Sowell: Football and Fallacies

Football and Fallacies


Thomas Sowell
Posted: Nov 23, 2016 7:11 PM



This is a football story with both political and legal implications.

It was fourth down in a National Football League game, and the punting team came onto the field. The other team went into their formation to defend against the punt. Then somebody noticed that the man set to kick the punt was black.

"Fake!" one of the defenders cried out. That cry was immediately echoed by others, and the defending team changed their formation, to guard against the kicker either running with the ball or throwing it. But in fact he punted.

Why did anyone think he was not going to punt the ball? Because chances are no one on that field had ever seen a black football player kick a punt. As someone who has watched NFL games for half a century, I have never seen a black player either punt the ball, or kick a field goal or a point after touchdown.

I have seen hundreds of black players score touchdowns, but not one kick the point afterwards. I have seen a black President of the United States before I have seen a black kicker in the NFL.

Politicians, the intelligentsia and even the Supreme Court of the United States have been saying for decades that statistical disparities between racial groups indicate discrimination. If so, then the racial disparities among kickers in professional football exceed that in virtually any other job anywhere.

But is it discrimination? The very same people who employ blacks at every other position on a football team are the people who hire kickers. Why would they be willing to hire black players in other positions that pay a lot more money than most kickers get, but draw the line at hiring black kickers?

In this situation, discrimination is an explanation that doesn't even meet the test of plausibility.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, there are those who attribute differences in racial representation to genetics. Are blacks genetically incapable of kicking a football? Somehow black colleges have been playing football for generations, without having to recruit white players to do the kicking.

But if neither race nor racism can explain why black kickers are so rare in professional football, what can possibly explain it? One of the most obvious possibilities is routinely ignored in many cases of group disparities: Different individuals and groups have different things they want to do.

If black youngsters who are dreaming of an athletic career don't happen to be dreaming of becoming kickers, then it doesn't matter whether they have both the innate ability and the opportunity.

It is very doubtful if any of the guys who grew up in my old neighborhood in Harlem ever became ballet dancers. Is that because black guys can't dance? Some of the best male tap dancers have been black. Is it because nobody would hire black male dancers? Some black male tap dancers have starred on the stage and danced in movies. Just not in ballets.

Many of us have been so brainwashed over the years -- by sheer repetition, rather than by either logic or empirical tests -- that statistical disparities are automatically taken to mean discrimination, whether between races, sexes or whatever.

The plain fact that different individuals and groups make different choices is resolutely ignored, because it does not fit the prevailing preconceptions, or the crusades based on those preconceptions.

Women make different career choices than men, and wisely so, because men do not become mothers, and being a mother is not the same as being a father. And we can't make them the same by simply calling them both "parents" or saying that "the couple" is pregnant.

Discrimination can certainly cause statistical disparities. But statistical disparities do not automatically mean discrimination.

When some racial or ethnic groups have a median age that is 20 years older than the median age of some other racial or ethnic groups, how surprised should we be to find members of the younger groups far better represented in sports and members of the older groups far better represented in jobs that require long years of experience?

Statistics are no substitute for thought -- certainly not in government policies, and especially not in Supreme Court decisions.

Sowell: Backward-Looking 'Progressives'

Backward-Looking 'Progressives'


Thomas Sowell
|
Posted: Nov 22, 2016 12:01 AM

People who call themselves "progressives" claim to be forward-looking, but a remarkable amount of the things they say and do are based on looking backward.

One of the maddening aspects of the thinking, or non-thinking, on the political left is their failure to understand that there is nothing they can do about the past. Whether people on the left are talking about college admissions or criminal justice, or many other decisions, they go on and on about how some people were born with lesser chances in life than other people.

Whoever doubted it? But, once someone who has grown up is being judged by a college admissions committee or by a court of criminal justice, there is nothing that can be done about their childhood. Other institutions can deal with today's children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and should, but the past is irrevocable. Even where there are no economic differences among various families in which children are raised, there are still major differences in the circumstances into which people are born, even within the same family, which affect their chances in later life as adults.

