back to indexGlenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture | Lex Fridman Podcast #285
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I hate affirmative action.
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I don't just disagree with it.
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I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment.
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The hatred comes from an understanding
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that it is a bandaid, that it is a substitute
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for the actual development of the capacities
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of our people to compete.
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They wanna tell African Americans to pat us on the head.
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We're gonna have a separate program for you.
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We're gonna give you a side door that you can come into.
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That doesn't make us any smarter.
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It doesn't make us any more creative
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and it doesn't make us any more fit
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for the actual competition that's unfolding before us.
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The following is a conversation with Glenn Loury,
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professor of economics and social sciences
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at Brown University.
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He is one of the great minds and communicators of our time,
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writing and speaking about race and inequality.
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I highly encourage you to listen to his show
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on YouTube and Substack, simply called The Glenn Show.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Glenn Loury.
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Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech
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I think is the greatest speech in American history.
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If I may, I'd like to read a few words of it.
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And ask you a question about this dream.
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I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up
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and live out the true meaning of its creed.
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We hold these truths to be self evident,
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that all men are created equal.
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I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia,
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the sons of former slaves and the sons of former
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slave owners will be able to sit down together
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at the table of brotherhood.
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I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi,
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a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,
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sweltering with the heat of oppression,
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will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
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I have a dream that my four little children
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will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
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by the color of their skin,
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but by the content of their character.
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I have a dream today.
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First of all, damn.
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I mentioned to you offline I immigrated to America
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and this is why I love this country.
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This is one of the great speeches that represents
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what this country is about.
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So what is this ideal of equality
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that we should strive for as a nation,
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that all men are created equal?
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What does that mean to you, this equality?
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Well, if we put this in historical context,
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King is speaking in 1963 when he gives that speech.
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It's exactly 100 years after Abraham Lincoln signs
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the Emancipation Proclamation
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declaring the enslaved people to be free.
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They're not yet citizens in 1863,
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but the end of slavery has become the position
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of the federal government when Lincoln issues
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that Emancipation Proclamation.
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So putting it in context, enslaved people,
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four million or so African descended enslaved people,
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how do they become citizens?
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How do they become in this status of subjugation
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and domination and stigma and exclusion?
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How do they become citizens?
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It seems to me that that's the heart of it.
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The equality that King is talking about
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is an equality of status as members of the nation
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as free and equal citizens within the republic.
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Now, I think it's really important to understand
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that slavery was not merely a legal order,
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but it was also a social system
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that had the symbolism attached to it.
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They had a big journey to make
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from their subjugated status as serfs, as landless people,
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as uneducated, unfit for citizenship really
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in the minds of many.
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So I think that's what in 1963, 100 years later,
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that King is appealing to this idea
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that when Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence
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writes these words, all men are created equal
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and endowed by their creator
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with certain inalienable rights,
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Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, didn't have in mind
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when he wrote those words, the people who were slaves.
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But by the time you get to 1963,
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King is invoking this idea, all men,
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and of course he means all persons.
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He doesn't only mean men.
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He means men and women are created equal.
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He wants this idea to be embraced by the country
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in reference to the descendants of the African slaves.
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The legacy of slavery would be erased,
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that the position of African Americans would be equalized
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within the political community,
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which is the United States of America.
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That's my sense of it in any case.
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So on a very basic level, the worth of a human being
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It's just literally the worth of a human being.
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So I mentioned to you offline
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that I came from the Soviet Union.
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My grandfather fought in World War II,
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and for Hitler, the worth of a Slavic person
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as they were captured, there's different numbers,
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but it's in the hundreds to one German
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in terms of the value of the person to the great Germany.
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So he wanted Germany to expand
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and conquer a large part of the world.
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And within that future world, that Third Reich,
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the worth of a Russian or a Slavic person
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is one hundredth or one thousandth of a German person,
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of a pure German person.
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So that has to do with not some kind of public policy
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or politics or all that kind of stuff.
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It has to do with the basic worth of a human being.
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And that's what Dr. King is speaking to,
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that all people on some kind of deep level
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are worth the same.
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If you're somehow weighing the value of a person,
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we're equal in that basic fundamental worth.
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Yeah, I think that's correct.
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I think that's very well said.
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I don't know that he had in mind
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the position of Slavic people in Central Europe
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in the middle of the 20th century,
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or the first part of the 20th century, King.
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I don't know that he had that in mind.
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He might well have done.
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But certainly that's the idea.
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So you don't think he was really thinking
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about this particular civil rights struggle
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and the particular struggle
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against the backdrop of the history of slavery in America
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and thinking about African Americans.
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He wasn't thinking about the basic,
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he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of all human beings.
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No, I don't mean to say that.
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The speech in Washington.
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In 1963 at that march was within the context
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of the United States.
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And it was within the context of the civil rights movement.
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There was a movement that was going on.
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He was an actor in a political drama that was American
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that had to do with the fight over equal rights
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for voting, for housing, for employment,
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for citizenship of blacks in America.
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But King was informed, I think,
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by a much broader Christian ethic of the equality
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I mean, he gets killed in 1968.
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The five years after that speech in Washington,
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he spends developing his worldview
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and the things that he had to say, for example,
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about the war in Southeast Asia that was going on
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at that time made appeals to universal principles
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He was a pacifist to some degree.
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He was against war.
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He was a socialist to some degree.
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He might not have worn that label publicly,
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but he believed in a decent society
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where the poor would not go untended,
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where healthcare would be available to people who needed it
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and this kind of thing.
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A humanitarian who saw that the value of a life
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was not dependent upon the color of the skin,
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upon the native mother tongue that might be spoken,
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upon whether male or female.
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All persons are created equal.
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This is very much the ethic of Martin Luther King,
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on my understanding.
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Broadly speaking, what do you learn about human nature
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by looking at the history of slavery in America?
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So what does that tell you about people?
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Well, I think of two things right off the top of my head.
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One is about the capacity of people
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for looking the other way in the face of
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unethical and morally profoundly problematic practice.
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So, I mean, slavery was controversial.
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It was controversial going all the way back
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to the founding of the United States of America.
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The country was founded on a compromise
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where half of the country thought that slavery was abhorrent
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and would not have had it countenanced in the Constitution.
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The other half of the country were steeped
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in the dependence on the labor of these African captives
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and their descendants.
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The economy depended upon it.
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They owned them as property.
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That was their wealth.
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Their wealth was invested to some degree
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in the value of these human beings.
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And in order for the United States to come together
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as a confederation of the several colonies,
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there had to be a compromise made.
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And it was made where slavery was allowed to persist
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and the people who were against it
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or who thought it morally problematic
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were able to countenance the practice
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in the Southern states where slavery flourished.
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And that went on for 75 years
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after the founding of the country
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until the crisis of the late 1850s
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that led to the Civil War
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and ultimately to the emancipation.
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So one thing I think about human nature
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from the fact of slavery is that the ability of people
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to live with terrible, morally questionable practices
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and have that as a part of their institutions.
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It took a movement, a massive movement of abolitionists
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struggling against slavery for the better part of a century
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before that practice could be eradicated.
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But the other thing about human nature that I see
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is the ability of people to sustain their humanity
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under the most awful, oppressive conditions.
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The enslaved persons, the slaves and their children,
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I mean, they were chattel,
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they were bought and sold like horses or cattle.
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And yet their humanity was not destroyed by that.
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And they were able to sustain their dignity to some degree
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in such a manner that once emancipation finally did arrive,
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the freedmen and women, the persons who had been enslaved
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and who were set free were able to over the following decades
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build a foundation for the development of African Americans
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within the context of American society
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that eventually culminated in the civil rights movement
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of the middle of the 20th century
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and has led us into the present day.
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So, you know, human nature can countenance awful evil
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but human nature can also survive
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in the face of terrible evil.
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That's what I take from slavery.
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That survival, that flame can burn even when the world
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around it tries to put it out.
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There's still a little flame of human consciousness,
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of spirit, of culture, of whatever the hell that is
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that makes humans flourish and makes humans beautiful
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That's very well said.
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Yeah, I think you put it very well.
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There's gotta be some poetic way of expressing that.
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Leave it to the poets.
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What about the people that look the other way?
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How many people do you think, just regular people,
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knew that something is, this is wrong?
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Or do people through generations convince themselves,
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most people, most regular people,
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convince themselves that there's nothing wrong?
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I ask this question because I wonder
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what we're looking the other way on today also.
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Because you have to ask yourself these difficult questions
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of assuming we're the same people we were back then
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then we can be flawed in that same kind of way.
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We can look the other way just as others have in history.
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Yeah, you spoke of the European context
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and of the Nazis and certainly a lot of people
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had to be looking the other way when the massive crimes
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that were committed by that regime were being undertaken.
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I mean, railroad cars full of human beings
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being taken off to be slaughtered or to be worked to death
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in labor camps or to be gassed, et cetera.
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A lot of people had to know about what was going on
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and look the other way or enthusiastically supported
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the persecution of the Jews and the gypsies and so on.
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And I don't know, I wasn't around in 1840.
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My sense of the matter is that like many practices
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that are unjust, most people thought
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that's just the way it is.
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I mean, that's the world that they inherited.
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They were not moralists, they were not revolutionaries.
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They just wanted to go along.
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Some people might've been troubled by it
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but thought there's nothing that can be done.
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Some people might've thought, well,
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they're these black Africans, they're not really like us
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and they are lucky to be here.
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If they were in Africa, they'd be worse off still.
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Some people might've thought that.
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Some people might've been disturbed
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but not been able to see what it is
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that they could do about it.
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They might've thought, oh, this is disgusting.
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This is not something I would wanna have anything to do with
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but not knowing whether there's any practical way
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of opposing it, that's why you need a movement.
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You need for the people who are troubled by the practice
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to know that there are others like themselves
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equally troubled and as they gather together,
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collectively, they can exert their influence.
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I mean, debates about the wrongness of slavery,
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as I say, go all the way back to the founding of the country.
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There were abolitionists and there were people
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who opposed the compromise that led to the framing documents
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and institutions that created the United States of America,
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opposed the countenancing of slavery in that situation.
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But it took a while before that could come to a head
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and produce the crisis which ultimately led
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to the eradication of slavery.
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I would note that slavery is not unique to the United States.
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It's not unique to the Western Hemisphere.
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The enslavement of people, the trafficking in human chattel
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is something that one sees on a global basis,
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one sees it going all the way back to antiquity.
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So we might ask, how is it that people finally came
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to turn their backs and eradicate the practice?
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That might be the thing worth really trying to understand
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because the practice itself is,
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there's a wonderful book by the sociologist
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Orlando Patterson called Slavery and Social Death
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that was published in 1982, which is a comprehensive history
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and social analysis of the institution of slavery
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over 2,500 years, going back to the classical Greek
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and Roman civilizations, finding slavery in Africa
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amongst Africans, finding slavery in the Middle East,
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finding slavery in the Far East,
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finding slavery in South Asia, the enslavement of people,
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the practice of taking someone as a captive in war
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and then instead of killing them, which you could do,
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making them into your property was very, very widespread
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So I mean, I'd like to make this point sometimes
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when people are talking about how wrong slavery was
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and I agree without any question
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that the practice was profoundly morally problematic,
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but I'd like to make the point that given how wrong it was,
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think about how impressive was the accomplishment
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of the eradication of slavery.
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Now, that was something, I mean, there were 600,000 dead
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in the war between the states, 1861 to 1865
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in a country of 30 million people.
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That's a lot of dead people who gave their lives
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not to eradicate slavery in every instance,
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probably most of them were just fighting for,
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they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces
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and they fought and they died,
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but the net effect of their having fought and died
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was to push along a process
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that led to the eradication of slavery.
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That's an amazing achievement.
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The slaves themselves were largely uneducated
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and backward in their,
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of course, what else could they have been?
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They were kept in captivity,
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they were prevented from developing their human potential
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and yet after the end of slavery,
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that population, that 4 million plus African descended people
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became the foundation for what a century later
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leads to Martin Luther King standing in the Washington Mall
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and giving that great speech
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and now here we are 150 years down the road
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and Barack Obama is president of the United States.
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Now, he did not descend from slaves,
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I think we must not lose track of that,
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but he identified as an African American
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and was a part of the population
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that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves
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and we are, we African Americans are
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for all practical purposes,
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fully equal citizens of this great republic.
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That has happened within a century and a half
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and I don't know that you can find any parallel
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to that kind of transformation in the status of people
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from human chattel to full citizens of the republic.
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Anywhere in human history,
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it's certainly worth celebrating the achievement
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of the eradication of slavery, I would say.
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And it probably started with a few people
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that inside their mind dared to rebel.
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You know, it's interesting to think about how it all started,
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how in the state of injustice,
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the revolution percolates, like where it starts.
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You said people that see something is wrong find each other.
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It's in the ideas of charismatic individuals
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that not only know that something is wrong,
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but are able to tell others about it and be convincing
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and then together gather and rise up.
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It's interesting to make this kind of incredible progress
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from slavery to where we are today
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to live out the ideal of this all men are created equal.
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The power of individual,
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because I don't know what you think about it,
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but I tend to think that a few small individuals
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probably originated this.
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Like it's the power of the individual,
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because sometimes we think there's injustice in the world,
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what can I possibly do?
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But I tend to think one person can be the seed
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of starting to fix the injustice.
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One person here, one person there.
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One thinks of course of Frederick Douglass,
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this massively significant figure who was born in slavery,
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who stole his freedom because he was property
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and he decided he was not gonna be property anymore
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and he took it unto himself to emancipate himself personally
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and who became an educated, a powerfully articulate,
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massively influential person in the United States
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and in England going around presenting himself
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as an embodiment of human dignity
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and commitment to ideals of equality.
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And I mean, he's just one person,
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but there were others like him.
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All it takes is just one person.
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So here we are on this topic of equality
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in the 21st century.
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So what does equality mean today?
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If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome
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or the injustice of inequality,
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at which point does equality of outcome is just,
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at which point is it unjust?
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Sort of looking at our world today
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and looking at inequality,
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how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice
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and some is the way of life?
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So what does equality mean when we look at the world today,
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different from Dr. King's speech of the basic humanity?
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I don't think King's speech, I have a dream
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that one day my four little children will be judged
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not by the color of their skin,
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but by the content of their character
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requires equality of outcome.
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He says his children will be judged
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by the content of their character.
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That's a conditional statement.
