A major factor in both income and wealth is age. Those who have worked for many years tend to have advanced in their careers to higher-paying positions and to have accumulated more assets, whether in the form of money in the bank or a pension fund, or equity in their homes. People in their sixties have persistently had higher incomes than people in their twenties and much higher net worths. In short, membership in various income brackets tends to be transient, in the American economy at least, due both to age and to the ordinary ups and downs of individuals’ careers and of the surrounding economy. Yet that fact has had very little effect on visions, crusades, or the rhetoric attacking “inequality.”
Equality and Inequality of Performance
Thus far, in speaking of equality among human beings, we have mentioned only equality of benefits. But most benefits must be produced and another dimension of equality is equality of productivity or performance. Egalitarians are offended if any race, gender, or other social groupings are said to be inferior in productivity or performance, especially if it is claimed that they are innately so. But merely defining performance uniquely can be virtually impossible, even in a narrow field.
To deliberately choose an example with no ideological overtones to confuse the issue, Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average was 25 points higher than Babe Ruth’s, but Ruth hit far more home runs. To arrive at some common denominator in which to compare their batting performances, you must make some ultimately arbitrary determination as to how many singles are the equivalent of how many home runs—and all this quite aside from differences between Cobb and Ruth as outfielders or base runners, or the fact that Ruth was one of the top pitchers in baseball during his early career. Note again that all these complications arise merely in defining equality of performance in one aspect of a narrow specialty like professional baseball. We have not even begun to address the question as to how other ballplayers might be made equal in performance to either Cobb or Ruth, much less what equality of performance would mean when comparing performances across a vast spectrum of fields of endeavor.
One of the things that makes sports fascinating to so many people are the endless debates as to who was “the greatest” in a particular sport, or even in a particular specialty within a given sport—the greatest quarterback, shortstop, welterweight, center, goalie, etc. These debates are never resolved, precisely because there is no common denominator, even when the facts are extensively documented, beyond dispute, and widely available. The Baseball Encyclopedia, for example, contains nearly three thousand pages of detailed statistics, printed in small type and covering every player in the history of major league baseball. Yet the debates rage on, because defining equality—and its corollaries, superiority and inferiority—is ultimately a conceptual, rather than an empirical, dilemma.
To question equality, whether in concept or in policy application, is not to advocate inequality. The conceptual difficulties in defining who is equal apply as well to defining who is superior and who is inferior. These difficulties are not insurmountable, but they do require some further specifications, and these specifications must ultimately be arbitrary. Some of these difficulties are apparent when we turn to concrete examples involving equality or inequalities of income and wealth, equality or inequalities of performance, equality or inequalities of merit, all at the individual level. Difficulties also arise when considering group equality or inequalities as regards either minority groups within a given society or cultural equality or inequality as regards one society or civilization compared to another.
Culture versus Equality
At all stages of history, vast disparities in performance have been commonplace among peoples, nations, regions, and many other groupings of human beings. These disparities have been economic, military, technological, and so on, across a vast spectrum of human differences. Races have been just one of the many groupings which have differed in performance, but these differences have been equally profound among other groupings which have no genetic basis. Moreover, races which have clearly been far more technologically or organizationally advanced than others at one stage of history have been equally far behind those other races in another.
China, for example, was far more advanced than any nation in Europe, in many technological and organizational ways, for many centuries. Yet, for the past several centuries, the roles of China and Europe have been reversed. Even within Europe, for most of the recorded history of the continent, Southern Europeans have been more advanced than those of the north. Greece had Plato and Aristotle, the Acropolis, and the Colossus at Rhodes, at a time when much of northern Europe consisted of illiterate tribal societies living primitive lives. Yet the technological, economic, and scientific frontier of Europe has for the past few centuries been its northern and western nations.
Clearly the question as to whether there have been large performance differences between peoples, as of a given time, is quite different from the question as to whether those differences are racial or genetic in origin. Even so, resistance to acknowledging superior performances has in recent times been fierce, determined, and ingenious, even if not always ingenuous.
The most sweeping denials of performance superiority have been based on redefining them out of existence as culturally biased “perceptions” and “stereotypes.” Those who take this approach of cultural relativism acknowledge only differences but no superiority. Yet all cultures serve practical purposes, as well as being symbolic and emotional, and they serve these practical purposes more efficiently or less efficiently—not just in the opinions of particular observers but, more importantly, in the practices of the societies themselves, which borrow from other cultures and discard their own ways of doing particular things.