For example, among children of the same parents, raised under the same roof, the first born, as a group, have done better than their later siblings, whether measured by IQ tests or by becoming National Merit Scholarship finalists or by various other achievements.

The only child has also done better, on average, than children who have siblings. The advantage of the first born may well be due to the fact that he or she was an only child for some time, perhaps for several formative years.

By the time people have grown up and apply to college, all that is history. Nothing that a college admissions committee can do will change anything about their childhoods. The only things these committees' decisions can affect are the present and the future. This is not rocket science.

Nevertheless, there are people who urge college admissions committees to let disadvantaged students be admitted with lower test scores or other academic indicators.

Those who say such things seldom even attempt to see what the actual consequences of such policies have been. The prevailing preconceptions -- sometimes called what "everybody knows" -- are sufficient for them.

Factual studies show that admitting students to institutions whose standards they do not meet often leads to needless academic failures, even among students with above average ability, who could have succeeded at other institutions whose standards they do meet.

The most comprehensive of these studies of Americans is the book "Mismatch" by Sander and Taylor. Similar results in other countries are cited in my own book, "Affirmative Action Around the World."

When it comes to criminal justice, there is much the same kind of preoccupation on the left with the past that cannot be changed. Murderers may in some cases have had unhappy childhoods, but there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to change their childhoods after they are adults.

The most that can be done is to keep murderers from committing more murders, and to deter others from committing murder. People on the left who want to give murderers "another chance" are gambling with the lives of innocent people. That is one of many other examples of the cruel consequences of seemingly compassionate decisions and policies.

Ironically, people on the left who are preoccupied with the presumably unhappy childhoods of murderers, which they can do nothing about, seldom show similar concern about the present and future unhappy childhoods of the orphans of people who have been murdered.

Such inconsistencies are not peculiar to our time, though they seem to be more pervasive today. But the left has been trying, for more than 200 years, to mitigate or eliminate punishments in general, and capital punishment in particular. What is peculiar to our time is the degree to which the views of the left have become laws and policies.

A long overdue backlash against those views has begun in some Western nations, of which the recent election results in the United States are just one symptom. How all this will end is by no means clear. Just as the past cannot be changed, so the future cannot be predicted with certainty.

‘Not My President’ Proves Liberal Love For Democracy Is Just A Ruse

‘Not My President’ Proves Liberal Love For Democracy Is Just A Ruse

Liberals who chest-thump about the integrity of our political institutions are frequently eager to discredit those same political institutions when it suits their purposes.

By Daniel Payne
November 14, 2016

The months leading up to the 2016 presidential election included a great deal of freaking out over the possibility that Donald Trump and his followers might not “accept” the election results. This was seen as a dangerous attack on the sanctity of American elections and the stability of the American political order.

After Trump’s smashing victory, however, the tables were turned: it was suddenly liberals who were unwilling to “accept” the results of November 8. To be fair, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the establishment seemed willing to concede the legitimacy of the election readily enough, but much of the liberal base was having none of it.

This is actually a regular feature of American politics. For all its hand-wringing after Trump waffled about “accepting” the election results, the Left itself is often noticeably unwilling to tolerate any displeasing election results. Liberals who are outwardly the most concerned about the integrity of our political institutions are the same people who are frequently most eager to discredit those same political institutions when it suits their purposes.
I Reject Reality and Substitute My Own

Case in point: in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, the slogan “not my president” began spreading like wildfire throughout the liberal ranks. It was termed a “liberal rallying cry.” Multiple protesters were arrested in multiple states. In California, students walked out of their high school declaring “Not my president!” College students said the same thing. Vandalism and mayhem were present at many protests. Some protesters burned Trump in effigy while chanting the slogan.

