The Future of Equality
Mini Teaser: Thomas Sowell's Race and Culture provides ample documentation as to the importance of culture as a component of human capital, one that is critical in determining individual and national performance. In his usual feisty way, Sowell is eager to deb
Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 331pp., $25.00.
Like tectonic plates slowly grinding against one another prior to causing an earthquake, there are two slowly developing tendencies in the world that will lead to major disruptions in the future, both within societies and among them.
The first of these developments is the "end of history." By this I mean the steady convergence of political and economic institutions around the models of liberal democracy and capitalism, and the continued implementation of liberal principles, particularly the principle of equality of opportunity, within liberal democracies. There has rarely been as much homogeneity in the basic structure of the institutions of advanced countries than there is today. Despite a series of peripheral conflicts around the world, nothing that has happened in the five years since I wrote the original "End of History?" article in this journal has fundamentally contradicted this view, and much has occurred to confirm it.
The consequence for international politics is not that nations are converging in all respects. On the contrary, the fact that their basic institutions have become so similar means that they are differentiated from one another increasingly by other factors, the most obvious and important of which is culture. Americans and Japanese thought they were all part of the "free world" during the Cold War; today, they see much more clearly that they have very distinctive forms of both democracy and capitalism.
The second development is the steadily increasing technological sophistication of modern economies and the societies they spawn. In the 1940s and 1950s, studies by economists showed that in narrow economic terms, it did not pay Americans to go to college: not only would the average college graduate not be remunerated significantly better than his high school-educated peer, but he would lose four years of working life that could otherwise be spent in a relatively high-wage steel or auto plant. Today, just the opposite situation prevails: the wage differential between college and high school graduates has been widening steadily, and the gap increases with even higher levels of education.
The question of stagnating wages for low-skill workers in the United States has been under intense debate in recent years, particularly since the 1992 presidential election when Bill Clinton laid the blame for it on the Reagan tax and spending policies of the early 1980s. This charge was silly, not least because the stagnation in low-skill wages had begun prior to Reagan's election; and, indeed, it continued after Bush's defeat. Many less politically motivated observers blamed the phenomenon on globalization, which means that low-skill workers in the United States increasingly have to compete against labor of similar skills but lower living standards in (mostly) Third World countries. The view that low working-class wages were due to foreign imports of goods and American exports of capital gave the debate on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the fall of 1993 a particularly nasty tone, and is currently threatening passage of the treaty coming out of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The NAFTA debate revealed in a vivid way a genuinely new degree of class polarization in the United States, between well-educated elites (whether traditionally Democrat or Republican), who stood to benefit from increased trade liberalization, and less-educated working people, who feared its consequences.
The view that the stagnation in low-skill wages is due to globalization has been vigorously contested by economists like Paul Krugman of Stanford, who have sought to demonstrate statistically that because of the relatively small exposure of the U.S. economy to world trade, the latter could not produce the large income differential attributed to it. The culprit, according to Krugman, is technological change itself, which has dramatically boosted the rewards to those able to live and work with it. This view is consistent with theories of "human capital" laid out by Gary Becker and others: as the technological sophistication and information intensity of the economy grow, the returns on investments in human capital--i.e., education and training--also increase. In this respect, the vaunted "information superhighway" can only increase income stratification in the United States, since it will greatly reward those with the knowledge and skills needed to use it.
What do growing inequalities in income distribution have to do with the end of history? Namely this: in the past, people were differentiated from each other within a society, and nations were differentiated from one another in the international system, by a host of artificial barriers. People were segregated into castes and classes by race, parentage, gender, religion and other factors, while nations differed greatly depending on whether they were traditional monarchies, republics, communist or fascist dictatorships, and so on. The end of history--that is, the victory of liberal principles--has wiped away many of those man-made barriers. This has not ended stratification, however, but rather put it on a different basis. Enhanced equality of opportunity in liberal states has leveled the playing field in critical respects, but sharpened social inequality in others by allowing educated and skilled people to rise to the top in a technologically-stratified meritocracy. Similarly, the end of ideologically-imposed distinctions between states will allow nations to sort themselves out on a different basis--not in terms of liberal, communist, fascist, or Islamic faiths; nor in terms of traditional goods of international life like territory, population, resources, or geopolitical position; but on the basis of which states have the best endowments of human capital.
Human capital, in turn, has three sources or components. The first is what is conventionally understood by economists as human capital, that is, knowledge and skills that can be acquired through education and training. The second is culture, for certain cultures favor education as an end in itself or promote social cohesion and complex self-organization, while others are hostile to innovation, prize leisure over work, or promote individualism. Third, there may in addition be differences in the way that the raw genetic material of cognitive ability is distributed across populations. Conventional human capital is the result of deliberate human agency (often on the part of the state), while cognitive ability is hard-wired into the biological system and beyond our control. Culture falls somewhere in between: it is a human artifact and therefore changeable, but one that strongly resists manipulation through government policy.
Thomas Sowell's Race and Culture provides ample documentation as to the importance of culture as a component of human capital, one that is critical in determining individual and national performance. Much of the discussion will be familiar to readers of Sowell's earlier work on the subject, such as Ethnic America, Essays and Data on American Ethnic Groups, The Economics and Politics of Race, and Markets and Minorities. In his usual feisty way, Sowell is eager to debunk liberal assumptions that differences in the performance of ethnic and racial groups are due entirely to surrounding social structures. These groups, on the contrary, have their own innate cultural characteristics that shape those environments. Moreover, cultures are not, as contemporary multicultural ideology would have it, equal in their effects: some promote entrepreneurship and political participation, while others act as obstacles to them.
