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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Argument from Disparity
Discrimination cases use statistics to put the burden of proof on the
accused.
By Thomas Sowell
A longstanding legal charade was played out again recently, when Federal
Express paid $3 million to settle an employment-discrimination case brought
by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Federal Express was accused of both racial discrimination and sex
discrimination. FedEx denied it.
Why then did they pay the $3 million? Because it can cost a lot more than $3
million to fight a discrimination case. Years ago, the Sears department-
store chain spent $20 million fighting a sex-discrimination charge that took
15 years to make its way through the legal labyrinth. In the end, Sears won
— if spending $20 million and getting nothing in return can be called
winning.
FedEx was apparently not prepared to spend that kind of money and that kind
of time fighting a discrimination case. The net result is that the
government and much of the media can now claim that race, sex, and other
forms of discrimination are rampant, considering how many anti-
discrimination cases have been “won.”
At the heart of these legal charades is the prevailing dogma that
statistical disparities in employment — or mortgage lending, or anything
else — show discrimination. In both the FedEx case and the earlier Sears
case, statistical differences between the mix of the workforce and the
population mix were the key evidence presented to show discrimination.
In the Sears case, there was not even one woman who worked in any of the
company’s 900 stores who claimed to have been discriminated against. It was
all a matter of statistics — and of the arbitrary dogma that statistical
disparities show discrimination.
Once statistical disparities have been demonstrated, the burden of proof
shifts to the employer to prove his innocence, contrary to centuries of
legal tradition that the burden of proof is on the accuser.
No burden of proof whatever is put on those who argue as if there would be a
random distribution of racial and other groups in the absence of
discrimination.
Happenstances may be random but performances seldom are. Most people are
right-handed but, among major-league hitters with lifetime batting averages
of .330 and up, there have been 15 left-handed batters and only 5 right-
handed batters since the beginning of the 20th century. All the best-selling
beers in the United States were created by people of German ancestry.
Anyone who follows professional basketball knows that most of the leading
stars are black.
Some years ago, a study of National Merit Scholarship finalists found that
more than half were first-born children, even in five-child families. Jews
are less than one percent of the world’s population but they won 14 percent
of the Nobel Prizes in literature and the sciences during the first half of
the 20th century, and 29 percent during the second half.
It would be no problem at all to fill this whole column with examples from
around the world of gross statistical disparities in outcomes, in situations
where discrimination was not involved. But those who take the opposite view
— that numbers show discrimination — do not have to produce one speck of
evidence to back up that sweeping conclusion.
Human beings are not random events. Individuals and groups have different
histories, cultures, skills, and attitudes. Why would anyone expect them to
be distributed anywhere in a pattern based on statistical theories of random
events? Much less make the absence of such a pattern become a basis for
multi-million-dollar lawsuits?
However little evidence or logic there may be behind the belief that an
absence of random distribution shows discrimination, there are nevertheless
strong incentives for some people to cling to that belief anyway. Those who
lag behind — whether educationally, economically, or otherwise — have
every incentive to think of themselves as victims of those who are more
successful.
Those who want their votes have every incentive to go along, or even to
actively promote that idea. So do those who want to see issues as moral
melodramas, starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces
of evil. The result is an invincible dogma — and a polarized country.
—Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2012
Creators Syndicate, Inc. |
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