Transcription
Are you saying that in a culturally pluralistic society such as America, the variable in success or lack of success is the culture of the particular group?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. And I'm saying it not only for the United States but in terms of the studies of various other countries around the world. The same thing seems to be true.
You not only find the same group having the same characteristics in country after country. You look at the Chinese; what they major in in Malaysia in college is what they major in in the United States in college, namely science and technology.
Heavily Asian-Americans time and again are portrayed as overachievers. What is it about this group that leads to their extraordinary success in academics and beyond? Are they simply born this way, or is there more to the story?
Well, what is it in American life today? You cite six groups in two categories. You cite Jews, Chinese, and Japanese as overachieving groups. You cite blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans as underachieving groups. Now, what are you describing there? What have you identified there as a variable?
Oh, in income. Well, the achievement is measured in terms of income and occupation. That is economic achievement. Obviously, there are other kinds of things that make up life, but I wouldn't want to stigmatize groups as permanently underachievers.
If you look at generation by generation, you find incredible changes. The black population, especially the change in occupations of blacks between the 1920s and the 1950s, is just phenomenal.
So what we're watching are people who, for cultural reasons and historical reasons, begin behind a certain level and have not closed the gap. It's like a relay race. You don't say that the runner is a bad runner because he hasn't closed the gap when he started 50 yards behind. If he's 40 yards behind now, we don't call him a failure; we say he's made up 10 yards.
What about Asian-Americans, who often seem to, as a group, perform better in school than other groups? Why is that?
I think the one four-letter word we can't use is "work." They just work. I mean, I remember when I was teaching at UCLA, and I had to go on a Saturday night to do research at the library. As I looked around, almost everybody I saw was Asian-American. I looked in vain for any black students there, not many white students there.
So the following week, when I went to class and found the Asian-Americans better prepared, there's no real mystery to it to me. They work.
You identified human capital in your book, and you say, now you tell me if I'm not paraphrasing you correctly, you say the Chinese succeed because they outwork everyone else.
Oh yes, is it that simple? In a sense, yes. If you put in enormous amounts of work, you're going to have a tremendous advantage over people who don't.
A study was done in San Francisco schools to show Asians, blacks, whites, Hispanics, and how they score in various fields, and mathematics in particular. There were vast differences, for example, between the Asians and blacks in terms of how many got high math grades.
What struck me was that for both the Asians and the Africans, the number of hours that you spent working or doing homework in math was almost identical with the same percentage who got high grades in math.
So that whether you're black or Chinese, if you spend an awful lot of time on math, you're going to be doing better than the person who's not. And although there were great disparities, the disparities were differences in how much time you spend on math homework.
Well then, conversely, Dr. Sowell, are you not saying that groups who do not overachieve are groups who don't work hard enough?
Sometimes, but sometimes the government itself makes it impossible or very difficult for groups to work hard enough. The minimum wage law is one classic example. Occupational licensing laws are another.
Insofar as the school system fails those groups that don't have an independent educational tradition, they are lost. Whereas if you have that independent tradition, even if you go to a bad school, if the parents can help you, if you get the maximum that you possibly can from the books and so on, you still may achieve quite a lot.
So it's a combination. It is the culture, but at the same time, insofar as a society puts barriers, particularly the government, which has tremendous power and supplies education and other kinds of things, they make it tougher for you to do it.
The economics and politics of race. Dr. Sowell, you have written what I consider to be one of the most exhaustive statements I have ever seen on an awfully complex subject. I'm really not sure that I understand it that thoroughly.
So let me begin by trying to get some general understanding. Are you saying that in a culturally pluralistic society such as America, the variable in success or lack of success is the culture of the particular group?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. And I'm saying it not only for the United States but in terms of the studies of various other countries around the world. The same thing seems to be true.
You not only find the same group having the same characteristics in country after country. That is, the Germans produced the first pianos in Australia, they created the piano industry in the United States, they built the first pianos in England, they built the first pianos in Russia.
You look at the Chinese; what they major in in Malaysia in college is what they major in in the United States in college, namely science and technology. Heavily, this follows the group around the world.
So the notion that the group is a creature of society, that society shapes the group, just will not stand up to the facts. If you say that culture is the variable in success, which means conversely culture is the variable in failure, and you cite the phenomenal achievement of West Indians, which is the largest black immigrant group in the United States, their phenomenal success in the United States, I think they earn about 15% more on average than the average American.