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That is the judgment will depend upon the content
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of their character, not the color of their skin,
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but it doesn't follow from that,
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that the outcomes, whatever outcomes we consider wealth
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and economic power,
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position within the society,
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representation in the various professions,
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the various measures of social achievement
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doesn't follow from judging by the content of character
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and not color of skin,
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that when we look at the end of the day
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at the social outcomes that they will be equal
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across the different groups.
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In fact, I think there's a contradiction in the idea
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that groups will be equal
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in all of the various social outcomes,
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that they will be equally successful in business,
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that they will be proportionately represented
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in the various professions,
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that they will have the same educational achievement,
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that the occupational profiles will look the same.
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If they are, in fact, distinct groups
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with their own cultural traditions and practices,
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with their own ideals and norms,
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various immigrant populations,
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people coming to the United States of America
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from all corners of the world,
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the descendants of the African slaves,
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the black Americans here today,
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who are ourselves various with different backgrounds,
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different origins and so on,
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the different religious practices and commitments
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that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever,
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however we parcel up the total population
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into the various groups,
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these groups are themselves different from one another.
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They have different norms
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within their own cultural practice.
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How would we expect,
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if in fact we recognize
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that the groups are different from one another,
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that in a world that is fair,
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they would all come out equally represented
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in every undertaking.
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They're not equally represented,
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and that fact, I'm arguing,
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is in and of itself insufficient
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to justify the conclusion
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that they're not somehow being fairly treated.
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Fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes
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in a world in which the populations in question
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are themselves different
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with respect to their culture, their practices,
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their norms, their traditions,
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their beliefs, their ideals, and so on.
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The fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs,
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cultural orientations, and ideals
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will have consequences
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in terms of their different social outcomes.
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So I just think it's a mistake
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that people are making
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fairness of treatment
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implies equality of outcomes.
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Is the process by which we're speaking now
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in the midst of the National Basketball Association's
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I confess to being a Boston Celtics fan.
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it's a very good team, and I'm excited about my Celtics.
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I mean, we defeated Kevin Durant
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and Kyrie Irving and company, okay,
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in a playoff series.
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and we're on our way to
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the Eastern Conference Finals,
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and we're on our way to the NBA Finals,
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and I'm, you know, if I were a betting man,
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I'd put down a few bucks
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that the Boston Celtics, underrated as we are,
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have a very good chance of winning the NBA Finals.
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Okay, so that's the NBA.
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That's the National Basketball Association.
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I like basketball.
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Slightly biased prediction, but yes.
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Yeah, it is somewhat biased.
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All I'm saying is,
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if you take a look at who the star players are
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in the National Basketball Association,
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you're gonna find that there's some Eastern Europeans.
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You know, there's some really good basketball players
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coming out of Eastern Europe,
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and more power to them,
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and there are a lot of African Americans.
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We're overrepresented.
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There are not that many Jews, as far as I know.
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No offense intended there, Lex,
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equally representative
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of all of the different populations in the United States.
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Now, we could go into the reasons why,
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but I'm just saying the process
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by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair.
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If you can play, you can get on the court.
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All they're looking for is people who can play.
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I think something like that is true
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in many different venues.
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I expect, if you're a really good technical engineer,
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companies are gonna employ you,
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and if you can make money, they're gonna advance you,
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and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession.
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I expect that the people who are engaged
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in financial transactions,
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who are actually making bets on the market,
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by and large, are the people who are good at that activity,
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and if you're good at that activity in this world,
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in this modern world,
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you're gonna rise to the top.
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I'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination.
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Of course, there are of many different sorts,
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but I'm saying that to expect that there would be,
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okay, I mean, let's look at who's actually writing code.
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Let's look at who's actually trading bonds.
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Let's look at who's actually starting businesses and so on.
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To say that in a fair world,
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I would expect that if blacks are 10% of the population,
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they'd be 10% of every one of those things,
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is to ignore the reality that the differences
link |
in the culture and practices and norms
link |
of the various population groups
link |
will lead to differences in their representation
link |
amongst people who are outstanding performers
link |
in one or another activity.
link |
How do you know if the difference in culture
link |
accounts for the difference in outcomes,
link |
or it's the existence of barriers,
link |
especially barriers early on in life,
link |
of discrimination that are racially based?
link |
So if you think about affirmative action,
link |
in which ways is affirmative action empowering,
link |
in which way is it limiting
link |
for these early development of different groups,
link |
but let's just speak to African Americans.
link |
We should say that you went to some no name
link |
Northwestern University at first,
link |
but then you ended up with the great university of MIT.
link |
So that's your, not early, but middle development.
link |
So speaking of the development,
link |
the opportunities, the equality of opportunity,
link |
how do we know we got that equality right?
link |
Yeah, I'm glad you put it like that.
link |
We were talking about results,
link |
now we're talking about opportunity.
link |
I was taking the position that
link |
when King says, I have a dream and he envisions a world
link |
where his children will not be barred
link |
from the good things in life
link |
because of the color of their skin,
link |
we're talking about opportunity, not about results.
link |
But opportunity is not just something
link |
that depends upon what the law is
link |
and what public policies are.
link |
Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions
link |
in which people are raised,
link |
the social and economic conditions.
link |
So the child of a poor family that has no resources,
link |
it doesn't have the same opportunity
link |
as a child of a wealthy family
link |
to realize their full human potential.
link |
You asked me, how can we tell whether or not
link |
a difference in outcomes is a reflection
link |
of unequal opportunity,
link |
or it's a reflection of differences in culture
link |
and interest and practice?
link |
And I don't know that there's a single answer
link |
but I think one wants to look at the data,
link |
one wants to try to measure.
link |
As a social scientist, I would say what you wanna do
link |
is you wanna estimate the significance of various factors
link |
for determining the outcome.
link |
If the outcome is how much money does a person make
link |
when they work in the labor market?
link |
So you look at their wages and you think,
link |
well, that depends upon a number of things.
link |
It depends upon how educated they are,
link |
what kind of skills they have,
link |
what kind of work experience they have, and so on.
link |
And those things are all legitimate factors
link |
that might determine how much they end up making
link |
in the labor market.
link |
But you also wanna perhaps, controlling for those things,
link |
see whether or not the fact that they are black
link |
or they are Latino or whatever,
link |
fact that they are male or that they are female,
link |
the fact that they do or do not speak English
link |
as their native language, this kind of thing,
link |
whether those factors also are implicated
link |
in determining how successful they are in the labor market.
link |
And if you find that after you have controlled
link |
for the things that are legitimately determining success
link |
and failure in the labor market,
link |
like skills and education and experience,
link |
having controlled for those things,
link |
the fact that a person is black or is a woman
link |
or is an immigrant or is of Latino background
link |
also affects their earnings,
link |
then you might conclude that to that extent,
link |
they're not getting equal opportunity in the labor market,
link |
that kind of idea.
link |
But I wanna focus a little bit more here
link |
on what we mean by opportunity
link |
because it's not just whether employers treat the worker
link |
on a fair and even basis,
link |
irregardless of the worker's racial or ethnic background.
link |
That's one opportunity issue,
link |
but that's at the end of the development process.
link |
They are now presenting themselves to the market,
link |
trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage.
link |
That's the end of the line.
link |
What about the developmental opportunity,
link |
the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place?
link |
That goes all the way back,
link |
that goes all the way back to birth.
link |
It even goes back to before birth.
link |
Or the mother carrying the infant in the womb,
link |
she has certain nutritional practices
link |
as she might be smoking or drinking alcohol
link |
or something like that.
link |
I'm not saying she is, I'm not saying she isn't,
link |
I'm just saying whether she is or she isn't
link |
that will affect the development of the fetus.
link |
The newborn, now there's a question of environment.
link |
There's a question of the development
link |
of their neurological potential.
link |
Do they learn how to read?
link |
Are they stimulated verbally?
link |
How many words have they heard spoken?
link |
Are they being nurtured in a home environment
link |
so as to maximize the possibility
link |
of them achieving their human potential?
link |
What about the peer group influences?
link |
What about the values and norms of the surrounding
link |
human communities in which they're embedded?
link |
Do they encourage the young person
link |
to apply themselves in a systematic way
link |
to their studies and to their focus
link |
on their acquisition of language command
link |
and of their educational potential?
link |
So development is not only something
link |
that is controlled by the society's practices,
link |
it's also something that is influenced
link |
by the cultural background of the individual.
link |
And those things are not equal.
link |
Those things vary across groups in a very significant way.
link |
And that too will be a factor
link |
determining disparities of outcome.
link |
So when I see outcomes that are different,
link |
I see wealth holding that's different.
link |
I see educational achievement that's different.
link |
I see representation in the professional schools
link |
and law school and medical school
link |
that's different between groups.
link |
One question is are the institutions treating people fairly?
link |
But another question is do the background
link |
in social and cultural influences
link |
equip people in the same way?
link |
And we know that the answer to that,
link |
not in every instance do they equip people in the same way.
link |
And so it makes the judgment, the moral judgment
link |
that we make when we see inequality of outcome complicated.
link |
Inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree,
link |
but it is also a cultural factor to some degree,
link |
I wanna say, and that's controversial, I know.
link |
A lot of people, they think of themselves
link |
as being progressive.
link |
They wanna point a finger at society
link |
whenever they see a disparity.
link |
But I think that that's a mistake.
link |
I think it misunderstands the difficulty of the problem.
link |
You think that if you get the right law,
link |
if you have the right public policy,
link |
if the right politicians are elected to office,
link |
suddenly those disparities will go away.
link |
And I'm here to tell you that that's a false hope.
link |
And moreover, it is probably the wrong goal.
link |
But I mean, we could go into that.
link |
You were talking about affirmative action,
link |
which is something else altogether.
link |
And you were talking about me and my education,
link |
which is also something that's a little bit different.
link |
And I'm happy to talk about those things.
link |
Northwestern University, by the way, was a great university.
link |
I'm just joking, it's one of the great universities
link |
of the world, yes.
link |
And I studied mathematics at Northwestern University,
link |
which is how I ended up at MIT in the first place.
link |
And I got a very good technical training in mathematics
link |
when I was at Northwestern, so.
link |
You love both mathematics and human nature.
link |
And so, which is why you ended up going into economics
link |
at one of the great economics programs in the world at MIT
link |
and getting your PhD there.
link |
So one of the many hats you wear is that of an economist,
link |
which allows you to think systematically and rigorously
link |
about the way the world and the way humans work at scale.
link |
Trying to remove the full mushy mess of humans,
link |
like a psychology perspective, economics allows you to do.
link |
Well, economics is one of the social sciences.
link |
I think there's value in psychology and in sociology.
link |
There's a lot to know that doesn't come up
link |
within the study of economics.
link |
We study markets and the dynamics of economic development
link |
and trade and so on.
link |
But yeah, speaking personally, as I was coming along,
link |
I was fascinated by mathematics.
link |
I was good at it and ended up at Northwestern
link |
and took a lot of courses there in functional analysis
link |
and logic and mathematics and dynamical systems
link |
and stuff that I ended up employing
link |
in my graduate studies in economics.
link |
But you're right, I was not satisfied simply
link |
to be proving theorems.
link |
I wanted to be addressing issues of social significance
link |
I discovered to my delight was a field of study
link |
that allowed me both to develop
link |
rigorous analytical frameworks,
link |
modeling and precision of logical deduction
link |
and inference on the one hand,
link |
satisfying my mathematical interests,
link |
but on the other hand,
link |
could address questions of social significance
link |
like why does racial inequality persist?
link |
Why are some countries prospering and growing
link |
and others less so?
link |
Why do the prices of raw materials fluctuate
link |
in the way that they do over time and so on and so forth?
link |
And I ended up falling in love with the application
link |
of mathematical analysis to the study of social issues.
link |
What do you use beautiful about mathematics,
link |
about mathematical puzzles, about logic,
link |
all those kinds of things?
link |
Because it's still there.
link |
The love for math is still there for you.
link |
So is there something you could speak to?
link |
What is the kernel, the flame of that love?
link |
I mean, you know, being able to prove something
link |
and I mean, you know, I think of offhand,
link |
you know, there's no largest prime number, okay?
link |
So how would somebody know that?
link |
Okay, what's a prime number?
link |
So a prime number is a number that has a whole number
link |
that has no divisor other than one.
link |
There are no divisors of the number
link |
that makes it a prime number, like 13 or 19 or 37,
link |
So they're prime numbers.
link |
There's no largest prime number.
link |
There are infinite number of prime numbers.
link |
There's no largest prime number, okay?
link |
You can get your mind around it in an instant.
link |
It doesn't take a whole lot of depth to see the question.
link |
There's no largest prime number.
link |
I wonder if prime numbers show up in economics.
link |
Oh, they don't show up in economics except cryptography.
link |
I understand that's important.
link |
For code, you know, in coding stuff.
link |
And that shows up in economics.
link |
But in terms of models, probably not.
link |
That's, so prime numbers are little,
link |
you know, in abstract algebra,
link |
it's like they show up in all these places
link |
that are just like beautiful mathematical puzzles
link |
that don't immediately have an application,
link |
but somehow maybe challenge you,
link |
and as a result, push mathematics forward.
link |
Like Fermat's last theorem, you know,
link |
as far as I know, no obvious real world application,
link |
but it has challenged mathematicians
link |
throughout the centuries.
link |
And somehow indirectly progressed the field, but.
link |
That the rational numbers are countable.
link |
They can be put in one to one relationship
link |
with the integers and, you know,
link |
but that the real numbers are not countable
link |
and there's a lot more real, quote unquote,
link |
more real numbers.
link |
These are orders of infinity.
link |
This is Cantor, Georg Cantor, and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Or Gödel's theorem, I studied this as an undergraduate,
link |
you know, the incompleteness theorem
link |
that there are propositions within any logical system
link |
that's rich enough to accommodate arithmetic.
link |
There are going to be propositions
link |
that you can formulate that are true,
link |
but that you cannot prove to be true.
link |
So the idea that you could systematically develop
link |
a logical framework for mathematical inquiry
link |
that could demonstrate the truth or falsity
link |
of any proposition is not a feasible goal.
link |
This was Hilbert's project as I understand it
link |
and Gödel showed that there was no hope ever
link |
of being able to demonstrate the closure
link |
of logical systems that were rich enough
link |
to accommodate the real numbers.
link |
They gave an existential crisis to all mathematicians
link |
and scientists alike and humans
link |
because maybe you can't prove everything.
link |
I remember, you know, when I was a junior college,
link |
a community college student
link |
before I transferred to Northwestern
link |
and I took a calculus course and it was a lot of fun
link |
and it was differentiating algebraic expressions
link |
and integrating and using trigonometric substitutions
link |
and it was a lot of simple problem solving.
