Preferential Policies: an International Perspective. - book reviews

National Review, June 25, 1990 by Brad Miner

* At a recent Manhattan Institute luncheon, Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, spoke about his new book, Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (William Morrow, 192 pp., $17.95). According to Professor Sowell, the ultimate goal of preferential policies around the world-including affirmative action in the United States-is to see all groups in a society represented within all institutions and professions more or less as in their proportion in the population at large. Indeed, such a statistical approach is required to demonstrate patterns of discrimination," the precursor of set-asides, preferences, quotas, and the like. If we can just give temporary preference to lagging group A, the rationale holds, it will start to join, at appropriate levels, Profession Z, from which history had excluded it. To explain the absurdity of the statisticians, Professor Sowell mentioned a study in which the author-determined to explain away innate difference observed how lucky Jews were to have immigrated to America just as the needle trades began to flourish. It's like saying," Professor Sowell mused, "How lucky of Henry Aaron to have come up to bat just as all those home runs were about to be hit."'

Around the world, governments have felt compelled, sometimes by social injustice, sometimes by political self-interest, to institute special programs to give preference-in hiring, in education, in welfare-to particular groups. In America, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka, Professor Sowell found that such policies (a/k/a "compensatory preferences," "reverse discrimination") had similar unfortunate and unintended consequences. Once established, affirmative action tends to expand, and specific mandates and time limits tend to evaporate. Such policies usually end up most benefiting the most fortunate within the preferred group; they lead to polarization, even to violence, occasionally deadly violence; they encourage people not actually qualified to claim membership in the preferred group; and, finally, only the rationale of preferential policies is understood and discussed, never the actual results.

Preferential policies flourish because of four illusions: the illusions of control and knowledge, and of morality and compensation; in other words, the usual illusions of social planners. To pretend," Professor Sowell writes, to disentangle the innumerable sources of intergroup differences is an exercise in hubris rather than morality." And compensations given without incentives do nothing to help the disadvantaged.

Preferential policies have been extended in one way or another to two-thirds of all Americans, in most cases because of political expediency. The situation is most absurd with regard to the feminist demand for 'equal pay." It is true that married women do not earn as much as other groups-male or female-but Professor Sowell points out that women who remained single into their thirties earned more than 100 per cent of the income of single men-even before preferential policies for women." The most visible, aggressive affirmative action has been employed to put more black students into college, and the book's best chapter ("Minority Preferences in Majority Economies") demonstrates the devastating unintended effect it has bad upon them. The "wonderfully diverse" student body at the University of California at Berkeley closely reflects" the ethnic distribution in California's high schools. Fine and dandy, but 70 per cent of Berkeley's black students-almost all of whom entered under affirmative action-fail to graduate. Why? Because even with all sorts of "innovative educational programs," Berkeley's still a tough school. The black students entering had SAT scores (952 combined) higher than the national average, and they might easily have mastered the programs at other schools, but their scores were more than two hundred points lower than Berkeley's average. The spiral downward continues: Schools with lower scores and standards lose the best black students to Berkeley, and must pick from a pool with, yes, SATs at below their normal levels, and so on. Black students find themselves inexorably pushed into failure, level by level, by a system designed to help them succeed.

But the bureaucrats and politicians are happy. They've achieved statistical Utopia. One must hope they will read Preferential Policies, and be disabused of illusion. However, Professor Sowell is pessimistic. After all, affirmative action is a quick fix for the politicians, and money in the bank for racial activists and bureaucrats. Alternative approaches to problems can come only when a change of heart happens in a preferred group. "Determining in this way what should be done is not an exercise in Utopianism," Professor Sowell concludes, for once there is a consensus on what needs to he done, that in itself changes what is politically feasible." -BRAD MINER

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