But they don't do well in their own native countries, and they don't do well in England. Now, if culture is the variable, why is that a fact?
I guess you'd have a selective migration coming into this. That's also true of other groups, by the way. The Chinese are prosperous everywhere in the world except China. The Indians are prosperous throughout Africa, but they are in terrible shape in India.
They are prosperous in Malaysia; they're prosperous in other parts of Burma at one time. There are many groups which, when freed from the constraints of their particular society, burst forth with all the other abilities that they have in their own.
What about Jews? The Jews, of course, the same thing has happened with the Jews numerous times. Thousands killed here, thousands killed there, and of course under the Nazis, millions killed.
The groups that have suffered the most violence, and I use that as one index of group hostility or racism, those groups have typically been middleman minorities: the Chinese, the Jews, the Armenians, the Ebo in Nigeria—30,000 of those were killed in massacres just within our time.
And yet I don't find any correlation in the long run between the economics and the political hostility.
All right, let's get back to the primary criticism of your book made by a writer I really respect, William Raspberry, a syndicated columnist. He says that you make these points, but you don't say what we should do.
What we should first of all do is understand what does and does not work. I don't consider myself to be a policy maker, despite what the media may try to say. I consider myself to be someone who tries to supply facts so that those who do make policy will know what they're talking about, as they usually do not.
Now, speaking of what the media says, you have stopped giving interviews for the last couple of years.
Yes, I should have stopped many years before that, actually.
Why?
I see no correlation between what I say and what the media reports. One of the most hideous things that I've seen reported was on the CBS Morning News, where they suggested that I was a believer in the theory of genetic inferiority of blacks.
Now, I have been arguing against that theory for more than 10 years, and I don't know how many books, how many articles, and how many lectures. This was so well known that British television tried to arrange a debate between author Jensen and me.
I don't know why the word got to London, but it never got to Washington.
So you have been wary, to say the least, of the media.
I think that's an understatement.
Speaking of your book, is there something that you definitively found that you did not suspect before you did research in terms of group achievement or the lack of group achievement as can be applied to a multi-racial society such as the United States?
One of the things that surprised me was how little correlation there was between acculturation and achievement.
Would you define that for us?
That is taking on the culture of the surrounding society. The Chinese, for example, in Southeast Asia, in many cases will live for generations there, maintaining their own culture, their own language.
The Germans have done this in Russia and various parts of South America, other parts of the world. And yet, when we look at groups like Hispanics, those Hispanics who don't learn English are far behind those Hispanics who do in terms of incomes and occupations.
What I finally got out of all of that was that if you're working for someone else, then you must know the culture of that society. If you are able to set up your own farms, your own businesses, being independent professions, it doesn't really matter that much.
But if you have to go out and work for someone else, then you must know his language; you must know how his culture operates in order for you to operate in.
Well, do you suspect that you may be guilty of deemphasizing the effects of racism in that pattern?
It's always a possibility, but as I look at the data, I don't find any correlation between the degree of racism and the degree to which groups advance.
That is, if you look at the history of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the hostility they have encountered there will compare with any hostility blacks encountered here.
There have been a number of occasions in the history of Southeast Asia where the number of Chinese killed in a few days exceeded all the blacks lynched in the history of the United States. So they are enormously hated.
Now, you also delineate the migration of the African from Africa through the Caribbean, if that took place, and then into the United States. You distinguish, you document the difference in the form of slavery that took place in the West Indies and the form of slavery that took place in the United States, and you relate that to the performance of the two respective groups.
Yes, in light of what you've said, though, and in the light of the recent studies of England, you can't push that too far because, in fact, in the West Indies, the Chinese are disproportionately the entrepreneurs.
But of the West Indians who come to the United States, you have a very heavy selection factor going on. You have that with most immigrant groups, by the way.
What do you mean by selection factor?
That is, the average person of the average country doesn't get up and leave and go to some other country. It's the person who is unusual. It's not an ability, at least in attitudes and other kinds of things like that.
That's also common around the world. When people go into, let's think of the Japanese who come to the United States, the Chinese who come to the United States, they do better than the Chinese who were born in the United States.