link |
I get to Northwestern,
link |
I take a course in differential equations.
link |
And again, it was a lot of formulaic applying
link |
if you get a differential equation of this structure
link |
like if it's linear, you got exponentials, et cetera,
link |
And then I took a course that showed me, you know,
link |
where the question was not how to solve
link |
any particular functional expression,
link |
but it was proving the existence of a solution
link |
to a differential equation where it was like X dot equals
link |
F of X and T and F is just some arbitrary function.
link |
What do I have to assume about the function F
link |
in order to know that there exists a solution
link |
to the differential equation,
link |
dx dt equals F of X and T.
link |
And it's basically, they called it a Lipschitz condition.
link |
It's a condition about the bounding of the slope
link |
of the function F as a function of X that it doesn't,
link |
that you can sort of uniformly bound the slope
link |
on that function and then you can use a iterative process
link |
to show that the sequence of, you know, partial solutions
link |
to the thing converges to something that's a solution
link |
to the real thing.
link |
Anyway, again, I'm not gonna bore you
link |
or pretend that I'm a mathematician, I'm not.
link |
But what I'm saying is the difference
link |
between a specific algebraic formula
link |
that you can manipulate and solve on the one hand
link |
and the abstract question of whether there exists
link |
a solution in the general case is like a huge,
link |
was like a huge step for me in my study of mathematics
link |
and the techniques that you have to employ
link |
to address these larger questions and so on.
link |
So I, you know, when I was an undergraduate,
link |
I took the first year PhD sequence in math analysis
link |
at Northwestern from a brilliant mathematician
link |
named Avner Friedman and learned about measure theory
link |
and learned about some early functional analysis ideas
link |
and when I saw that those ideas were being applied
link |
by advanced study in economics, I was delighted.
link |
I found an intellectual home.
link |
So one of the fascinating challenges in mathematics
link |
is to think how can you, which echoes
link |
the challenge of economics, what are the properties
link |
of an equation that allow you to say something profound
link |
and say it simply?
link |
And so the question of economics is how do you
link |
construct a model where you can generalize nicely
link |
and say something profound and say it simply?
link |
So one of the questions, one of the challenges
link |
of economics is macro versus microeconomics is,
link |
you know, the world is made up of individuals.
link |
So there's a connection to this, our discussion
link |
of race and discrimination and outcomes
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
The world is made up of individuals,
link |
but in order to say something general,
link |
we have to construct groups in order to analyze the data.
link |
We have to aggregate that data somehow.
link |
We have to make an average over some set of people.
link |
So what are the pros and cons of looking at things
link |
like equality of opportunity and equality of outcome
link |
based on groups versus based on individuals
link |
and what are the groups, if there's any pros
link |
to looking at groups that we should be looking at?
link |
Okay, well, those are big questions.
link |
I mean, in economics, you're right.
link |
I mean, micro, you have an account of how individuals
link |
make decisions about spending their money
link |
on this consumption side and about how enterprises
link |
make decisions about what to produce, how much of it,
link |
what inputs to use, what techniques of production
link |
and so on, individual firms, individual consumers,
link |
and then you want to aggregate.
link |
So there's a so called theory of general equilibrium
link |
where you think supply and demand in a bunch of markets,
link |
you think prices that move to equilibrate,
link |
but you recognize that the price in one market
link |
affects people's behavior in another,
link |
the markets are interacting with each other.
link |
You realize that the behavior of one individual
link |
affects the supplies and available resources
link |
and for other individuals, so they're knitted together
link |
in some kind of systematic way.
link |
And you want to try to demonstrate the fact
link |
that notwithstanding all these interdependencies,
link |
there exists a solution to the system of equations
link |
that equates demand and supply
link |
across all the different markets.
link |
This is the existence of general equilibrium.
link |
Then you want to try to say something about the properties
link |
of an equilibrium, if it exists, is it efficient?
link |
What do you mean by efficiency?
link |
Well, the idea of so called Pareto efficient outcomes,
link |
these are outcomes that cannot be uniformly improved upon,
link |
everybody can't be made better off
link |
by an alternative outcome.
link |
You want to demonstrate the efficiency
link |
of competitive equilibrium.
link |
What do you mean by competition?
link |
You mean that people take their actions
link |
to do the best for themselves that they can.
link |
Profits of firms, well being of consumers,
link |
they try to do the best for themselves that they can,
link |
but they do so in reference to a set of prices
link |
that they believe they cannot control.
link |
That's the criterion of competitive market circumstance.
link |
So does a competitive equilibrium exist?
link |
Do there exist a set of prices
link |
which if everybody recognizes them as given
link |
and responds to those prices on behalf of their own interest,
link |
the outcome will be supply equaling demand
link |
in all the markets where people are interacting
link |
with one another, and that requires the use
link |
of some concepts and topology, fixed point theorems
link |
and whatnot that are familiar to mathematics,
link |
not very deep mathematical results,
link |
but important to economics.
link |
That's all about general equilibrium and whatnot.
link |
But you ask about groups.
link |
By the way, amazing whirlwind summary of all of economics,
link |
but yes, go ahead, that was great.
link |
Markets of competition of operator efficiency anyway,
link |
And prices. And prices.
link |
And by the way, there are some very beautiful
link |
formalizations of everything that I'm saying here.
link |
You end up in vector spaces,
link |
you end up with sets of bundles of consumption
link |
and production, you end up with convexity,
link |
you end up with hyperplanes,
link |
which are in this finite dimensional vector space,
link |
which are all of the bundles that have the same value
link |
at a certain price.
link |
You end up with inner products.
link |
Yeah, but you almost forget that it's just a bunch
link |
of humans transacting with each other.
link |
That markets are made up of individuals.
link |
Markets are made up of individuals.
link |
And in order to carry out this formalization,
link |
you have to make assumptions about the individuals.
link |
And the end result is true in a formal sense,
link |
but may not be true as a representation of the reality,
link |
because it depends upon assumptions
link |
that themselves may not hold.
link |
But at least you know what it is that has to be true
link |
in order for your formal framework to be relevant,
link |
which is already a step in the right direction, I think.
link |
I mean, the formalization is better than the intuition.
link |
There aren't your intuition where we sit back
link |
and we don't really know exactly what we're talking about
link |
because we haven't pinned it down in a precise way.
link |
I'm in favor of the formalization.
link |
People, they think, what is mathematics
link |
and the social sciences?
link |
After all, we're dealing with people.
link |
People are not automata.
link |
I agree with that.
link |
But the analysis of the interaction of people,
link |
I think, to be rigorous, requires us to be specific
link |
about what we're talking about, about markets,
link |
about consumers, about firms, about profits,
link |
about technology, about preferences.
link |
And that's the language of economics.
link |
But people's behavior depends upon what they seek in life,
link |
depends upon their goals and their objectives.
link |
Those things are at play.
link |
They can be pushed this way or that.
link |
So, I mean, nationalism,
link |
fighting and dying for your country,
link |
religion, sacrificing on behalf of some abstract ideal
link |
of the good or of what is the human situation
link |
and what is the meaning of life.
link |
Economists have to assume that these things
link |
are some particular thing
link |
before they can turn the crank on their machine
link |
to analyze the outcomes of human interaction.
link |
And yet these things, belief in my identity,
link |
but the things that I'm willing to sacrifice and die
link |
for purposes of life that I affirm
link |
and pass on to my children are important preconditions
link |
for actually carrying out any economic analysis.
link |
And they are subject to manipulation and to change over time.
link |
And that's not something that economics
link |
has a whole lot to say about.
link |
Well, is there some general things
link |
that are really powerful in terms of,
link |
you said nation, religion, those are groups.
link |
Can you group people nicely
link |
in helping you understand human nature?
link |
So group them into nations based on their citizenry.
link |
That's geography, right?
link |
The geographic location of your birth
link |
or your long term residence, or maybe religious belief,
link |
what religion you believe over time.
link |
Is there groups like that?
link |
And then race, is that useful?
link |
What are the pros and cons of looking at outcomes
link |
based on these kinds of groups, race in particular?
link |
I think they're pros and I think they're cons.
link |
I mean, I am myself, Glenn Loury sits before you right now,
link |
a black American, an African American.
link |
I quote unquote, I identify as,
link |
that's the way they talk about it nowadays.
link |
I identify as a black American.
link |
My skin is brown, my hair is coarse, my nose is broad,
link |
relative to the way other people's noses look.
link |
My lips are thicker.
link |
That's a consequence of my ancestral descent
link |
from the human population resident in the African continent
link |
in millennia past, my race.
link |
Here in the United States,
link |
we have various quote unquote races defined crudely
link |
in the way that I just tried to define myself.
link |
You could say, and I think there is a very powerful argument
link |
that these are superficial differences.
link |
Why should it matter that your eye color
link |
or your hair color or the shape of the bones in your face
link |
or the color, the tone of your skin,
link |
the amount of melanin,
link |
how it is that you react to ultraviolet radiation
link |
in terms of your skin, what is that the basis of anything?
link |
I mean, that's arbitrary, that's not meaningful.
link |
Could there really be meaning
link |
in these superficial differences among human beings?
link |
Isn't that a archaic or barbaric way
link |
of thinking about ourselves,
link |
to look at each other's skin color or hair texture
link |
and then to decide, oh, that's a black or that's a white
link |
or that's a Latin or that's an Asian or that's a whatever.
link |
That's something that we should outgrow, a person might say.
link |
That's a relic of a kind of tribal society
link |
of a kind of pre modern society
link |
where we built real structure
link |
on the basis of such superficial difference.
link |
A person could say that.
link |
On the other hand, I am a black American.
link |
I mean, that's part of my identity,
link |
that's part of my heritage,
link |
it's part of the stories that I tell myself
link |
about who my people are.
link |
Why do I need a people?
link |
Why do I need a narrative of descent
link |
in which I affiliate with a racially defined people?
link |
Do I really need that?
link |
I mean, I think that's an important question.
link |
In fact, this is a confession, think of myself as black.
link |
I could think of myself as simply human.
link |
I could not identify specifically as black.
link |
I could say, my eyes are brown too, so what?
link |
I mean, I'm gonna invent a group based on my eye color.
link |
I weigh 290 pounds.
link |
I'm gonna have a body size group.
link |
I'm a plus 200 and that's quote, who I am, close quote.
link |
I came from Chicago.
link |
Yes, I do have a certain sense of affinity with my hometown.
link |
I'm a Chicago born person,
link |
but frankly, I haven't lived in Chicago since 1979.
link |
That's a long time.
link |
I wear my Chicago origins very, very lightly.
link |
I would not go to war with someone from Cleveland
link |
or St. Louis and fight to the death
link |
with that St. Louis person or that Cleveland person
link |
based upon the fact that we come from different cities.
link |
And you have even abandoned in your heart
link |
the Chicago Bulls.
link |
There's some Chicago that's still in me, I suppose,
link |
but it's not very deep.
link |
It's not quote, who I am anymore.
link |
And I'm wondering, here I'm trying to pose the question,
link |
why is it that being a descendant of African slaves
link |
should be who I am?
link |
So there's some answers.
link |
One answer is people will look at me
link |
and deal with me differently based upon what they see.
link |
I don't have control over that.
link |
I'm going to be perceived as a member of a group,
link |
whether or not I elect to affiliate myself
link |
with that group or not.
link |
Therefore, I need to be mindful of the fact
link |
that regardless of what my internal orientation is,
link |
the world will perceive me in a particular way
link |
and will perceive me differently
link |
based upon the color of my skin.
link |
So a police officer who stops me at two o clock
link |
in the morning because my tail light is out
link |
and ask me for my automobile registration
link |
and I reach quickly to the glove compartment
link |
to get my registration.
link |
And the police officer says, show me your hands.
link |
And I don't quite hear what he says
link |
or I ignore what he says as I'm getting my document
link |
out of my glove compartment.
link |
But the police officer thinks because I have not responded
link |
to his demand to show my hands
link |
that I might be reaching for a weapon.
link |
And the police officer sees that I'm black
link |
and fears that the likelihood that I might have a weapon
link |
is higher because in that town at that time,
link |
a lot of the people who get stopped with weapons in their car
link |
happen to be black and male and so on.
link |
And he pulls his weapon and he discharges it
link |
and I'm bleeding out there and I'm dead now.
link |
And all of that is a possibility that's very real
link |
and it's based upon the color of my skin.
link |
And therefore, when he stops me,
link |
I keep my hands on the steering wheel
link |
and I don't go to the glove compartment.
link |
And I'm fearful of the fact that he might mistake me
link |
for a criminal, et cetera.
link |
Or I walk into a high end store, clothing store.
link |
I see you're nicely dressed there, Lex.
link |
I'm not, but that's okay.
link |
I do have some good clothes at home.
link |
I just didn't wear them here today.
link |
But you know what I mean.
link |
And the salesman in the clothing store
link |
either treats me like an old friend
link |
and is warm and welcoming.
link |
And what can I do for you, sir?
link |
And let me show you this and that.
link |
And what are you looking for?
link |
Because he thinks I'm gonna spend $1,000 there that day
link |
and he's gonna get a 5% commission or whatever it is.
link |
And he either does that or he ignores me
link |
and looks at me with suspicion
link |
and thinks I might be trying to shoplift something
link |
or thinks I'm only gonna spend $50 and not $500
link |
and therefore I'm not worth his time.
link |
And I'm aware of the fact
link |
that when I go into the clothing store,
link |
especially the high end places where I can buy a good suit
link |
or buy some really good dress shirts or slacks
link |
that fit me well and so on,
link |
I'm aware of the fact that I may not be taken seriously
link |
by the salesman based upon the fact
link |
that he's looking at me and he sees a black person.
link |
And therefore I dress up
link |
before I go out to buy clothes to get,
link |
cause I wanna present myself
link |
as not someone who just walked in off the street,
link |
but as one of those black people
link |
who is really prepared to spend some money in the store
link |
so that I can be treated with respect.
link |
And I have to carry the burden such as it is
link |
of knowing that I need to earn the being taken seriously
link |
being taken seriously by overcoming the suppositions
link |
that people may have about me
link |
based upon the color of my skin, something like that.
link |
Or I ask myself, what am I gonna teach my children
link |
about who they are and where they come from?
link |
What stories am I gonna tell them about their ancestors?
link |
Who are their ancestors?
link |
Every African American has European ancestors.
link |
Every black person in the United States of America,
link |
I think that I can say that almost without exception.
link |
We could go to 23andMe and look at the DNA.
link |
They have European ancestors, they're not purely African.
link |
That's a fact and that's a consequence
link |
of the experience of African descended people
link |
because it's a mixed population.