Western civilization, for example, has abandoned Roman numerals for mathematical work, in favor of a very different numbering system originating in India and conveyed to the West by Arabs. The West has also abandoned scrolls in favor of paper, and scribes in favor of printing, in each case choosing things originating in China over things indigenous to Western culture. All over the world, peoples have abandoned their own bows and arrows for guns, wherever they have had a choice. Much of the story of the advancement of the human race has been a story of massive cultural borrowings, which have created a modern world technology, as much at home in Japan as in Europe or the United States.
Whatever the theories of cultural relativists, the actual practices of human beings in virtually all cultures throughout history contradict the notion that it is just a matter of “perceptions.” These practices of human beings across the planet and down through history—the preferences revealed by cultural borrowing—provide a common denominator in which particular products of many cultures can be compared. In this common scheme of valuation, it is clear that some economies, for example, perform much better than others. Nor is this merely a culture-bound perception. Many Japanese products find numerous buyers in societies culturally very different from that of Japan.
Within societies, as between societies, equality of performance is not to be found. As the distinguished French historian Fernand Braudel put it: “In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally.”10 Performance equality is the most difficult of all kinds of equality to believe in, on any basis other than sheer dogma. The same man is not even equal to himself on different days, much less at different periods of life. However, denials and evasions of performance differences take many forms. A vast literature and powerful legal and political doctrines in many countries proclaim intergroup disparities in representation or rewards to be “inequities” due either to overt discrimination or to subconscious bias by individuals, institutions, or “society.”
Virtually no one has seriously denied that discrimination and bias have resulted in various inequalities. It is the converse proposition—that discrimination or bias can be inferred from statistical inequalities—which is the reigning non sequitur of our times, both intellectually and politically. To prove statistically
that the observed patterns of representation or reward are not due to random chance is considered to be virtual proof that they are due to discrimination—not to performance differences. The implicit assumption is that a more or less even or random representation or reward for performance could be expected, in the absence of institutional or societal policies and practices which disadvantage one group compared to others. Yet there has never been an even or random world, even in matters not controlled by the biases of others. Not only performance differences but also differences in luck and in many other factors wholly disrupt the simple picture of an even, regular, or balanced world.
In the case of many social disparities, the beneficiaries have often been powerless minorities with no way to discriminate against the majority populations of their respective countries. The history of the Jews in Eastern Europe, the “overseas Chinese” in Southeast Asia, the Lebanese in West Africa, and emigrants from India in Fiji are just some of the examples. Innumerable factors are behind these disparities, including not only performance differences but also differences in median age (often differing by a decade or more from one racial or ethnic group to another), differences in regional distribution, and other differences that may be obvious, speculative, or unknown. What is wholly unsubstantiated is the prevailing assumption that the world would be random or even, in the absence of discrimination or bias by individuals, institutions, or “society.”
The factors operating against performance equality are far too numerous, beginning with the physical settings in which different peoples have evolved culturally and economically. Geography is not egalitarian. The very ground that people stand on differs radically in fertility, topography, mineral wealth, and other characteristics. Navigable waterways are abundant in Western Europe and painfully scarce in sub-Saharan Africa. Large beasts of burden, such as horses and oxen, which for centuries played vital roles in the economic life of many parts of the world, were totally lacking in the entire Western Hemisphere before Columbus arrived. It is not uncommon for rainfall on one side of a mountain range to be ten times what it is on the other side, making for radically different agricultural prospects for the people in the two regions. Geography is brutally oblivious to human desires for equality.
It is not simply that economic levels vary widely for different regions of the earth, as a result of fortuitous geographical differences. More fundamentally, the people themselves vary in their cultural development, according to whether their respective geographical settings facilitate or impede their economic development and their exposure to a wider world of economic and cultural interactions.
How could Eskimos have acquired the skills and experience needed to grow pineapples or other tropical crops? How could the peoples of the Himalayas have learned to navigate on the high seas? How would Scandinavians or Polynesians know as much about camels as the Beduins of the Sahara—or the Beduins know as much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians? Given that the mineral deposits that were central to the industrial revolution neither existed in the Balkans nor could have been transported there without prohibitive costs, how could emigrants from the Balkans have brought with them to North America or to Australia the industrial skills possessed by people from the mineral-rich industrial heartlands of Germany or Britain?
People living on isolated islands in the sea, in remote mountain communities, or in other geographical settings that limit their cultural exposures, tend generally to lag behind the technological, organizational, and other developments among people more favorably situated. When the Spaniards invaded the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level. So were the Australian aborigines when the British encountered them.