We now have an influx of another wave of immigrants, particularly from the East. Many of these groups are settling in black neighborhoods and going into business and so forth, and there is now some friction and a lot of debate about that phenomenon.
What is it in their culture that you see that relates to their entrepreneurial performance?
This is true of these same groups throughout Southeast Asia. It's true in Guyana, Panama, Peru, and Jamaica that the Chinese have been entrepreneurial in all these areas for centuries on end.
For example, in much of Southeast Asia, the Chinese own over half of all the rice mills in the country, even though the Chinese were only about 5% of the population of these countries.
But are you saying there's something in the black culture that prohibits them from doing what these Chinese boat people do when they come from Vietnam?
No, no. What I'm saying, I look at it entirely differently. I don't ask what is the cause of poverty. Everybody is born poor and ignorant.
The question is, what factors allow some groups to get from that position? Blacks, first of all, started further back and are coming forward.
At this point, there simply has not been the pattern of entrepreneurship in the black population that's been true of other groups, such as the Irish, for example.
The Irish are doing quite well today, but they're not doing well in entrepreneurial occupations. They're in the law, they're in the church, they're in this, they're in that.
On the bottom line, they're doing better than the average American, but they're not doing it in those particular fields.
Every group succeeds in some particular area. Blacks who win Nobel prizes don't win them in the same fields that the Chinese win Nobel prizes in.
Let me quote to you again from "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics": "Without the cultural prerequisites for developing natural resources into real wealth, the raw physical resources themselves are of little or no value."
Tell us what you mean by cultural prerequisites.
Partly, that would be simply the knowledge of how to use things. As I mentioned in the book, the main difference between us and the caveman is simply human capital.
Don't forget the caveman had all the natural resources we have today, and he had them in greater abundance because none of them had ever been used up. But he didn't have the knowledge that it would take to turn those to his own purposes.
We just know more.
You note that a certain productive capacity that certain cultural groups demonstrate, and you can see them because they demonstrate this certain, let's call it industriousness, as they dispersed to different parts of the world.
Yes, Germans, Chinese, Lebanese, Jews, Indians.
Quote: "The productivity is a matter of culture. That productivity as a matter of culture is shown by how many groups have arrived in various countries far poorer than the existing population and have nevertheless risen above the economic level of those who were there before them."
Let's just choose a—let's you name a lot of groups; it's a big book. Let me just toss one at you and see how you do: the overseas Chinese.
Oh my goodness, the overseas Chinese settled largely in Southeast Asia. Many of them came there with little more than the clothes on their backs.
There was one Chinese millionaire in one of the countries who had in the foyer to his mansion this stick with a little cloth thing tied to it because he walked into this place with that stick, all his belongings in this little cloth thing tied to his stick over his shoulder, and he took off from there.
All right, the Jews.
Oh my heavens, that's been in so many places. My gosh, the Lower East Side of New York, one of the most terrible places when the Jews landed. The poverty and squalor is just unbelievable.
In fact, even as late as the late 1940s, when I went to school on the Lower East Side, I had always heard that all Jews were rich. When I saw the Lower East Side, I said, "Why are these rich people living like this?"
The buildings on the Lower East Side were older and in worse conditions than the buildings in Harlem where I lived.
And they don't live there anymore.
No, those neighborhoods have turned over.
Yes, and it went by generation. The generation they were there first, even when they rose up to where they could have moved, they didn't because many of them were not fluent in English and so on.
You could live on the Lower East Side knowing only Yiddish and find doctors, lawyers, anything you wanted, go to stores and so forth.
And if you moved up to upscale places like Harlem, which was once Jewish, or to the Bronx, which at another time became Jewish, you would lose that.
The more acculturated people, the next generation who spoke English and were more familiar with American society, they lived in those kinds of places.
Got it.
So why is it that in many instances that you detail, you get a subgroup, the Chinese moved to Fiji, and why is it then that so often we see the pattern that not that the indigenous people who were there first failed to get with the program?
In fact, not only do they not get with the program, learning the skills of productivity, they tend again and again and again to persecute the groups that came with nothing but achieve a certain level of affluence.
So we have the Jews—that's an old story, an ancient story—the persecution of the Jews. But you also show it with the overseas Chinese in Malaysia, with Indians in East Africa, and on and on it goes.
What's going on there?