link |
My name is Lowry, spelled L O U R Y
link |
but pronounced as if it were L O W E R Y.
link |
And I gather if you trace the history of that name
link |
that it's Scottish.
link |
So somewhere back then.
link |
So you could identify as a Scot.
link |
Well, or I could claim some Scottish descent, but I don't.
link |
I don't know who those ancestors are.
link |
And frankly, I don't know who my enslaved ancestors are.
link |
I can't trace my family history back very far
link |
into the 19th century.
link |
So what stories do I tell my children about who we are,
link |
about who their ancestors are?
link |
I mean, I wanna tell my children some story
link |
and that story is gonna be colored, quote unquote,
link |
So even though it is superficial
link |
and in an ideal world, you might think,
link |
why would human beings, I mean, I read science fiction.
link |
So there's this Chinese writer, Chixin Liu is his name.
link |
I might not pronounce it exactly right, C I X I N L I U.
link |
Chixin Liu, he has a trilogy of The Three Body Problem,
link |
The Dark Forest, and Death's End.
link |
Those are the three books of Chixin Liu's trilogy
link |
about how Trisolaris, which is another star system
link |
within a few light years of the solar system,
link |
and Earth get into a conflict.
link |
And when the Trisolaris come down to dominate Earth,
link |
suddenly all of these differences between the Chinese
link |
and the North Americans and the Europeans
link |
and the Africans and the South Asians
link |
become kind of insignificant because after all,
link |
the Trisolaris with their advanced civilization
link |
whose star system is dying,
link |
have their eyes on the solar system,
link |
which has a planet, the third rock from the sun
link |
that is pretty habitable and the difference between us
link |
become pretty insignificant.
link |
So we shouldn't need for an invasion
link |
by extraterrestrial beings to have to happen
link |
before we would recognize the common humanity
link |
that we all share that is profound and is deep.
link |
We all descend in effect from the same ancestral population
link |
of Homo sapiens who walked out of East Africa eons ago
link |
and have survived amongst all of the different possible
link |
variations of species and whatnot,
link |
of humanoid population, the Homo sapiens have flourished,
link |
the others have died out and here we are
link |
and we can just look at the genetic endowments
link |
that characterize our biological essence
link |
and we can see that we are quote unquote
link |
the same beneath the skin
link |
and yet we end up freighting so much weight
link |
onto these superficial differences.
link |
So I can see both sides of the issue is what I'm saying.
link |
I can see the argument race is an irrelevancy
link |
because at the end of the day, deep down it is.
link |
But I can also see the argument
link |
that I hold on to racial identity because A,
link |
my racial presentation colors how other people deal with me
link |
but B, because everybody needs a story.
link |
Everybody needs an account.
link |
You tell me you're Jewish.
link |
I mean, I don't know how deep that is.
link |
I don't know how genetically profound that is.
link |
I do know that it's a culturally profound identity
link |
for a lot of people based upon maybe some of the same
link |
kind of forces that I'm talking about.
link |
A, they won't let you not be Jewish.
link |
You could say you're not Jewish
link |
but when Hitler is rounding people up,
link |
what you say doesn't have a whole lot to do
link |
with what the Gestapo was about.
link |
And B, you need to tell your children a story.
link |
That's the fascinating thing about this tribalism
link |
that you spoke about that we form tribes as humans
link |
throughout human history, form tribes
link |
and have directed hate toward other tribes
link |
and sometimes violence and destruction.
link |
And yet tribalism allows you to tell a story
link |
to your children, allows you to grow a culture.
link |
There's something about defining yourself
link |
within a particular tribe that allows you
link |
to have a tradition.
link |
You have an article that you wrote
link |
called The Case for Black Patriotism.
link |
So I should also say it's so interesting
link |
because for me personally, I feel, identify as,
link |
believe I am an American.
link |
And yet within the American umbrella,
link |
it feels that there's a longing for other tribes.
link |
You mentioned Jewish but what I honestly feel is,
link |
I mean a lot of it is humor and culture and so on
link |
is Russian and Ukrainian because that's where I come from.
link |
That's where my family is from.
link |
You know, there's like stereotypical things
link |
that are funny, humorous type of thing about Russians
link |
that's showing no emotion, good at chess and math,
link |
into wrestling, drinking vodka.
link |
I mean, there's literally every single stereotype.
link |
I'm in the embodiment of that.
link |
So there's a, you celebrate that in certain kinds of ways.
link |
There's a tradition there within the American umbrella
link |
and some of it is humor, some of it is little quirks
link |
of culture but now with the war in Russia and Ukraine,
link |
interestingly enough, even that little thing,
link |
it becomes also a source of negative tribalism.
link |
But anyway, that context aside, what is black patriotism
link |
and why do you feel?
link |
I mean, I'm speaking in an article called
link |
The Case for Black Patriotism in a Particular Context
link |
and what I'm saying basically is very simple.
link |
I'm saying we are African Americans
link |
and the emphasis should be on the American.
link |
I actually don't even much care
link |
for the framing African American
link |
but I'm not gonna fight with people about it.
link |
It's, I don't think it's worth fighting about.
link |
That's not how, I would just say we're Americans
link |
or if you want, we're black Americans.
link |
We're certainly not African.
link |
That is the African American population
link |
is a population of people who come into existence
link |
here in North America through the cauldron of slavery.
link |
There are also immigrants, immigrants from East Africa,
link |
immigrants from West Africa, immigrants from Southern Africa,
link |
immigrants from the Caribbean who descend
link |
from an ancestral population which is African.
link |
The history of the world since 1500 is a history
link |
in which people of African descent are scattered
link |
because of slavery throughout the Western hemisphere.
link |
And so here we are.
link |
But the institution of slavery ended in 1863
link |
in the United States.
link |
The struggle that we started out talking about
link |
which gave rise to Martin Luther King giving that speech
link |
that you say is the greatest speech in American history
link |
and I'm not gonna argue with you about that,
link |
happened right here in the United States.
link |
We are, what is the United States?
link |
The United States is a nation of immigrants.
link |
The population of the North American continent
link |
was sparsely populated by an indigenous population
link |
which was destroyed in conquest by a European population
link |
that settled here in North America and appropriated the land
link |
and have built a civilization here
link |
which has been peopled by a large influx of immigrants
link |
of individuals from Europe, Irish and Italian
link |
and Greek and Slavic and Jewish, Russian Jews
link |
coming in large numbers and so on
link |
and wave after wave after wave of immigration,
link |
Asian, Latin American population of people
link |
who have come to reside here in the United States
link |
and we black Americans who descend from slaves.
link |
We African Americans who descend from slaves.
link |
This is a great nation.
link |
I mean, this is a monumentally significant political force
link |
which is the United States of America founded in 1776, 1787
link |
fought a war of independence from the British,
link |
established a republic which is a confederation
link |
of these independent colonies
link |
which has grown into now the 50 states
link |
of the United States of America, continental nation.
link |
The richest and most powerful nation on the planet
link |
with massive influence throughout the world
link |
for good and for ill.
link |
That's who we are, I wanna say to black people.
link |
There is no other home for us.
link |
This fantasy of we being a people apart
link |
back in the day when I was coming along in the 1960s,
link |
there was something called
link |
the Republic of New Africa Movement
link |
and they wanted some states in the South
link |
given over to black people
link |
and we were gonna have our own country.
link |
And that's a joke, it's a fantasy.
link |
It's a mythic, unbalanced,
link |
the unrealistic fanciful politics.
link |
It's not a serious politics.
link |
We're Americans, we're not going anywhere here.
link |
The idea that, and I wanna say this
link |
in a number of different registers,
link |
I wanna say first of all,
link |
we need to make peace with the fact
link |
that that's who we are and that's where we are.
link |
So nobody is coming, the world court
link |
is not gonna litigate our disputes.
link |
The United Nations is not gonna set up a desk
link |
for people of African descent who reside in North America.
link |
We have to work out whatever our concerns are
link |
with our fellow Americans right here
link |
within the context of American politics.
link |
That means compromise.
link |
That means looking for a framework for political expression
link |
which is broader than our racial identity, et cetera.
link |
So I wanna say that.
link |
But I also wanna say there's no reason
link |
to apologize for this.
link |
There's something positive to affirm.
link |
I take on this question about slavery in brief,
link |
because in fact, slavery was awful and it was wrong
link |
and it was on the backs of the enslaved Africans
link |
and it had consequences that have endured
link |
long after the termination of the thing.
link |
But I also wanna say, look at what has happened
link |
in the last 150 years for African Americans.
link |
And I wanna say, look at the vitality
link |
of the institutions here in the United States of America,
link |
of the Democratic Republic of the United States of America.
link |
Again, not perfect, which are malleable enough,
link |
these institutions to allow for the transformation
link |
of the status of African Americans
link |
such as has occurred since the end of slavery.
link |
And I wanna say there's a lot to celebrate in that.
link |
So this is our country.
link |
We are full members of the polity.
link |
We have burdens and responsibilities
link |
as well as privileges that are associated
link |
with our membership in this Republic.
link |
That does not mean that we should not fight
link |
for what we believe to be right,
link |
although we are not one voice here, we black Americans.
link |
It does not mean that we should not protest things
link |
that we think are deserving of protest.
link |
But I wanna say, it does mean that we should not reject
link |
the framework that we're operating in
link |
because we basically don't have any alternative.
link |
And because when viewed in full context,
link |
a noble and profoundly significant achievement,
link |
the United States of America and a beacon
link |
to the rest of the world, I don't wanna go off
link |
in some starry eyed kind of jingoistic celebration
link |
of America as the greatest civilization, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
But this great nation is our nation.
link |
And I think we do best by beginning,
link |
we black Americans do best by beginning,
link |
this is my argument in the piece,
link |
by beginning from a framework which accepts that fact
link |
and then builds on it.
link |
So black patriotism is, if not exactly the same,
link |
rhymes, echoes American patriotism.
link |
So a black American is first and foremost an American.
link |
Yeah, a black American is first and foremost an American
link |
and it's a good thing too.
link |
Let me return to the question of Dr. King
link |
and another powerful, impactful individual, Malcolm X,
link |
to ask you the question.
link |
Well, first, people often perhaps inaccurately portray them
link |
as representing two different ideals, approaches
link |
to the fight for civil rights.
link |
So Martin Luther King for the nonviolent approach,
link |
the peacemaker, and Malcolm X is the by any means necessary.
link |
What do you think about this distinction?
link |
And broadly speaking, in black patriotism,
link |
in the future of black Americans in the 21st century,
link |
what is the role of anger?
link |
What is the role of protest?
link |
Even violence encompasses a lot of things,
link |
but just aggression and the fuck the man,
link |
we're going to have to make change, force change.
link |
Okay, I think you put your finger on something
link |
really important in the context of,
link |
we were just discussing my black patriotism essay.
link |
It's not the only story.
link |
There is another story and Malcolm X is someone
link |
you identify and his memory lives on
link |
and is powerfully influential.
link |
And I think you see it in Black Lives Matter,
link |
and I think you see it in the protest and rioting
link |
and so forth that has broken out periodically
link |
going all the way back to the 1960s and before,
link |
but especially since the 1960s.
link |
You saw it in Los Angeles in 1992,
link |
the Rodney King civil disturbances
link |
that broke out there and the balled up fist,
link |
the radical afrocentric rejection
link |
of the American story that Martin Luther King,
link |
He believed in a magnificent promissory note.
link |
And a lot of people are rolling their eyes
link |
and saying, as you say,
link |
fuck the man, magnificent promissory note.
link |
I mean, just get your knee off my neck.
link |
That's what you can do for me.
link |
Don't ask me to believe in your BS
link |
about some magnificent promissory note,
link |
some founding fathers who were all slave owners anyway.
link |
I mean, just get your knee off my neck.
link |
Now, I can relate to that.
link |
As I mentioned, I grew up in Chicago in the 1950s
link |
I remember Malcolm X, I mean, literally in real time.
link |
I remember when he was murdered in 1965
link |
in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem,
link |
in Manhattan, in New York City.
link |
I remember my uncle, I was raised in a house
link |
where my aunt and uncle were the master of the house.
link |
And my mother and my sister and I lived
link |
in a small apartment upstairs in the back
link |
of this big house that my successful aunt and uncle owned.
link |
And my uncle was a small businessman,
link |
a barber and a tradesman.
link |
I mean, legally, he did what he had to do to make money.
link |
He was a very enterprising, not especially well educated,
link |
but a very intelligent and disciplined
link |
and resourceful provider for his family,
link |
which included myself, my sister,
link |
and my mother in their household.
link |
And we called him Uncle Mooney
link |
because he had moon shaped eyes
link |
that protruded and were round.
link |
Uncle Mooney, James Ellis was his name.
link |
Uncle Mooney, James Ellis Lee was my Uncle Mooney.
link |
But I'm saying all that to say this.
link |
He admired the nation of Islam.
link |
I mean, King and Malcolm X,
link |
Martin King and Malcolm X differed
link |
along a number of different dimensions.
link |
Malcolm X was a Muslim.
link |
And Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister.
link |
My Uncle Mooney didn't have any time
link |
for these Christian ministers.
link |
He thought that was the white man's religion.
link |
And back in that day, you'd go into a black church
link |
and you'd see a portrait of Jesus
link |
and he'd be blonde hair, blue eyed.
link |
He didn't even look like a Mediterranean.
link |
I mean, he didn't look like somebody who came from Palestine.
link |
I mean, he looked like somebody who came
link |
from Northern Europe or something like that,
link |
the picture of Jesus.
link |
And my Uncle Mooney rejected that whole thing.
link |
He would be damned if he was gonna bend his knee
link |
to some white Jesus.
link |
But he was not a Muslim either.
link |
But he respected the Muslims.
link |
He brought home their newspaper.
link |
It was called Muhammad Speaks.
link |
This is the nation of Islam,
link |
which is the black Muslim movement
link |
founded in American cities in Detroit and then Chicago,
link |
going back to the early middle 20th century
link |
and growing into a very significant movement
link |
that had a lot of influence,
link |
Louis Farrakhan and controversial figure
link |
descends from this movement.
link |
It has fractured now
link |
and has the major part of the legacy of the black Muslims
link |
has assimilated itself into Islam proper.
link |
Malcolm X made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina
link |
and came back with a very different vision
link |
about what it meant to be a Muslim
link |
and understood himself to be a part of the large tradition
link |
and religious culture of Islam that has a global reach.
link |
And he had a different vision when he came back from that.
link |
Some people say that's why he was killed and so on.
