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Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

Book by Thomas Sowell · 4 quotes · Economics, Affirmative Action, Equity And Inclusion

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Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? Quotes

“However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution.”

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“Affirmative action hiring pressures make it costly to have no minority employees, but continuing affirmative action pressures at the promotion and discharge phases also make it costly to have minority employees who do not work out well. The net effect is to increase the demand for highly qualified minority employees while decreasing the demand for less qualified minority employees or for those without a sufficient track record to reassure employers.”

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“How, then, can women as a group be so far behind men as a group, in both incomes and occupations? Because most women become wives and mothers and the economic results are totally different from a man's becoming a husband and father. However parallel these roles may be verbally, they are vastly different in behavioral consequences. There are reasons why there are no homes for unwed fathers.”

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“With women, as with racial and ethnic minorities, the effects of policies must be carefully separated from the intentions of those policies. The crucial question is not the desirability of the professed goal but the incentives and constraints created and what they are most likely to lead to. The imposition of monthly equality in pensions, rather than lifetime equality, has the net effect of making pension plans more expensive, the more female employees there are [because women live longer than men]. Viewed as prospective behavioral incentives, rather than as a retrospective status pronouncement, this means that employers will find it more costly to hire female work- ers with a given pension plan and more costly to institute a given pension plan when there are more female workers. Reducing the demand for female workers or reducing the likelihood of creating a pension plan is hardly the intention of the courts, but it can easily be the result. It is not clear that anyone is economically better off after such a symbolic ruling.”

EconomicsEpistemologyEquity And Inclusion
Book:Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
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