Well, one thing, there's no particular reason to have expected the indigenous people to have acquired the same skills that the people who came there had.
And worse yet, the leaders of these groups are very quick to blame the fact that they are lagging on the other groups who are more advanced.
One of the phrases that you often hear is that this group took over this whole industry, and in many cases, there was no such industry until they came there and built it. They did not take it over.
Right.
On social factors, I'm quoting again from "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics": "There is empirical evidence against genetic determinism."
We're talking about IQ scores now, for example. There have been whole communities of whites from isolated mountain regions in America whose average IQs have been similar to or lower than the average IQs of black Americans.
But while such evidence undermines genetic determinism, that does not make mental test differences irrelevant.
So we're not genetically determined, but disparities among ethnic and racial groups are still worth noting, still consequential.
How do we put this?
No, no, you're seldom hiring a whole group or admitting a whole group to college. What you're doing is judging individuals.
And predictive validity is really a totally separate question from the question of genetics versus environment.
See, in other words, if the IQ test does not have a single question about flying an airplane and you give it to people who want to become pilots, the only real question is, do the scores on those tests correlate with the subsequent performance of people in the air?
Right.
But you see, I mean, it sounds so simple when you say it that way, but the Supreme Court of the United States had a totally different take that the employer must validate a test that is not job-related.
And so what I'm saying is it's a question of whether this test seems plausible to third parties who have neither expertise nor experience on the job, and that would be the criterion for whether it's a good test.
In my years of researching cultures around the globe, I've learned that success rarely occurs in a vacuum. Success is shaped by values, decisions, and sacrifices often made long before the rewards materialize.
Take, for example, the emphasis placed on education within many Asian families. It is not merely encouraged; it is a cultural cornerstone.
This is something I discussed in my essay "Race, Culture, and Equality." Cultural values, particularly those from Confucian traditions, uphold learning as a virtue.
But it is not just respect for education; it is a deep generational commitment to perseverance and sacrifice. In many Asian cultures, education is more than just a means to personal advancement; it is seen as a duty, a responsibility owed to the family, the community, and even the ancestors who made sacrifices for future generations.
This cultural thread can be traced to Confucian ideals, which emphasize the virtues of discipline, respect for authority, and self-improvement.
Education, therefore, becomes a means to honor one's family. For an immigrant father who works long hours in a labor-intensive job, seeing his child graduate college is a validation of his efforts.
It's not merely academic success; it is the fulfillment of a collective dream that bridges generations.
But let us not overlook the systems of support within these families. It is common to see parents sacrifice their own comforts to provide their children with opportunities, be it private tutoring, access to better schools, or simply the time spent ensuring their child's homework is complete.
Studies consistently show that children from families with high parental expectations and involvement perform better in school.
And yet, this success is often misunderstood or dismissed by those who attribute it solely to genetic or ethnic factors.
As I've observed, what matters most is not the accident of birth but the values that a community nurtures and passes down.
This culture of learning creates a multiplier effect. High parental expectations push children to excel; their success, in turn, sets a precedent for siblings and peers to emulate.
What you see is not just individual brilliance but the ripple effects of a deeply entrenched value system.
So when people talk about overachievement, they are often referring to these layered and interlocking commitments that begin at home but extend into every facet of life.
It is not an anomaly; it is the predictable outcome of a culture that regards knowledge and effort as sacred.
Consider the history of Asian immigration to the United States. Many of these immigrants came from societies where opportunities were scarce and life was unpredictable.
When they arrived, they carried with them not only their belongings but an unyielding belief that hard work and education could transcend adversity.
But this success, this overachievement, as some call it, is not without its challenges.
In affirmative action around the world, an empirical study I examined the unintended consequences of racial quotas and affirmative action policies for Asian-Americans.
These policies often penalize the very qualities that lead to their success. Imagine this: a student who has studied tirelessly and excelled in every measurable way discovers that their achievements mean less, not because they are less qualified, but because of the group they belong to.
Harvard's practices limiting the number of Asian-American students are a striking example. As I've argued, policies like these betray the principles of meritocracy and fairness that should form the foundation of education systems.
The irony here is thick: a group so vilified for their success faces obstacles placed precisely because of their achievements.
But let me be clear: it is not luck that has brought them here. It is grit, it is discipline, it is a focus on family, education, and the future.