link |
I certainly find that to be plausible
link |
that he became the constituted threat to the sect,
link |
which was the black Muslims
link |
and had to be dealt with.
link |
I don't know if we'll ever know the full story on that.
link |
But anyway, what I'm trying to say is
link |
the black Muslims were there, Malcolm X was there.
link |
And in my experience,
link |
they constituted a counterpoint to the position of king,
link |
which depended on a kind of respect
link |
for the best of the tradition of American democracy,
link |
appealing to the better nature of our oppressors,
link |
live up to the full meaning of our creed.
link |
I mean, these are words that he would use.
link |
A magnificent promissory note is what he would think of
link |
as the declaration of independence
link |
and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln,
link |
a unfulfilled ideal.
link |
And the black Muslims were like, fuck that.
link |
We're gonna take care of our own.
link |
We're gonna build our own schools.
link |
We're gonna build our own businesses.
link |
We're not waiting for the white man to do anything.
link |
Get your knee off my neck and get out of my way
link |
and let me take care of my own.
link |
And my uncle respected that.
link |
He respected the straight back,
link |
the stand up straight with your shoulders back.
link |
That's a Jordan Peterson.
link |
But I mean, that was way before Jordan Peterson,
link |
but that was his philosophy.
link |
Stand up straight, but just raise your children.
link |
Don't be depending upon welfare.
link |
You're taking welfare from the white man.
link |
You need to get busy.
link |
You need to educate yourself.
link |
You need to clean up your act.
link |
Put down the fried chicken because it's gonna kill you.
link |
My uncle Mooney loved this book that Elijah Muhammad,
link |
they called him the honorable Elijah Muhammad,
link |
who was the founder and the leader of the nation of Islam.
link |
He had a book and all the book said was,
link |
be smart, eat green vegetables, don't eat fried food.
link |
Don't eat pork and take responsibility for your diet
link |
And don't be putting a whole lot of pills into your body.
link |
You don't need to do that
link |
if you just get control of your diet
link |
and you eat properly.
link |
My uncle loves this idea of responsibility for self
link |
and a determination to build.
link |
He respected that in the Muslims,
link |
even if he didn't buy the religious part of it.
link |
And so, and by the way, when my uncle died in 1983,
link |
he left me a bequest.
link |
It wasn't money, unfortunately.
link |
It was his complete collection
link |
of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.
link |
And I have these albums.
link |
These are 33 and a third LPs.
link |
There's six of them.
link |
And I have a complete collection,
link |
as best as my uncle could assemble,
link |
of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.
link |
Now, why did he do that?
link |
He did that because he did not want me to forget.
link |
Don't be dependent upon the white man.
link |
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
link |
Proud black man, take care of your business.
link |
Take care of your children.
link |
Pick up the trash in front of your house.
link |
This was this philosophy.
link |
So violence now, that's another story.
link |
I mean, Malcolm X would say,
link |
we're gonna defend ourselves.
link |
You're gonna mess with us,
link |
you racist Ku Klux Klan or whatever.
link |
We're gonna arm ourselves and we're gonna fight you back.
link |
You racist police who are oppressing
link |
and persecuting and abusing our people,
link |
well, you better be ready
link |
because we're gonna fight you back.
link |
And that too was the spirit that my uncle,
link |
that was a kind of attitude, a kind of posture.
link |
My uncle was not a radical.
link |
He was a businessman, but he respected this idea.
link |
You take your life in your own hands when you mess with us
link |
because we're prepared to defend ourselves.
link |
So that blood runs in you too.
link |
That thread is, when you write about black patriotism,
link |
that thread is there too.
link |
It's like you embody both the ideal that we're all American,
link |
but also that there is this oppressive history.
link |
There is the powerful that are manipulating you,
link |
that are oppressing you, and you can't just wait around
link |
for things to fix themselves.
link |
You have to take action.
link |
You have to take things into your own hands.
link |
And sometimes that means being angry.
link |
Sometimes that means being violent.
link |
Yeah, it's there, but here, and the but is,
link |
I don't, me today, Glenn Loury in 2022,
link |
think that that is the answer.
link |
I don't think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere
link |
at the end of the day.
link |
I think we're past that.
link |
There aren't Knight Rider, Ku Klux Klan,
link |
people breaking down your door and dragging you away.
link |
There are not nooses thrown over a tree limb
link |
where you hang somebody from the tree
link |
because they whistled at a white woman
link |
or they got too much property in your community
link |
and you became, they were uppity Negroes
link |
and whatnot like that.
link |
That is a thing of the past in America
link |
that the situation is no longer the one
link |
that requires that kind of violent reaction
link |
and that there is, if we look at the net effect
link |
of the so called rebellions in American cities,
link |
The George Floyd protests, which became violent
link |
and arsonists in the aftermath of civil disturbance
link |
and whatnot in the summer of 2020,
link |
I think set back the program for African Americans.
link |
I don't think it advanced it.
link |
I think there are things to be concerned about,
link |
schools that are not working,
link |
police that are not respecting citizens and so forth.
link |
But I think that those are things
link |
that affect white Americans as well
link |
and that the way to ultimately correct those things
link |
is to make alliance and associate oneself
link |
with Americans who are concerned to change these things.
link |
And I don't think it's properly framed
link |
as a racial problem.
link |
I certainly don't think that violent rebellion
link |
I get the historical salience of that posture
link |
and it made a lot of sense
link |
in the early and the mid 20th century.
link |
I don't think it makes very much sense at all
link |
in the early 21st century.
link |
Well, thank you for allowing me for a brief moment
link |
to try to channel your Uncle Mooney
link |
and maybe Malcolm X in this conversation
link |
as we look forward to the 21st century.
link |
You mentioned that in part,
link |
you're troubled by the term African American.
link |
So words are funny things until they're not.
link |
So let me ask you about what I think
link |
is one of the most powerful and controversial words
link |
in the English language, the N word.
link |
So this is a word that I can't say
link |
that only certain people have the right to say.
link |
I have a friend, Joe Rogan, who has,
link |
what would you say, there was mass pushback
link |
or highlighting of the fact that he didn't just say N word
link |
but said the full word many times
link |
throughout his conversations
link |
when referring to, in a meta way,
link |
about the power of words,
link |
especially when related to certain comedians
link |
using those words.
link |
What do you think about this word?
link |
Is it destructive?
link |
What does it mean for race in America?
link |
What does it mean that people like Joe Rogan
link |
were essentially, there's an attack to cancel him
link |
for using the word?
link |
Just as a scholar of human nature,
link |
what do you think about this whole thing?
link |
This is a phenomenon that interests me.
link |
The N word, nigger, I can say it because I'm black.
link |
But I mean, I can also say it because I like hip hop.
link |
And when I listen to hip hop, I hear the word all the time.
link |
These niggas ain't, you know,
link |
you better watch out for these, et cetera.
link |
I heard the word constantly as I was growing up
link |
as a boy and a young man in Chicago.
link |
Niggas ain't shit.
link |
That was, you know,
link |
and that could be a reflection of some kind of pathology
link |
within the African American community of self hatred
link |
It could be, or it could just be a colloquial linguistic way.
link |
I mean, I assume other groups also have their various,
link |
I don't know how the Irish talk about their Irish brothers
link |
and, you know, whatever.
link |
And I don't know how the Jews talk about
link |
the Jewish brothers and whatever.
link |
But black people, when talking about other black people
link |
use the N word all the time.
link |
My nigger, N I G G A, you know, my nigger.
link |
That is a term of endearment.
link |
My friend, Randall Kennedy,
link |
the law professor at Harvard University
link |
has a book called Nigger.
link |
And he uses the word in the title of the book,
link |
the history of a strange history of a provocative word.
link |
At some point there's a subtitle,
link |
but the title of the book is N I G G E R colon.
link |
And then he has a subtitle.
link |
I think, of course, the use of the word as a slur
link |
and an insult, which is a part of the history
link |
of black people in the United States,
link |
the use of the word by the Southern racist segregationist,
link |
we don't want no niggers up in here.
link |
Yall, you know, niggers have no place in my restaurant,
link |
in my store, et cetera.
link |
That's meant to be an insult.
link |
It's an insult to people.
link |
It's a fighting word.
link |
It's a way that you say that to somebody.
link |
It's a invitation for conflict.
link |
That said, what is it that about this particular word
link |
and also the asymmetry of it,
link |
that do you think it's empowering
link |
to the black community to own a word?
link |
My honest answer to you is I don't know.
link |
I don't fully understand it.
link |
It has become symbolic in a way.
link |
And the policing of the use of the word,
link |
I can say it, but white people can't say it.
link |
I'm not a self hating black.
link |
I'm just speaking the language of colloquial English
link |
that has emerged amongst African Americans
link |
in which that word plays a big role.
link |
But the prohibition on its use by others.
link |
And of course, in the Joe Rogan case,
link |
it wasn't as if he was calling anybody an N word.
link |
He was simply pointing out that people had said stuff
link |
in which the N word was a part of what they said.
link |
Now, he did make the statement about,
link |
how did he put it?
link |
The planet of the apes,
link |
that one of the offensive things that he said,
link |
he walked into a room,
link |
there's a bunch of black guys standing around.
link |
He says, like planet of the apes.
link |
He said it's like Africa, planet of the apes.
link |
Yeah, he should have been a little bit more careful.
link |
That was an insult.
link |
That was something that if you say that
link |
and people are offended,
link |
they have a right to be offended.
link |
And if you didn't mean to offend them,
link |
you can apologize.
link |
And he did apologize.
link |
I accept his apology.
link |
Joe's okay with me as far as that goes.
link |
In fact, John McWhorter and I at the podcast that I do,
link |
The Glenn Show, had a conversation,
link |
part of which touched on the Joe Rogan phenomenon.
link |
And we concluded he didn't really do anything wrong.
link |
I mean, you can like or you can hate him or whatever,
link |
but the idea that he's a racist is kind of ridiculous.
link |
So frankly, I mean, if that's your test
link |
of what constitutes a racist, the utterance of the word,
link |
then it's kind of silly as far as I'm concerned.
link |
What do you think about the rigorous testing of people
link |
to the degree they're racist or not?
link |
The accusation of racism being a way to attack,
link |
to bully, to divide.
link |
So what are the pros and cons of that once again?
link |
Because it does reveal the assholes and the racists,
link |
but it can hurt people who are not.
link |
Well, I think we have a history here in the United States
link |
of blatant racism that goes back a long way.
link |
And that has present day echoes.
link |
So there are racists.
link |
I mean, there are people who will look and see,
link |
oh, those are black people.
link |
They're patronizing this business.
link |
I don't wanna patronize this business anymore.
link |
Who if their daughter or their son is dating somebody
link |
that is black, they will say,
link |
I really wish you wouldn't do that.
link |
I mean, why are you hanging out with those people?
link |
Don't you know who they are?
link |
There are people, there are racists, okay?
link |
There are black racists.
link |
That is black people who see somebody who's white
link |
and who then invoke a whole lot of stereotypes or whatever,
link |
or have a visceral dislike based upon nothing
link |
other than the color of the person's skin.
link |
Such people exist.
link |
Racism is a real thing, et cetera.
link |
On the other hand, I think this,
link |
throwing around the accusation of racism,
link |
a college professor is teaching a course.
link |
He says in the context of teaching the course
link |
that the underrepresentation of blacks
link |
in physics program at this university
link |
is because they score lower on the test than other groups
link |
and they're not qualified.
link |
So say the professor gives a lecture and he says,
link |
we don't have more blacks in the physics department
link |
at this university because there are not enough
link |
Somebody in the classroom who hears that,
link |
a black student, objects.
link |
He's a racist, okay?
link |
That's a power move.
link |
It's a move to try to control the conversation.
link |
It's not an argument, it's an epithet.
link |
You've said that a person who has a particular idea
link |
that you don't like, maybe that idea is,
link |
I'm against affirmative action, I think it's unfair.
link |
I was just with Dorian Abbott.
link |
Dorian Abbott is a scientist at the University of Chicago
link |
who published a piece in Newsweek magazine
link |
in which he said that he thought affirmative action
link |
and racial balancing was unethical.
link |
He was invited to give a lecture at MIT,
link |
a very distinguished lecture in his field
link |
based on planetary science.
link |
I don't know exactly what it is.
link |
I'm not a scientist.
link |
But in any case, because he had said
link |
that he didn't like affirmative action
link |
and he thought affirmative action was racist,
link |
that's basically what he said.
link |
Why are we looking at people based upon their race
link |
and decide we should just do it on the merit?
link |
That was his position.
link |
Now, people protesting at the university
link |
where he was invited, MIT, saying that he's a racist
link |
because he had that opinion.
link |
He gets disinvited.
link |
Charles Murray is a popular social science writer
link |
who is famous for his book about IQ, The Bell Curve,
link |
one chapter of which chronicles the racial differences
link |
between black and white in performance
link |
on mental ability tests and speculates about the extent
link |
to which such differences may be connected
link |
with the genetic inheritance of these racially diverse people.
link |
Now, he could be wrong about everything that he's saying.
link |
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls him a white supremacist
link |
because he observes that there are racial differences
link |
in measured intellectual ability amongst Americans
link |
of different racial descent.
link |
He could be wrong.
link |
Let me stipulate that he is wrong.
link |
I mean, I don't wanna argue about whether he's right
link |
I don't wanna argue about whether he's right
link |
or about whether he's wrong.
link |
He's addressing himself to a factual issue.
link |
And now the issue becomes instead of grappling
link |
with the factual questions at hand
link |
and demonstrating his rightness or wrongness
link |
about those questions, the issue becomes his character.
link |
That's, in my mind, a lot like calling him a witch.
link |
And the use of that word now, I think,
link |
has parallels to accusing people of witchcraft
link |
because they have views about substantive questions
link |
that bear on racial inequality or racial difference
link |
that a person finds unacceptable
link |
or that a person disagrees with.
link |
And you think you can shut somebody up.
link |
Crime in the cities of Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore,
link |
Philadelphia, Washington, DC is out of control,
link |
some person might say.
link |
Murder rate is high.
link |
Who's committing those crimes?
link |
They're mostly black young men who are doing the carjackings
link |
and who are doing the shootings.
link |
They're killing each other.
link |
They're making our city unlivable.
link |
Now, that's a hypothetical statement that I offer.
link |
It might be correct, it might be incorrect.
link |
It might be appropriate, it might be inappropriate.
link |
It may be true, but something that we would be better off
link |
if people didn't focus on, I don't know.
link |
Responding to someone making that statement,
link |
have you seen what has happened to my city?
