Disparities come about for all sort of reasons.…Thomas Sowell is one clear thinker who has discussed this in detail. He has penned dozens of vitally important books that dissect and dismantle the reigning leftist orthodoxies.

Why do some people, or groups, or nations, seem to do better than others in various ways? The standard leftist answer is simple: there are two groups of people in the world, the oppressed and the oppressors. If one group seems to lag behind others, they are obviously the victims, and another group is exploiting and harming them.

Thus all Blacks today in America are kept down by discrimination and the like. All whites are obviously the villains, and only revolutionary social upheaval can set things right. That is the usual woke response to all social, economic and political disparities.

But the truth us, these disparities come about for all sort of reasons. American Black economist Thomas Sowell is one clear thinker who has discussed this in detail. He has penned dozens of vitally important books that dissect and dismantle the reigning leftist orthodoxies.

As he had put it back in 2003:

Virtually everybody is worse off than somebody else, if only in one dimension, so there are nearly unlimited opportunities to pander to people’s sense of injustice, victimhood and entitlement. Any of us can think back to situations where we got the short end of the stick. On the other hand, we may not be quite as quick to recall the times when we got more than we deserved — and neither politicians nor the intelligentsia have anything to gain by reminding us of that.

One of his more recent volumes that is especially worth considering on this is Discrimination and Disparities (Basic Books, 2018, 2019). In the first chapter of the book Sowell looks at disparities and prerequisites. He writes:

[W]e should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites—which is to say, most meaningful endeavors. And if these are indeed prerequisites, then having four out of five prerequisites means nothing, as far as successful outcomes are concerned. In other words, people with most of the prerequisites for success may nevertheless be utter failures.

Whether a prerequisite that is missing is complex or simple, its absence can negate the effect of all the other prerequisites that are present. If you are illiterate, for example, all the other good qualities that you may have in abundance count for nothing in many, if not most, careers today. As late as 1950, more than 40 percent of the world’s adult population were still illiterate. That included more than half the adults in Asia and Africa.

If you are not prepared to undergo the extended toil and sacrifice that some particular endeavor may require, then despite having all the native potential for great success in that endeavor, and with all the doors of opportunity wide open, you can nevertheless become an utter failure.

Not all the prerequisites are necessarily within the sole control of the individual who has them or does not have them. Even extraordinary capacities in one or some of the prerequisites can mean nothing in the ultimate outcome. (pp. 2-3)

Sowell looks at research and various studies on this, and then offers a down-to-earth case in point:

There may be more or less of an approximation of a normal bell curve, as far as how many people have any particular prerequisite, and yet a very skewed distribution of success, based on having all the prerequisites simultaneously. This is not only true in theory, empirical evidence suggests that it is true also in practice.

In golf, for example, there is something of an approximation of a bell curve when it comes to the distribution of such examples of individual skills as the number of putts per round of golf, or driving distances off the tee. And yet there is a grossly skewed distribution of outcomes requiring a whole range of golf skills—namely, winning Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) tournaments.

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