Around the world, according to Braudel, mountains “remain almost always on the fringe of the great waves of civilization” for civilizations “are an urban and lowland achievement.”11 Cities have long been in the vanguard of human advancement all around the world and over centuries of history. But cities do not arise equally in all geographic settings. In the millennia before the railroad appeared, most cities arose on navigable waterways. Such waterways are vastly more common in Western Europe than in sub-Saharan Africa and so are cities.
Differences in location mean that the sun beats down on different parts of the world with different intensity, making for profound differences in climate and, therefore, in agriculture and diseases. The availability of water for drinking, farming, or transportation likewise differs radically across the planet—and, even when two regions are both served by rivers, the contrast between those rivers can affect the economic viability of the regions they serve and the cultural development of the peoples within those regions. While rivers in Western Europe may be flowing year-around, rivers in Russia may be frozen for months at a time and rivers in Africa may be navigable for only limited stretches, due to cascades and waterfalls, not to mention drastic seasonal changes in rainfall.
It would be miraculous if all these—and many other—geographical variables worked out in such a way that each group’s evolution in its particular physical setting produced the same levels of skills in the same fields of endeavor as that of other peoples elsewhere, even during a given era, much less over the centuries and millennia of human history.
Such geographically influenced disparities as of a given time often persist over time, even when peoples move from one geographical setting to another, taking with them a particular set of skills and a whole mental universe, transplanting it into a different setting, where they compete with indigenous people and with others transplanted from other settings that produced different skills and different cultures. Scottish highlanders long differed culturally from Scottish lowlanders, not only in Scotland itself but also in the United States and Australia, where the lowlanders were far more economically successful, as they were in Scotland.12 Similar disparities have marked the respective histories of German Jews versus Eastern European Jews or of Gujaratis versus Tamils from India, among others.
Even putting aside all the differences growing out of geographical origins and their cultural consequences, demographic differences alone operate powerfully against equality of performance. No one expects small children to perform as well as adults with decades of education and experience—and groups differ significantly in the respective proportions of their populations which consist of children and which consist of those who are middle-aged adults. Moreover, such intergroup differences in demographic characteristics are common in societies around the world.
In the United States, for example, the median age of Jews is decades older than the median age of Puerto Ricans. Even if Puerto Ricans and Jews were identical in every other respect, they would still not be equally represented, in proportion to their respective populations, in jobs requiring long years of experience, or in homes for the elderly, or in activities associated with youth, such as sports or crime. The point here is not to claim that age alone explains most income or wealth differences. The point is that age differences alone are enough to preclude the equality that is presumed to exist in the absence of discrimination. Many other factors also make that vision an impossible one.
Despite the ease with which some discussions of income glide from the statistical category of inequality to the moral category of inequity, there is nothing requiring either special explanation or special justification in the fact that a young man beginning his career in his twenties is unlikely to be earning as much as his father in his forties, who has decades more experience, as well as more time in which to build a reputation. Since the father is also likely to have heavier financial responsibilities—for sending children through college or preparing for his own retirement and the growing medical expenses associated with age—statistical differences in income do not necessarily reflect corresponding differences in economic well-being. The son may even be able to afford some amenities or luxuries which his father cannot afford on a higher income.
Within given families,
there are performance differences on mental tests as between the first-born child and later children. A study of National Merit Scholarship finalists separated out the first-born from the later siblings and discovered that more than half of these finalists were first-borns—even in five-child families.13 A later study showed that IQ differences among siblings translated into income differences between them of a magnitude comparable to those between unrelated individuals with different IQs.14 If you cannot achieve equality of performance among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions?
The mere fact that families differ in size adds to statistical inequalities. Statistics on how the income of the top fifth of families compares with the income of the bottom fifth are misleading when they do not take into account that the top fifth of families contains more people than the bottom fifth. Families and households have differed in size from one era to another, from one group to another, and from one income bracket to another. For example, there are more than 50 percent more people per household earning $75,000 and up as per household earning under $15,000. That is one of the reasons for their differences in income: People earn money and more people tend to earn more money.
There are more than twice as many income-earners per household in households earning $75,000 and up as per household earning under $15,000. The top 20 percent of incomeearning families supply 29 percent of all workers who work 50 weeks or more per year, while the bottom 20 percent supply just 7 percent of such workers. There are very mundane explanations for many of the statistical differences that some seek to explain in more sinister and melodramatic terms.