link |
It used to be that you could go to North Michigan Avenue
link |
and you could find one after another
link |
after another high end shop.
link |
This is in Chicago, my hometown.
link |
And tourists would come and they'd go to the theater
link |
and there were restaurants and they'd go out.
link |
They don't do it anymore.
link |
Half of those stores are boarded up now.
link |
Because when George Floyd was killed,
link |
black people mobbed in the city and they burnt
link |
and they rioted and they looted
link |
and it hasn't been the same ever since.
link |
And I'm moving to the suburbs.
link |
I'll be damned if I'm gonna send my children
link |
A person could say that.
link |
They might be right, they might be wrong to say it.
link |
They might be right, they might be wrong to say it.
link |
Calling them a racist is exactly not
link |
a rebuttal of what they said.
link |
It's a move to try to take control of the conversation
link |
by accusing someone of having bad character
link |
because they said something that made you uncomfortable,
link |
which you can't deal with.
link |
So you think you can shut them up by calling them a racist.
link |
You might as well be calling them a witch.
link |
You might as well be calling for their head on a platter
link |
because they believe that Satan is Lord
link |
because that's the kind of quote argument, close quote,
link |
which is precisely not an argument
link |
that people who invoke that term are using.
link |
And here's what I have to say about that.
link |
It's a fool's errand to try to refute somebody
link |
by calling them a witch.
link |
Likewise, it's a fool's errand to try to rebut
link |
the contrary forces in American politics
link |
that are a reaction often to real things
link |
that are going on on the ground in black communities
link |
in the cities across this country
link |
by calling people a racist.
link |
You may shut them up, but you won't change their minds.
link |
And you know what?
link |
At the end of the day, they're gonna go to the ballot box
link |
and they're gonna vote.
link |
They're gonna pick up their store
link |
and they're gonna move it to the other side of town
link |
or to another town altogether.
link |
They're gonna keep their children away
link |
from places where they think the influences
link |
are harmful to those children.
link |
They may not even talk about it in public.
link |
You can believe that in private
link |
that they're talking about it with each other.
link |
You had better find a more effective way
link |
of dealing with the conflicts in this country
link |
that fall along racial fault lines
link |
than calling people witches,
link |
which is what this, you know, anti racist,
link |
you're a racist because you think
link |
that the out of wedlock birth rate amongst black Americans
link |
is seven babies out of 10 are born
link |
to a woman without a husband.
link |
Their families are falling apart.
link |
Now, no one says that in public
link |
because they'd be called a racist
link |
if they said it in public.
link |
But as a matter of fact, the families are falling apart.
link |
You didn't change that in the least
link |
by telling people to shut up about it.
link |
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is called a racist
link |
in the 1960s, the late Senator,
link |
the New York Senator who was a federal employee
link |
and an intellectual writing reports
link |
and he writes a report about the Negro family,
link |
he called it in those years.
link |
If I use the word Negro,
link |
now they're gonna call me a racist if I'm a white person.
link |
I can't even use the word Negro,
link |
which is a historically legitimate reference
link |
to the descendants of the enslaved people,
link |
which we were as black Americans proud to use until yesterday.
link |
So all of this linguistic policing is a sign of weakness.
link |
It's false black power.
link |
People will seed you the ground.
link |
Okay, you don't want me to use that word?
link |
I won't use that word anymore.
link |
Okay, you don't want me to talk about that in public?
link |
All right, I won't talk about it in public anymore.
link |
I don't wanna be called a racist, okay?
link |
So I won't express my opinion.
link |
You haven't changed anybody's mind.
link |
And you've also mentioned that for that,
link |
you haven't changed anybody's mind,
link |
but also for things like in universities and institutions,
link |
there's a diversity inclusion
link |
and equity kind of meetings and education and so on.
link |
And I believe I read somewhere,
link |
I've been, like I mentioned to you offline,
link |
big fan of your Glenn show, people should listen to it.
link |
There's also just interviews of you that I've listened to.
link |
I believe you mentioned somewhere
link |
that even those kinds of meetings,
link |
people might sit through and nod along,
link |
but that doesn't necessarily mean that's making progress,
link |
that they may actually be bottling up a frustration.
link |
The fear is that that's going to result
link |
in a pendulum sort of push back towards this idea
link |
of forced appreciations, like forced anti racism kind of thing.
link |
I talk about this often in my podcast,
link |
that's the Glenn show, you can find the Glenn show
link |
on my YouTube channel and also at Substack.
link |
Yeah, you have a great Substack.
link |
You and your friend do Q and As
link |
and all that kind of stuff on Patreon.
link |
So yeah, so people should definitely follow you.
link |
It's a brilliant conversation.
link |
But yeah, I mean, one concern is that the policing,
link |
the superficial policing,
link |
this is a part of political correctness,
link |
the insistence that you only use certain words,
link |
that you only talk in a certain way,
link |
is a phony kind of power
link |
because it doesn't actually persuade people
link |
about the issues that are at hand.
link |
Instead, it forces them underground
link |
in their talk about these issues,
link |
and that's problematic.
link |
Much better that we have overt and explicit
link |
and honest disagreement
link |
to the extent that there are disagreement
link |
about things that are going on
link |
than that we have a superficial kind of conversation
link |
that is purged of any real biting,
link |
discomforting confrontation with the realities
link |
of the situation at hand.
link |
And for black Americans,
link |
I think one big part of the reality
link |
of the situation at hand is violent crime, violent crime.
link |
A police officer is afraid when he stops the car
link |
because it's an 18 year old driver in the vehicle.
link |
He's got dreadlocks.
link |
He's a black person.
link |
The car doesn't have the right license plate.
link |
He's afraid to deal with that person.
link |
And one of the reasons he's afraid to deal with them
link |
is because a few who look like him are behaving violently.
link |
Their violence is usually perpetrated
link |
against others who look like themselves, but not always.
link |
And that reality doesn't get changed
link |
by telling a newspaper writer who writes about it
link |
that they are racist or enforcing within a newsroom.
link |
You can't cover that story in that way
link |
because to do so would be racist.
link |
I think it's a monumental mistake
link |
to enforce a closure on public discussion
link |
based upon a calculation that if we allow people,
link |
if Twitter allows this kind of post,
link |
if the Washington Post runs this kind of story, et cetera,
link |
you end up with a superficial politeness,
link |
a superficial politeness,
link |
but a subterranean seething resentment
link |
that only makes matters worse.
link |
If I can get your comment, maybe you have ideas
link |
because it does seem that this kind of attack works
link |
of being called a racist, being called, maybe not sexist,
link |
but somebody, like we're going through a Johnny Depp trial
link |
It's a defamation trial, and the reason it's a defamation
link |
trial is because all it took is a single accusation
link |
of Johnny Depp being somebody who sexually
link |
and physically abused Amber Heard.
link |
And all it took is just a single article.
link |
No proof was given except the accusation itself,
link |
and the world believed it.
link |
So it's effective.
link |
So how do you fight back if it's so damn effective
link |
that you can just call anybody racist?
link |
It's hard to wash off.
link |
It's, you're not proven in the court of law
link |
or anything like that, but we get those articles,
link |
we get that label, and then the world moves on
link |
and just assumes that person is racist.
link |
So how do you, do you have any ideas how to fight back?
link |
No, I don't, frankly.
link |
Just highlighting the fact.
link |
Listen, Roseanne Barr, who made this statement
link |
about Valerie Jarrett, she made some kind of ape
link |
like reference to the whatever, and her show
link |
got canceled, and she's a racist.
link |
So first of all, pointing it out, I suppose,
link |
is one of the most powerful things that this,
link |
the hypocrisy of it, the.
link |
You say it works, I guess you're right.
link |
It used to be that calling someone a communist worked.
link |
I mean, going back to the late 40s, early 50s,
link |
Red Scare, McCarthyism, and whatnot,
link |
and the person might've belonged to a club
link |
that was pro Soviet Union in the 1930s
link |
when they were in college.
link |
They might've voted for the socialist candidate,
link |
Henry Wallace, in the presidential election of 1948.
link |
They might belong to the Communist Party.
link |
They might think Karl Marx was right about a whole lot
link |
of stuff about capitalism and whatnot,
link |
and they got called a communist or a Marxist,
link |
and it could've ruined their career,
link |
could've ruined their lives.
link |
And a lot of people shut up about it,
link |
and it took, and it went on for a long time.
link |
And in a way, it kind of still is going on.
link |
I mean, you call somebody a Marxist,
link |
if you can make that stick, they're certainly not gonna
link |
get elected president of the United States.
link |
But I don't know about this.
link |
I think, you know, I once read this book
link |
by a German political scientist
link |
called Elisabeth Neula Neumann.
link |
That was the writer's name, Elisabeth Neula Neumann.
link |
The book was called The Spiral of Silence.
link |
And the argument was there can be some views,
link |
some issues in society that get defined
link |
in such a way that it's inappropriate to hold those views.
link |
And as a result, people who don't want to be shamed,
link |
who don't want to be ostracized don't express those views.
link |
And when they don't express them,
link |
anybody holding the view because they don't hear it
link |
said by others think that they're the only one
link |
and one of the few who hold the view,
link |
and so they don't want to be the only one
link |
out there saying something, so they keep it to themselves.
link |
So now this view, this attitude in society
link |
could be held by a large number of people,
link |
but because of the fear that if they were to express it,
link |
they'd be ostracized, no one says it.
link |
And since no one is saying it,
link |
the others who hold the view don't know
link |
that they're not alone,
link |
that they are not the only ones who hold the view.
link |
And hence they keep silent.
link |
That could be an equilibrium.
link |
It could be a relatively stable situation
link |
in which the emperor has no clothes.
link |
Everybody can see that this dude is naked, okay?
link |
But everybody thinks that, you know,
link |
I don't want to be the only one to say it.
link |
And so we all kind of collaborate in this charade
link |
of keeping the view to ourselves.
link |
Then along comes an event that somebody decides
link |
to defy the consensus and to speak out.
link |
It could be a little kid who in the story
link |
about the emperor has no clothes,
link |
doesn't realize that he's not supposed to say
link |
that the emperor is naked.
link |
The thing about the kid in the story
link |
who says that the emperor is naked,
link |
it's not that he's saying it.
link |
It's not even that other people hear him saying it.
link |
It's that everybody knows
link |
that everybody else heard him say it, okay?
link |
The kid who speaks out and says the emperor has no clothes
link |
creates a circumstance in which it's common knowledge
link |
that the emperor has no clothes.
link |
Now common knowledge does not just mean knowledge.
link |
It does not even mean widespread knowledge.
link |
It means comprehensive knowledge
link |
of other person's knowledge of the thing, okay?
link |
So the spiral of silence is a equilibrium
link |
that is susceptible to being undermined
link |
by a process of a kind of cumulative process,
link |
a snowballing process of revelation
link |
that you're not the only one who thinks this way, okay?
link |
It's fascinating to think that there's an ocean
link |
of common knowledge that we're waiting for the little kid
link |
to wake us up to, different little parts of it.
link |
And the little kid, by the way,
link |
could be somebody like Donald Trump,
link |
only more effective than Donald Trump,
link |
somebody who is smarter than Donald Trump,
link |
somebody who is shrewder than Donald Trump,
link |
somebody who figures out that when Colin Kaepernick
link |
takes a knee at a football game and says,
link |
I'm not gonna stand for this president allegiance,
link |
that a vast number of people are very unhappy about that.
link |
Somebody who understands
link |
that when a Black Lives Matter activist
link |
stands up with his ball of fists and says,
link |
burn this bitch down about a city
link |
in the United States of America,
link |
that a lot of people are upset about that, a lot of them.
link |
A person, a shrewd politician,
link |
a shrewd manager of a public image
link |
could build on and create a circumstance
link |
in which more and more people will feel safe
link |
to express that view.
link |
And the more who express it,
link |
the safer those who have yet to express it but who hold it
link |
will feel in expressing it.
link |
And to the extent that the view is very widespread
link |
but is kept under wraps, an explosion could happen.
link |
And you can look up tomorrow and have a very different
link |
country than you had today
link |
because the conspiracy of silence, the spiral of silence
link |
ends up getting unraveled by somebody who steps out
link |
away from the consensus,
link |
dares to take the slings and arrows
link |
of exposing themselves as a naysayer
link |
but taps into a sentiment that's very widespread.
link |
And I fear that with respect to many racial issues,
link |
this is the situation that we actually confront,
link |
that it could unravel in a very ugly way.
link |
But it could also unravel in a beautiful way.
link |
So it's depending.
link |
There is a spiral of silence, you're saying,
link |
and it could be, speaking of children,
link |
charismatic children, there's a guy named Elon Musk
link |
who might be a candidate for such an unraveling, right?
link |
You mentioned the person that speaks out
link |
could be a Donald Trump.
link |
But in this current situation that we live in,
link |
like as this week, Elon has purchased Twitter.
link |
That's what I hear.
link |
And is pushing for, in all kinds of ways,
link |
the increase of free speech on Twitter.
link |
And speaking about some of the issues
link |
that we've been speaking about here with you,
link |
but maybe in broader strokes about just the fact
link |
that you have to, it's okay to point out
link |
that the emperor wears no clothes,
link |
and to do so from all sides in a way
link |
that everybody's a little bit pissed off,
link |
What do you think about this whole effort
link |
of free speech in these public platforms?
link |
Elon in particular, Twitter, your avid Twitter user.
link |
But just public platforms for discourse,
link |
for us as a civilization to figure stuff out.
link |
Yeah, well, the people on the left
link |
are very upset about the possibility
link |
that Elon Musk and Twitter will be open to,
link |
more open to provocative public speech
link |
that has heretofore been banned or suppressed.
link |
And I think they might be right to be concerned
link |
that that could happen.
link |
I don't know enough about the technology
link |
and about the market to really,
link |
I mean, social media and whatnot,
link |
it seems like it's a complicated system
link |
of interactions between people and who the users are
link |
and so forth and so on.
link |
I do know that that New York Post story
link |
about Hunter Biden's laptop was real news
link |
and could have affected the outcome of the election,
link |
and it was suppressed,
link |
and that Twitter had a role in suppressing it.
link |
I do know that the question of where the COVID 19 virus
link |
originated and the role that a lab leak account
link |
could have played in the public processing of that event
link |
was real news, and that it was suppressed
link |
by people who were trying to control misinformation,
link |
disinformation, Russian disinformation campaigns
link |
So Twitter has users, I'm one of them,
link |
and it has a lot of users.
link |
It's not as big as Facebook, I gather.
