Europe economically and technologically many centuries later was a heartening sign that backwardness in a given era does not mean backwardness forever. But that does not deny that great economic and social disparities have existed among peoples and nations at given times and places.
Particular institutions, such as business enterprises, have likewise risen or fallen dramatically over time. Any number of leading American businesses today began at the level of the lowly peddler (Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, for example), or were started by men born in poverty (J.C. Penney; F.W. Woolworth) or began in a garage (Hewlett Packard). Conversely, there have been leading businesses that have declined from the pinnacles of profitable success, even into bankruptcy—sometimes with the loss of just one prerequisite.
For more than a hundred years, the Eastman Kodak company was the dominant firm in the photographic industry throughout the world. It was George Eastman who, in the late nineteenth century, first made photography accessible to great numbers of ordinary people, with his cameras and film that did not require the technical expertise of professional photographers. Before Kodak cameras and film appeared, professional photographers had to know how to apply light-sensitive emulsions to photographic plates that went into big, cumbersome cameras, and know how to later chemically develop the images taken and then print pictures.
Small and simple Kodak cameras, and rolls of Kodak film in place of photographic plates, enabled people with no technical knowledge at all to take pictures and then leave the developing and printing of those pictures to others.
Kodak cameras and film spread internationally. For decades, Eastman Kodak sold most of the film in the entire world. It continued to sell most of the film in the world market, even after film began to be produced in other countries and Fuji film from Japan made major inroads in the late twentieth century, gaining a 21 percent market share by 1993.44 Eastman Kodak also supplied both amateur and professional photographers with a wide range of photographic equipment and supplies, based on film technology.
For more than a century, Eastman Kodak clearly had all the prerequisites for success. As of 1988, the company employed more than 145,000 workers around the world, and its annual revenues peaked at nearly $16 billion in 1996.45 Yet its worldwide dominance came to a remarkably sudden end in the early twenty-first century, when its income plummeted and the company collapsed into bankruptcy.46
Just one key factor changed in the photographic industry—the substitution of digital cameras for film cameras. Worldwide sales of film cameras peaked in the year 2000, when those sales were more than four times the sales of digital cameras. But, three years later, digital camera sales in 2003 surpassed film camera sales for the first time. Then, just two years later, digital camera sales exceeded the peak sales that film cameras had reached in 2000, and now digital camera sales were more than four times the sales of film cameras.47
Eastman Kodak, which had produced the world’s first electronic image sensor,48 was undone by its own invention, which other companies developed to higher levels in digital cameras. These included electronics companies not initially in the photographic industry, such as Sony, whose share of the digital camera market was more than double that of Eastman Kodak by the end of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century,49 when digital camera sales skyrocketed.
With the sudden collapse of the market for film cameras, Kodak’s vast array of photographic apparatus and supplies, based on film technology, suddenly lost most of their market, and the Eastman Kodak company disintegrated economically. Its mastery of existing prerequisites for success meant nothing when just one of those prerequisites changed. Nor was this descent from industrial world dominance to bankruptcy unique to Eastman Kodak.*
Nature
In nature, as in human endeavors, there can be multiple prerequisites for various natural phenomena, and these multiple prerequisites can likewise lead to very skewed distributions of outcomes.
While some have f
ound it surprising that genetic similarities between chimpanzees and human beings extend to well over 90 percent of their genetic makeup, what may be more surprising is that even a microscopic, worm-like creature also has most of its genetic makeup match that of human beings.50 But having many or most prerequisites can count for nothing as far as producing the ultimate outcome.
Multiple factors have to come together in order to create tornadoes, and more than 90 percent of all the tornadoes in the entire world occur in just one country—the United States.51 Yet there is nothing startlingly unique about either the climate or the terrain of the United States that cannot be found, as individual features, in various other places around the world. But all the prerequisites for tornadoes do not come together as often in the rest of the world as in the United States.
Similarly, lightning occurs more often in Africa than in Europe and Asia put together, even though Asia alone is larger than Africa or any other continent.52 Among many other skewed distributions in nature is the fact that earthquakes are as common around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, both in Asia and in the Western Hemisphere, as they are rare around the rim of the Atlantic.53
Among other highly skewed outcomes in nature is that some geographic settings produce many times more species than others. The Amazon region of South America is one such setting:
South America’s Amazon Basin contains the world’s largest expanse of tropical rainforest. Its diversity is renowned. On a single Peruvian tree, Wilson (1988) found 43 species of ants, comparable to the entire ant fauna of the British Isles.54