Previously, Sowell had limited his cultural comparisons to different ethnic groups within the United States; in Race and Culture, he looks more widely at the performance of a variety of ethnic groups in different environmental settings. While the performance of a given group in one society can be explained by circumstantial factors, Sowell argues that similar performance by members of the same group in widely differing locales indicates something about the group's own culture. Thus he argues that while the theory propounded by the sociologist Edna Bonacich's theory of "middleman minorities" maintains that the Jews and overseas Chinese were forced to be intermediaries by hostile host societies that would not permit them advancement in other areas, the consistency with which they pursued such careers even in the presence of alternative opportunities suggests that these were choices favored by their own cultures.
The most interesting and provocative chapter in Sowell's book is that on "Race and Intelligence," which might have seemed even more controversial had it not been trumped by the subsequent publication of the Charles Murray-Richard Herrnstein volume The Bell Curve on intelligence and social stratification in America. Sowell begins by noting that there are very large differences in mental performance as measured by standardized I.Q. tests, not only between ethnic and racial groups in the United States, but between the populations of different countries as well. These differences correspond, unsurprisingly, to differences in overall economic performance, with Asians scoring particularly high on mathematical or other non-verbal tests.
Sowell notes that there are substantial methodological problems with these international comparisons, such as the fact that they seldom control adequately for selectivity in the backgrounds of the test-takers. Nonetheless, he argues strongly that the difference in results cannot be attributed to those kinds of simple environmental factors, like socio-economic status, that are usually adduced to explain away the poor performance of American minorities. Sowell points to a large number of studies that show significant variations among environmentally similar groups (such as the Proteus Maze test administered to illiterate adults in different countries), or studies that show similar results for the same group brought up under very different environmental conditions (such as children of black fathers who were raised by German versus American mothers). To demonstrate the limits of socio-economic status in determining performance results, Sowell notes that Asian-Americans taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) from families with less than $6,000 in annual income do better on average than black, Mexican-, or native-American SAT-takers from families with incomes of $50,000 and above.
Sowell presents evidence from a number of countries, moreover, that test scores are usually good predictors of subsequent performance. This is not because the preparers of standardized tests have learned how to write "culturally unbiased" exams. Indeed, an exam testing abstract reasoning (at which blacks and other minorities tend to do less well than whites) itself presupposes a cultural familiarity with abstraction. Rather, tests are good predictors of future performance precisely because we live within cultural contexts, in which, for example, the ability to use "white" or "middle-class" words will be much more important to economic success than proficiency in "ghetto English."
This latter point indicates that Sowell takes a very different position from that of Murray and Herrnstein in The Bell Curve. While Sowell does not rule out the possibility that the genetic basis for intelligence is distributed differently among biological groups, he notes that culture plays an extremely important part both in what constitutes intelligence itself, and in what one makes of the intelligence with which one is biologically endowed. In support of the first point, he provides data (contested by Murray and Herrnstein) that I.Q. scores for a number of American ethnic groups (including Jews, Italians, and Poles) have risen quite dramatically over time. Other studies have shown that the regional differences among American blacks are often greater than black-white differences. In support of the second point, he notes that the data show that Asian-Americans do not score substantially higher than whites on standardized tests (taking into account both quantitative and verbal), but that they do much better subsequently in terms of income and upward mobility. Evidently, there is something in Asian culture that allows them to make better use of their talents, whether a superior work ethic, stronger family values, or some other factor(s).
Sowell, in other words, attributes to culture most of the effects that Murray and Herrnstein attribute to heredity. I am not in a position to evaluate the merits of the data supporting Sowell's position on the cultural determinacy of I.Q. results, versus those in The Bell Curve, but I would be rather inclined to believe Sowell's version. It would certainly be better for people to believe that ability is something that can be developed by individual effort, rather than thinking their life chances are purely a matter of genetic accident. Perhaps character will be somewhat less important to success than education and intelligence in tomorrow's technological world, but I doubt it.
Sowell in this book is still very much preoccupied with domestic problems, and pays attention to American controversies that have counterparts abroad, like affirmative action or multiculturalism. While Race and Culture draws on a wealth of international data, it unfortunately does not draw out systematic conclusions for international relations per se, or for America's position in the world. It is not hard, however, to think through what some of those consequences might be. First, there will be growing stratification within societies that will lead to new sorts of social tensions, and therefore potentially to international tensions. This may not lead to a new age of revolution, but it will put societies under great stress. Internationally, there will be a growing redistribution of power around the world, not based on policies (since these will be similar) but on culture. There will also be a heightened stratification between societies that have the cultural resources to maintain and expand their stock of human capital, and those for whom advancing technology constitutes an ever-larger barrier to entry into the modern world.
The impact of this stratification will be most direct on the global division of labor. As more Third World countries enter the world economy at the bottom, there will be a scramble among the advanced nations to claim high-value-added niches. Their ability to do that, however, will depend not just on their education and training policies, but also on the social and cultural contexts within which those policies are shaped. The United States in particular has not done a good job in educating the bottom third of its population. The reasons for this go well beyond what is generally considered "education policy," and have to do with a variety of cultural constraints on the part of both those being educated, and those seeking to do the educating.
Samuel Huntington is right, in other words, that culture will become a far more salient factor in international politics than during the Cold War. But it is not clear that cultural differences will necessarily lead to "clashes," with civilizations replacing nation-states in a resurrected nineteenth-century balance-of-power world. Cultural competition may well play itself out in the economic rather than the political realm, and may well lead to cultural innovation and adaptation rather than war. The early chapters of Sowell's book contain many examples of cultural collision, for example via migration, which was ultimately enriching for one or both of the parties involved.
Race and Culture leaves something to be desired in the development of its central themes; it is poorly edited and often meanders into issues of unclear significance. But Thomas Sowell has nonetheless played a valuable role over the years helping us understand the importance and role of culture, an issue whose importance will only grow in the future.
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