link |
It's not, but it's important,
link |
the ability to construct counter platforms,
link |
people moving around and whatnot.
link |
It's a kind of network dynamic
link |
that maybe I should understand it better than I do
link |
being a social scientist, but.
link |
I don't think anyone understands it,
link |
even people inside Twitter, which is fascinating.
link |
It's a monster because of just the bandwidth of messaging,
link |
and you don't know who is a bot and who is a human.
link |
That's a fascinating dynamic,
link |
and the viral nature of negativity.
link |
All of those dynamics, of course,
link |
you are probably the right person to understand it
link |
from a social scientist perspective,
link |
from an economics perspective,
link |
but nobody really understands,
link |
and it's fascinating within that domain,
link |
how do you allow for free speech,
link |
not allow for free speech, encourage free speech,
link |
defend free speech, and at the same time,
link |
manage millions of ongoing conversations
link |
from just becoming insanely chaotic.
link |
Sort of from Twitter perspective,
link |
they want people to be happy, to grow,
link |
to actually have difficult, critical conversations,
link |
and the problem with humans is they think
link |
they know what that is, and they think
link |
they can label things as misinformation,
link |
as counterproductive or healthy conversations, in quotes,
link |
and the problem is, as we are learning,
link |
humans are not able to do that effectively.
link |
First of all, power corrupts.
link |
There's something delicious about having the power
link |
to label something as misinformation.
link |
You do that once for something
link |
that might be obviously misinformation,
link |
and then you start getting greedy.
link |
You start getting excited.
link |
It feels good to label something
link |
as misinformation or disinformation
link |
that you just don't like, and over time,
link |
especially if there's a culture inside of a company
link |
that leans a certain political direction
link |
or leans, in all the groups that we talked about,
link |
leans a certain way, they'll start
link |
to label as misinformation things they just don't like,
link |
and that power is delicious, and it corrupts.
link |
You have to construct mechanisms,
link |
like the Founding Fathers did,
link |
for somehow preventing you from allowing
link |
that power to get too delicious.
link |
At least that's my perspective on what's going on.
link |
Well, I'll just tell you personally,
link |
I'm excited about the prospect.
link |
I'm glad to see Musk making the move that he's making,
link |
and we'll see what happens at Twitter and so forth.
link |
You're looking forward for the, what did he say?
link |
Let's make Twitter more fun.
link |
I'm looking forward to the fun.
link |
You've talked about you are at a prestigious university.
link |
Brown University, and you've mentioned
link |
that universities might be in trouble.
link |
I think it's with Jordan, but everywhere else,
link |
that barbarians are at the gate.
link |
Who are the barbarians at the gate of the university?
link |
So first of all, what is to you beautiful
link |
about the ideal of the university in America, of academia?
link |
And what is a threat?
link |
Well, you know, a university is dedicated
link |
to the pursuit of truth, and to the education
link |
and nurturing of young people as they enter
link |
into the pursuit of truth, to doing research and to teaching
link |
in a environment of free inquiry and civil discourse.
link |
So free inquiry means you go wherever the evidence
link |
and your imagination may lead you.
link |
And civil discourse means that you exchange arguments
link |
with people when you don't agree with them
link |
on behalf of trying to get to the bottom of things.
link |
I think the university is a magnificent institution.
link |
It is a relatively modern institution.
link |
I mean, last 500 years or so.
link |
I mean, there are universities that are older than that,
link |
but the great research universities of the world,
link |
not only here in the United States,
link |
are places where human ingenuity is nurtured,
link |
where new lot knowledge is created,
link |
and where young people are equipped to answer questions
link |
that are open questions about our existence
link |
in the world that we live in.
link |
You can trace to the university much,
link |
if not most, of the advances in technology
link |
and resourcefulness and our understanding
link |
of the origins of the species, of the nature of the universe,
link |
cosmology, et cetera, science,
link |
the pursuit of humanistic understanding,
link |
the nurturing of traditions of inquiry,
link |
so forth, so that's the university.
link |
Barbarians are at the gates.
link |
The people who are trying to shut down open inquiry
link |
at the university on behalf of their particular view
link |
about things are a threat to what the university stands for,
link |
and they should be resisted.
link |
So if I'm inquiring about the nature of human intelligence,
link |
and I wanna study differences between human populations
link |
and their acquisition of,
link |
or their expression of cognitive ability,
link |
that's fair game, it's an open question.
link |
If I wanna know something about the nature
link |
of gender affiliation and identity
link |
and gender dysphoria and whatnot,
link |
that's fair game to study in a university.
link |
You can't shut that down, you shouldn't be able to,
link |
by saying, I have a particular position here,
link |
I'm a member of a particular identity group,
link |
suppose I wanna study the history of colonialism,
link |
and there's a narrative on the progressive side,
link |
which is colonialism is about Europeans dominating
link |
and stealing or whatever, whatever,
link |
and I happen to think, well, there's another aspect
link |
to the story about colonialism too,
link |
which is that it's a mechanism for the diffusion
link |
of the best in human civilization to populations
link |
that were significantly lagging behind with respect to that.
link |
It brought literacy to the Southern hemispheric populations
link |
that were dominated in the process of the colonizing thing.
link |
I'm not taking that position, by the way.
link |
I'm just saying somebody at a university
link |
should be able to take it up and pursue it
link |
and engage in argument with people about it.
link |
I'm talking about race and ethnicity,
link |
but this extends to a wide range of things.
link |
Suppose we're talking about race,
link |
a wide range of things, suppose we're talking about climate,
link |
and one person says the earth is endangered
link |
because carbon in global warming, et cetera, et cetera,
link |
and another person says, no, wait, no, wait,
link |
look at where we stand in the 21st century.
link |
We're vastly richer than our ancestors just 250 years ago.
link |
We have much more knowledge about that
link |
and so forth and so on.
link |
250 years from now, human ingenuity will have devised
link |
in ways that we can not even begin to anticipate.
link |
All manner of technological means for managing the problem.
link |
There's no reason that we should shut down
link |
industrial civilization today
link |
because we fear the consequences of it
link |
when in fact we are vastly richer than our ancestors
link |
and those who come two centuries after us
link |
will be vastly more effective
link |
at dealing with problems than we are now.
link |
I'm not actually making that argument.
link |
I'm just saying the tendency to try to say, oh, no,
link |
that person is a climate denier.
link |
They can't pursue that area of inquiry
link |
is against the spirit of the university.
link |
I think the barbarians at the gates
link |
has to do with the people who think they know
link |
what the right side of history is
link |
and try to make the university stand
link |
on the right side of history.
link |
My position is you don't know
link |
what the right side of history is.
link |
And the purpose of a university is to equip you
link |
to be able to think about what is the right side of history.
link |
What is the solution to the dilemmas that confront us
link |
as human beings living on this planet
link |
with the billions that we are in the condition that we are.
link |
So the identitarians,
link |
the ones who wanna make the university kowtow
link |
to their particular understandings about their own identity.
link |
We now have at Brown University and various other places,
link |
we don't do Columbus Day anymore.
link |
We do Indigenous Peoples Day.
link |
When that day comes up in October,
link |
we don't talk about Columbus.
link |
They're taking down statues of Columbus
link |
all across the country and so forth and so on.
link |
I'm not arguing anything here other than
link |
that the latter day position
link |
BIPOCs, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color,
link |
the latter day position that the university
link |
has to reflect a particular sensibility
link |
about these identity questions.
link |
I think it's a threat to the integrity of the enterprise.
link |
I don't think you're overstating it.
link |
I tend to be, just from my limited knowledge of MIT,
link |
but perhaps it applies broadly,
link |
I think the beauty of the university, broadly speaking,
link |
is the faculty and the students.
link |
And the problem arises from the overreach
link |
of a overgrowing administration
link |
that gives, again, thinks that it knows enough
link |
to make rules and conclusions based on a set of beliefs,
link |
and then based on that, empowers a certain small selection
link |
of students to be the sort of voices of activism,
link |
of a particular idea.
link |
And not, I think activism is beautiful,
link |
but not just activism, but anybody that disagrees
link |
is shut down, and that, I think,
link |
the blame lies with the administration.
link |
So I think the solution is in lessening,
link |
just like the solution with too big of a government,
link |
too big of a bureaucracy, is there needs to be
link |
redistribution of power to what makes universities beautiful,
link |
which is the old students and the young students,
link |
old students being professors.
link |
So the scholars, the curious minds,
link |
the people that are in this whole thing
link |
to explore the world, to be curious about it,
link |
on a salary that's probably way too low
link |
for the thing they're doing.
link |
That's the whole point.
link |
And then the administration just gets in the way,
link |
and is the source of this kind of,
link |
I would say that, in your beautiful phrasing,
link |
I would say the administration
link |
is the barbarians at the gate.
link |
So the solution is smaller bureaucracy,
link |
smaller administrations.
link |
I have to, on this point, you had this conversation,
link |
you put on your self stack with Jordan Peterson
link |
about cognitive inequality.
link |
I think it's titled Wrestling with Cognitive Inequality.
link |
This particular topic of just IQ differences
link |
between groups, why is this,
link |
why is it so dangerous to talk about?
link |
Why this particular topic?
link |
Well, it's like you're calling black people inferior.
link |
It's like you're saying they're genetically inferior.
link |
That's what people are saying.
link |
It's like you're rationalizing the disparity of outcomes
link |
by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black people.
link |
If you say cognitive ability matters for social outcomes,
link |
if you say cognitive ability exists,
link |
people really are different
link |
in terms of their intellectual functioning.
link |
And if you say cognitive ability differences
link |
are substantial between racially defined populations,
link |
the sum of that, there is cognitive ability,
link |
it matters, and the difference by race
link |
is the conclusion that outcome differences by race
link |
are in part due to natural differences
link |
between the populations.
link |
People find that to be completely offensive
link |
So that's what I think is going on.
link |
Can you steel me on that case
link |
that we should be careful doing that kind of research?
link |
So this has to do with research.
link |
It's like the Nazis used Nietzsche in their propaganda.
link |
You can use, white supremacists could use conclusions,
link |
cherry pick conclusions of studies to push their agenda.
link |
Can you steel me on the case that we should be careful?
link |
Yeah, I could do it at three levels.
link |
One is what do we mean by cognitive ability?
link |
So there's many different kinds of intelligence
link |
a person might say.
link |
How good are IQ tests at measuring
link |
other kinds of human capacities
link |
that are pertinent to success in life,
link |
like temperament, like emotional intelligence, and so on.
link |
So intelligence is not a one dimensional thing
link |
The cognitive psychologists talk about G,
link |
the general intelligence factor,
link |
which is a statistical construction.
link |
It's a factor analytic resolution
link |
of the correlation across individuals
link |
in their performance on a battery,
link |
a different kind of test.
link |
And they use that to define a general factor of intelligence
link |
that a person could say that is a very narrow view
link |
of what human mental capacities actually are.
link |
And that it's much better to think about
link |
multi dimensional measures of human mental functioning
link |
rather than a single cognitive ability measure,
link |
so called IQ, which is a narrow construction
link |
that doesn't capture all of the subtle nuance
link |
of human difference in functioning.
link |
Functioning is not just the ability
link |
to recite backwards a sequence of numbers.
link |
I say eight, seven, nine, five, three, two.
link |
You say two, three, five, seven, eight, nine.
link |
It's not just that.
link |
Intelligence is a complex management
link |
of many different dimensions of human performance,
link |
including things like being able to stick with a task
link |
and not give up, things like being able to discipline
link |
and control your impulses so as to remain focused
link |
That could be one dimension.
link |
I could start by questioning the very foundation
link |
of the argument for racial differences in cognitive ability
link |
by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed.
link |
I could go to a higher level.
link |
I could say what we're really interested in
link |
is social outcomes and the question of what factors
link |
influence social outcomes extends well beyond mental ability
link |
to many other things.
link |
So here's an example.
link |
Visual acuity, how well do you see?
link |
You're not wearing glasses, I am.
link |
Visual acuity varies between human beings.
link |
Some people see better than other people do.
link |
Visual acuity can be measured.
link |
I can put you at the chart and you can,
link |
can you identify and read that bottom line
link |
in small print or not?
link |
So we can measure visual acuity
link |
and it varies between human beings.
link |
Visual acuity is partly genetic.
link |
I think that's undoubtedly true.
link |
We inherit genes that influence whether or not
link |
we are nearsighted or farsighted or astigmatic or whatever.
link |
So visual acuity differs between people
link |
and can be measured and is under genetic control.
link |
On the other hand, corrective lenses allow for us
link |
to level the playing field between people
link |
who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity.
link |
Likewise, social outcomes are what we're really interested in
link |
employment, earnings, whether or not they're law abiding,
link |
how do they conduct themselves and their families
link |
and so forth amongst individuals.
link |
Yes, social outcomes are influenced
link |
by so called cognitive ability,
link |
but they're influenced by many other things as well.
link |
If there are interventions that can be undertaken in society
link |
that level the playing field between people
link |
who have different natural endowments of cognitive ability,
link |
the fact that people or groups differ in cognitive ability
link |
becomes less significant.
link |
Just like it's less significant that people differ
link |
with respect to how well they see
link |
when corrective lenses allow
link |
for the leveling of that playing field.
link |
There are in fact interventions, educational interventions,
link |
early childhood interventions that have been shown
link |
to level the playing field
link |
to create better life outcomes for people
link |
even if they happen to be endowed with low intelligence.
link |
So a second level of arguing against this whole program
link |
of research on human differences and intelligence
link |
is to observe that yes, human beings
link |
and perhaps racially defined groups
link |
may differ on the average in intellectual endowment,
link |
but there well may be social interventions
link |
that level the playing field,
link |
whether it's in education
link |
or in other kinds of programmatic interventions,
link |
especially for the poor.
link |
A final level of argument is the one that you alluded to,
link |
which is that if you talk like this,
link |
you're gonna encourage a kind of politics
link |
which is very ugly.
link |
And it's best to frame the discussion
link |
in ways that don't put emphasis
link |
on racially defined natural differences between populations.
link |
That's an argument that I am myself personally
link |
On the one hand, I think, you know,
link |
those people are just stupid.
link |
It is racist, okay?
link |
On the other hand, I think the calculation,
link |
we shouldn't do this kind of research.
link |
Suppose I'm at the National Science Foundation,
link |
a research team submits a proposal.
link |
The proposal proposes to undertake a study.
link |
The study would explore the extent to which people
link |
and racial groups differ with respect
link |
to their intellectual performance
link |
and how that's influenced by their genetic
link |
and environmental interaction.