It would be bad enough if this whole “not my president” meme were a one-time thing. But this has happened before: liberal hatred of former president George W. Bush was so strong in 2000 and 2004 that anti-Bush liberals created a T-shirt declaring that Bush was “not my president.” If you have any clear memories of the Bush years, you will probably recall at least one liberal (and likely many of them) saying of Bush, “He’s not my president.” This was a relentless slogan during Bush’s two terms.

But of course Bush was every American’s president, and soon Trump will be, too. That’s how U.S. elections work, even if the Left isn’t willing to accept it.
Also, Elections Are Rigged!

Some of this can be chalked up to rhetorical excess. But plenty of people genuinely seem to mean it when they say a Republican is “not my president.” You can see this sincere conviction in the way liberals often accuse presidential elections of being corrupt, fraudulent, and rigged.

Liberal accusations of rigged elections have been rampant in the wake of Tuesday’s results. Many progressives seemed to believe “voter suppression” was a key factor in helping Trump win. There was apparently something called a “war on voting rights” that may have given Trump a boost. Vox’s Ezra Klein heavily implied that the Electoral College is a rigged affair. So did Phillip Bump at the Washington Post. So did George Takei. So did around four million people who demanded that the Electoral College “ignore [the] states’ votes” and elect Hillary Clinton president on December 19.

But—again—we’ve seen this behavior before. After the 2000 election, liberals went bananas insisting the system had been rigged to favor Bush. Clinton herself implied as much! This “rigged” election had such an indelible effect on the liberal psyche that they’re still talking about it years later. After the 2004 election, John Kerry allegedly told at least one person he believed the election was stolen from him. An article in the New Yorker last year restated Kerry’s paranoid conspiracy theory

The message is clear: if a Republican insists that an election is rigged, it’s dangerous and reckless rhetoric. But if a liberal insists that an election is rigged, it’s fine.
I’m Taking My Ball and Leaving!

Then there is liberals’ ever-present threat to leave the country if a Republican wins an election. Anyone is free to leave the country for whatever reason he desires, of course. But there is a weird unseemliness to making such a threat just because an election didn’t go the way you like. Many progressives who simply can’t stand the thought of living in the United States under a Republican president seem to be tacitly implying that the American political system is, practically speaking, unacceptable and worthy of abandonment.

One almost gets the feeling that liberals aren’t really all that scandalized by accusations of “rigged” elections; they only pretend to be so if a Republican is making the accusations. When faced with an election result they don’t like, the Left seems delighted to delegitimize every last shred of American political integrity they can find.

Perhaps a reasonable conclusion is this: modern progressives don’t really care all that much about protecting and preserving America’s political institutions. They just care about securing power for themselves, and they are perfectly willing to be duplicitous to secure that power.

Why is liberalism so concerned with getting power and so willing to debase the American political system to get it? One possibility is the life-and-death, apocalyptic style of liberal politics. In many cases, the Left styles elections as the choice between a liberal political savior and a conservative demon. The implication is always that, if the conservative wins, then America will turn into a kind of continent-wide Nazi Germany. Looked at from this angle, it’s not hard to see why many progressives might believe that the ends justify the means: they’ll do whatever it takes to keep Republican Hitlers out of the White House.

Or maybe there is a lower and baser explanation than that: perhaps the progressive impulse, generally speaking, is one that views policy as secondary or even tertiary to the quest for power. Maybe power in political terms is less the means for the Left and more the end. How that power is used once in office is not a primary concern so long as someone with a “D” next to his name is wielding the power. If this is true, we should be grateful whenever a conservative wins an election, regardless of how much liberals melt into hysterics.

Of course, there is an upside to one feature of this: if many liberals do follow through with their threats to flee the country, the probability of our having to deal with this stuff drops accordingly. So perhaps we should encourage that.

Daniel Payne is a senior contributor at The Federalist. He currently runs the blog Trial of the Century, and lives in Virginia.