Discrimination and Disparities

What It Is

A short, aggressive book of social analysis, published by Basic Books in 2018 and reissued in a revised and enlarged edition in 2019, written when Sowell was eighty-seven.

Its target is a habit of mind rather than a policy. Sowell calls it the invincible fallacy: the belief that without discrimination or unfair advantage, outcomes would be more or less evenly distributed across groups. Against it he sets a mass of evidence, gathered from places nobody arguing about inequality usually thinks to look.

Much of the book turns on the several incompatible things the word discrimination is asked to carry, and on what happens to an argument when they are run together. The confusion, he argues, is not an accident.

Why It Matters

The book asks a question anyone serious about inequality has to answer: what would the world look like if there were no discrimination at all? He takes his examples from everywhere, from birth order to geography to the accident of which language a people happened to speak, and he makes you show your working.

It is the compressed statement of a thesis he had been building for forty years, from Ethnic America through Wealth, Poverty and Politics. If you want to know why one of the most cited black economists in America spent his career at odds with the civil rights establishment, this is the shortest route to the reasoning.

Now the honest part. The evidence is used illustratively rather than systematically. Sowell selects cases that support the argument and rarely engages the strongest work against it, so the book shows that his explanation is possible without establishing that it is right. He is thin on the American history of housing, credit and policing, which is exactly where his critics locate the mechanisms he says are missing. A reader who wants the counter-case will have to fetch it, and should.

What survives all of that is the discipline he demands of his reader, and of himself. That is a fair demand, and it is uncomfortable in every political direction.

Before You Read

Four or five hours. The difficulty is temperamental, not intellectual.

Come prepared to argue. Sowell is not asking you to like the conclusion. He is asking you to find the error, and the book is only worth reading if you take that invitation seriously.

The endnotes are where the work is. Sowell makes strong empirical claims quickly, and the citation is often the only way to see how much weight one will bear. Keep a finger in them.

Which Edition to Read

• The revised and enlarged edition (Basic Books, 2019) — recommended. The definitive text, now in print in hardcover and paperback. It adds a substantial chapter on the human consequences of the prevailing view of disparities, which sharpens the argument from analysis into indictment. The cost: that chapter is the most partisan writing in the book, and readers who came for the evidence will feel the temperature rise. Buy it anyway. The core is unchanged and the endnotes are fuller. View on Amazon →
• The first edition (Basic Books, 2018). Leaner, cooler and arguably better proportioned. Worth picking up secondhand if you find it cheap. The cost: you lose the added chapter and the expanded notes, and there is no reason to prefer it beyond price.
• The unabridged audiobook. Sowell's sentences carry aloud and the argument is easy to follow by ear. The cost: this is a book made of numbers, comparisons and citations. Hearing a statistic is not the same as being able to check one, and the endnotes, which are half the book's value, are effectively gone.

Read the 2019 edition in print. Listen to it instead and you have heard the case without seeing the evidence, which is the one thing Sowell tells you never to do.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it with a pencil. Every time Sowell asserts a causal link, ask whether the data he offers can bear it. He would approve of the treatment.

Then read something against it. Take up a serious historian of American housing policy or labour markets and see which claims survive the collision. A book this confident deserves a real opponent, and reading it alone is how people end up quoting it rather than thinking with it.

Do not start Sowell here. Basic Economics or A Conflict of Visions will show you the machinery. This is the machinery pointed at the most sensitive subject in American life, which is why it is the one people fight about.