link |
And I decide not to fund the study
link |
based on a political calculation
link |
that the subject is too sensitive.
link |
And if you explore that subject,
link |
you might get the wrong answer.
link |
And if you get the wrong answer,
link |
the white supremacist will be encouraged.
link |
Well, that is presuming before the research is done
link |
that I know the outcome of the research
link |
and that I can calculate what the political consequence
link |
of the research outcome is gonna be.
link |
That's assuming the thing before you even know
link |
what the thing actually is.
link |
It's a kind of omniscience.
link |
It presumes that you as the master of the universe
link |
can tell people what it is
link |
that people are being treated like children,
link |
what it is that they're capable of knowing
link |
and what it is that they're not capable of knowing.
link |
It would be like someone saying to Einstein,
link |
I don't know about that special relativity theory.
link |
You know, it could well lead
link |
to the development of technologies
link |
that would allow nuclear weapons.
link |
Or someone saying to Oppenheimer,
link |
who is a physicist overseeing the Manhattan Project
link |
where the US developed a nuclear weapons capacity,
link |
don't carry out that project
link |
because the results of acquiring that knowledge
link |
may be more than we can deal with.
link |
Or someone saying to someone doing biomedical research
link |
who's interested in exploring the nature of the human genome,
link |
don't carry out that experiment,
link |
that cloning, undertaking, whatever,
link |
because the consequences could be deleterious.
link |
Well, the consequences could be deleterious.
link |
The consequences could also be the cure of cancer.
link |
The consequences could also be
link |
being able to generate electric power
link |
without producing carbon effluent.
link |
So who are you to tell me,
link |
you being the person in the political position
link |
to control the research,
link |
what the consequence of doing the research is?
link |
I think I don't want to cede that kind of power
link |
to politicians over the course of human inquiry.
link |
So yes, I would want there to be regulations
link |
governing the use of biologically sensitive
link |
and potentially dangerous pathogens
link |
in a lab in Wuhan or any place else.
link |
I would not want to simply leave that to laissez faire.
link |
On the other hand, I think that the tendency
link |
to try to shut down inquiry
link |
on behalf of supposed adverse political consequences
link |
is the road to ignorance and impoverishment
link |
at the end of the day for humankind,
link |
denying ourselves the potential benefits
link |
of that kind of inquiry.
link |
I think we need to take our chances with inquiry
link |
rather than to try to control it.
link |
And I feel that way about the exploration
link |
of human intelligence as much as anything else.
link |
So you've asked me to steel man the case
link |
against research on IQ of the sort
link |
that Charles Murray is famous for popularizing.
link |
And I've said A, your measure of intelligence
link |
is single dimensional and it ought to be multi dimensional.
link |
I've said B, the consequences of people's differing
link |
in intelligence depends not only
link |
on the natural endowments of the people
link |
but also on the environment
link |
and the potential for intervening in that environment
link |
through one or another kind of instrument
link |
as the metaphorical example of the use of corrective lenses
link |
to level the playing field between people
link |
with different visual acuity indicates.
link |
But finally, I've said, yes,
link |
research on racial differences in IQ can foster
link |
political beliefs that we would regard to be noxious.
link |
On the other hand, to presume that what we don't know yet
link |
and might find out from the research is gonna be harmful
link |
is to assume a kind of presumption
link |
or of knowing what the outcome of unknown processes might be
link |
which we ought to be very slow to embrace
link |
because if we had done so in the past,
link |
we wouldn't have nuclear power.
link |
There's a lot of things that we wouldn't know.
link |
I mean, what were people saying about Darwin
link |
and exploration of the evolution
link |
and origin of the species?
link |
They were afraid that it was gonna, in effect,
link |
disprove the religious based accounts
link |
of what were they saying about Copernicus
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and et cetera, et cetera.
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That was a masterful layering of, quote,
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wrestling with cognitive inequality.
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You dragged in nuclear research,
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Copernicus, Darwin, biomedical research with genetics,
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even COVID and the lab leak.
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I mean, that was just fun to listen to.
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Let me ask you about your politics.
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So you've recently said that you're a conservative leaning.
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I mean, maybe that's a day to day thing.
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Maybe you can push back.
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But so you have somebody like your friend, John McWhorter,
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who we could say is on your left, to the left of you.
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And then you have somebody like Thomas Sowell
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who maybe is on to the right of you.
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And yet there's a lot of overlap between the three of you.
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So to what degree does politics affect your view on race
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And maybe to what degree does your view on race
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affect your politics?
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And that, for people who don't know, has shifted over time.
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You've been on quite a roller coaster,
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as anybody who thinks about the world should be.
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Well, let's begin with the fact that I was trained
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as an economist in a tradition of what many people
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would call neoliberalism.
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I was trained at MIT, which was not a right wing place
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by any means, but it was a place where you learned
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about markets and about the benefits of capitalism
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as a way of organizing society,
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the virtues of free enterprise,
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the fact that the pursuit of profit
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was not necessarily a bad thing,
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but it well might be the road to prosperity
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and to economic growth.
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The idea that private property and individuals seeking
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to acquire and succeeding in acquiring wealth
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did create inequality, but it also created opportunity.
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And it also expanded the ability to do things
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and expanded our knowledge and our control
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over the physical environment in which we're embedded
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So we were not Marxists at MIT, although we did read Marx.
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I mean, those of us who were intellectually curious,
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Marx was an important figure in the history of the West.
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And I think Marx should be read in capital three volumes,
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et cetera, alienation of labor and whatnot.
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The implications of modernization,
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the advent of industrial capitalism, et cetera.
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That kind of dynamic deserves to be studied
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and to come at it in a critical way,
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informed by the intellectual inheritance of Marx and Marxism.
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I think that's a part of a full education
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in social philosophy and economic analysis
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that an open minded person ought to acquaint themselves with.
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But at the end of the day,
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I think that the free marketeers have the better of it.
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I think the story of the 20th century
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as far as economic development is concerned reflects that.
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I think that the experiments where centralized control
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over economic decisions was the order of the day failed.
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I think that the fact of the 21st century rise of China
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as a force has a lot to do with the spread of,
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in effect, capitalist oriented modes
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of entering economic exchange,
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freeing up prices, markets, property, and so forth.
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Although obviously it's a complicated
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political economic system, we're talking about China.
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But I think that the story of the 20th century
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and the hope for the 21st century
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is that prosperity is enhanced through the free exchange
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of goods and the pursuit and acquisition of property
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by people in a more or less capitalist oriented system.
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That's the view that I hold.
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I guess that makes me a conservative, I don't know.
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I wanna say that's not to the exclusion
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of a social safety net.
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I'm not saying that old people in an ideal social system
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would be left to their own devices
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regardless of whether or not
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they had saved for their retirement.
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I'm not saying that the ideal of extending decent access
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to healthcare to all people regardless
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of whether or not they can afford it,
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decent access to education to people
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regardless of whether or not they can afford it
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is standing in the way of prosperity.
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I don't believe that.
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I think the mixed economies that we see in Northern Europe
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and in North America are a balancing
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of the virtues of free enterprise property
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and the pursuit of wealth on the one hand
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against the needs to have a decent society
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in which people who fall between the cracks nevertheless
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are bolstered through a sense of social solidarity
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that is accommodated by our common membership
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within a single nation state,
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which is why I think nationalism is important.
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And it's why I think borders are important
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because without a coherent polity
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who can see themselves as in a common situation
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and agree through their politics
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to support each other to some extent,
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you can't sustain a safety net.
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You cannot have a social safety net for a global population.
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You can only have a social safety net
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for a bounded population who have a sense
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of common membership in an ongoing political enterprise
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which they pay their dues through their taxes
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in order to sustain it.
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There's a balancing that has to go on.
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So that's the first thing that I would say about my politics.
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I'm a neoliberal economist.
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I believe in markets.
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I believe in prices.
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I believe in profit.
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Corporations are not an incarnation of evil.
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Corporations are a legal nexus
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through which production gets organized
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in which you solicit the cooperation of workers,
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of people who provide capital,
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of people who provide raw materials
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and input of customers and so on.
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And that functionality allows for the production of goods
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and their distribution and their earning of income
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and its distribution,
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which at the end of the day is the foundation
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of our prosperity.
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Corporations are people too.
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Mitt Romney got in trouble for saying that in 2012.
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But corporations are nothing but a legal fiction.
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The corporation is not a person as such,
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but the nexus of contracts and relationships
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amongst the stakeholders who intersect
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in the context of the corporation
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is the way in which we organize
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the massively complex set of activities
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that are necessary in order to produce economic benefits,
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in order to feed people,
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in order to have everybody with a cell phone in their pocket,
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in order to be able to travel from one side of a continent
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to another on a device that is with almost absolute certainty
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gonna safely take off and land
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and in order to be able to build cities and et cetera.
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But do the markets, the ideal of the market
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collide with the ideal of all men are created equal?
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The identity, the struggle that we've been talking about
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of what it means to sort of empower humans
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that make up this great country.
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Do they collide and where do they collide?
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Well, markets are gonna produce inequality
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and all men being equal is a statement
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about the intrinsic worth of people,
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not about the situation that will come about
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when people interact with each other through markets
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because people are actually different
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and because there are factors
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that are beyond anybody's control called luck and chance
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that you and I both invest.
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It looked a priori like your investment and my investment
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were equally likely to succeed.
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But as a matter of fact, ex post facto,
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your investment succeeds, my investment doesn't succeed.
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I don't have wealth and you have wealth.
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That is an inevitable consequence of a environment
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in which both of us are free to make our investment choices
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and where the consequences of investment
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depend in part upon random circumstances
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of which no one has control.
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But you asked me about my politics
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and I was just trying to lay down a foundation
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by saying I begin as an economist
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in the tradition of liberalism, Adam Smith and so forth,
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John Maynard Keynes for that matter and so forth,
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that Milton Friedman and so forth,
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that Paul Samuelson, Bob Solla, James Tobin and so forth,
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Thomas Sowell, yes, that appreciates property,
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the virtues of free enterprise,
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the set of institutions that allow for security of contract,
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a rule of law, things of this kind.
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So that's one thing to say about my politics.
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Another thing to say about my politics and you're right,
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I've moved around, is that I began south side of Chicago,
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black kid, I was a liberal Democrat.
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I encountered the economics curriculum at the MIT
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and I became trained in economics
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in the tradition that I've just described.
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And I encountered also the Reagan Revolution.
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This is the late 70s and early 80s.
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These are big debates about economic policy and so on.
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And I found a lot to admire in the supply side errors,
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the people were saying,
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let's get the government out of the way,
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the people who were worried about national debt,
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which is a lot more now than it was then,
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the people who were worried
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that the welfare state could be too big,
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that the incentives of transfer programs
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could be counterproductive, that you had a war on poverty
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and we did have a war on poverty and poverty won.
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And that's what I found.
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And we did have a war on poverty and poverty won.
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And there's a lot of evidence that the war on poverty
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was lost by the people who were trying to, quote unquote,
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eradicate poverty in our time.
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That incentives really do matter
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and that the state, which is driven by politics,
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is often unresponsive to the dictates of incentives.
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Whereas markets eliminate people who are inefficient
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and who are not cognizant of the consequences of incentives
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because they can't cover their bottom line
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and they won't persist for very long.
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If they can't cover their bottom line,
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they're forced to respond to the realities of differences
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and costs and benefits and so forth
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in a way that governments can cover
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because they have their hand in our pocket.
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They can cover their losses
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and they can make accounts balanced,
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not withstanding their mistakes
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because they can take my property by fiat,
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by the power of the state, the tax collector comes,
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if I don't pay, he seizes my holdings.
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And they can carry on in that way.
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They need the corrective influence of markets
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in order to be responsive to the realities of life.
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I mean, I may not like it that prices are telling me
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that something that I wanna do is infeasible.
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I may not like it, but what the prices are telling me
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is that the costs of doing it exceed the benefits
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to be derived from doing it.
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And if I persist in doing it not withstanding that,
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I'm gonna run losses.
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And those losses will accumulate.
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And the net effect of that over an entire society
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is stagnation and ultimate attenuation
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of the economic benefits
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that might be available to people.
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Again, I think if you look at the developing world
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in the postcolonial period,
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the second half of the 20th century,
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that's exactly what you see.
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Planning doesn't work.
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Centralized control over resource allocation doesn't work.
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Okay, so I became more conservative in that respect,
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but I also, and this has to do with race,
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lost the faith in the posture
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that what became of the civil rights movement.
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I mean, the civil rights movement, you quote King 1963,
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the civil rights movement starts out as
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we want equal membership in the polity,
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but it becomes a systematized cover I'm going to argue
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for deficiencies that are discernible
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within black American society, which only we could correct.
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That's a very controversial statement.
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I make it with trepidation.
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I don't take any pleasure in saying it,
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but here's what I'm talking about.
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So I'm talking about the family.
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So the family is a matter internal to the community
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about how men and women relate to each other
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and engage in social reproduction, childbearing,
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the standing up of households,
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the context within which children are developed,
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are maturing and so forth and so on.
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So the African American family is in trouble.
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I think I can demonstrate that
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by reference to high rates of marital dissolution,
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by high rates of birth to out of wedlock and so forth.
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You can't even say that
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the African American family is in trouble.
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Violence, homicide is an order of magnitude more prevalent
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amongst African Americans than it is
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in the society as a whole.
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This is behavior, it's behavior of our people.
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I speak of black people.
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Of course, we're not the only people in society
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for whom violence is an issue.
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It's an order of magnitude more prevalent in our communities.
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I'm talking about schooling and school failure.
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So we have affirmative action as a cover.
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It's a bandaid on differences in the development
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of intellectual performance,
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which is only partly a consequence
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of the natural intelligence of people
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and largely a consequence of how people spend their time,
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what they value, how they discipline themselves,
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what they do with their opportunities,
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how parents raise their children,
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what peer groups value and things of this kind.
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The Asian students who are scoring off the charts
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on these exams are doing it
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not because they're intrinsically more intelligent
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to other people, but because they work harder,
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because their parents are more insistent
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on focusing on their intellectual performance
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because they're disciplined,
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because of the way that they devote their time
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and their resources to equipping their children
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to function in the 21st century.
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This is what I believe.
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I think it's demonstrably the case.
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And it is a factor in racial disparity.
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The way that the civil rights movement has evolved
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under the wing of the Democratic Party
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into an organized apologia for the failures
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of African Americans to seize the opportunities
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that exist for us now in the 21st century,
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but did not exist in the first half of the 20th century,
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the way in which the civil rights movement
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has become an avoidance mechanism
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for us not taking we African Americans responsible.