Another fine Monday post brought to you by Stephen Hall. Thanks, as always, Stephen!!!
Well, not The Gap as in the retail outlet of that name, and not “the” as in a truly definite article used to identify a particular specific gap, but rather a generic reference to whatever particular gap or difference which happens to be the topic of current discussion and what passes for debate in the rather anti-social, social media.
Of current, and oft recurring, faux concern is the alleged pay gap between men and women where it is declared that the average woman only earns about 77% of what the average man earns.
In a similar vein, part of the evidence put forth before Congress to push for passage of the Civil Rights Act revolved around the wage gaps between blacks and whites, as well as the wage gaps between men and women.
Sitting in class, and with a rudimentary knowledge of simple mathematics, I looked at the data presented as arguments for why government mandated segregation needed to be replaced with government mandated integration, this wage gap data.
The gap was narrowing. By itself, that is not very meaningful, they it was the rate of the gap narrowing which caught my attention. So performing a simple linear extrapolation, that is taking the rate of closing of the difference and carrying into the future to the present day, I compared that calculation to the present day figures the teacher was telling us about the respective wage gaps.
The figures showed that if segregation had remained and the Civil Rights Act had never been passed, the wage gap would have been within 1% of what it was with the legislative actions. In other words, the effect of the national and many state legislation and agencies designed to enforce this legislation has had on the wage gap, is essentially nothing. It has had no effect.
As many readers of this forum are keenly aware there have been many people who have provided overwhelming evidence that the gender wage gap is largely an illusion created by differences in job selection, life choices and work history involved around family.
Let us throw into the mix a more controversial gap, in particular for those familiar with the book The Bell Curve, the differences in average IQs of various racial groups and the heritable nature of intelligence.
You may be familiar with the evidence that the average IQ for black people in America is about one standard deviation lower than the average for the population in general, but you may not be familiar with studies showing that the American black population has an average IQ about halfway between the average European IQ and the average native sub-Saharan African IQ.
The book discusses that while largely heritable, IQ also responds and adjusts to environmental influences and natural selection involving social and geographic conditions. The authors estimate that on average the mean IQ of a population may change by as much as one point every generation. In other words, that population IQs adjust over time to social and environmental conditions.
If true, then one would expect that the average IQ of the black population would reasonably be expected to increase over the preceding 200 years about 15 points, or about 15 generations, which is almost exactly what one sees in the data.
At this rate, the intelligence gap could reasonably be expected to, for all practical purposes, completely close in another 300 to 500 years, or 20 to 30 generations. This is a natural process but one which will be rejected by many learned people, including many readers of his article, mostly because it is not something that they want to accept.
One final example of a gap which needs to be entered into our mix is a reaction I observed in the local newspapers some years ago to a bit of news. It occurred that the newspaper announced that black people were now graduation college and getting degrees at the same rate as the white students.
What ought for a rational person have been hailed as progress and good news was lamented by the journalists, in an entire edition devoted to such similar issues, that the black people had not instantaneously achieved parity in income and in wealth with their white counterparts.
In other words, they lamented income and wealth gaps, without stopping to understand the economic realities of the improvement of income over one’s life and the accumulation of wealth over one’s life and even over several generations. They wanted instant parity, an instant closing of the gaps in income and in wealth.
It is the nature of this desire for instant parity which is the real subject of this post. Gaps exist. The differences between groups, whether based upon gender, race, religion, geography, or any other basis on any topic in any field exist. The real question to be asked is not whether a gap exists, not how large such a gap may be, but what is the actual nature of the difference in question.
What people so often fail to comprehend is that such gaps and the growth or diminishing of such gaps are not particularly subject to the manipulations of the state; they do not respond to laws or the desires of well meaning social activists.
If there is a fundamental and real reason for a difference, no law will make that gap disappear. As discussed earlier, there are real reasons for a wage gap based upon gender differences, and efforts to increase the wages of women or decrease the wages of men can be of no effect so long as wages are not dictated by the government and men and women remain different.
There are other differences or gaps which are often exploited for political purposes, such as the differences being currently touted in fertility rates in the civilized world compared to birth rates of many third world nations. Many advocates of open borders and unrestrained immigration promote this fertility disparity as a justification for massive immigration and transfer of the accumulated wealth of the west.
What they always avoid discussing is why those differences in fertility rates exist. How much of that is because of an adjustment to the natural consequence of a wealthier society and a response to the increasing automaton of society? Unless one can know the reason for that difference it is completely foolish to base public policies in an effort to contradict a natural trend towards lower birth rates.
Other differences will disappear in good time if they are disappearing already, the problem is that people lack patience to allow the natural processes to close the gap and try to force the convergence by force of law and legislation.
The big problem with this approach is that it really appears to work, but that the appearance is but an illusion. When you pass a law to effect an outcome which is already occurring incrementally, then it erroneously appears that the law is what has caused that effect.
Standards of living increasing, work weeks shortening, child labor decreasing, and dozens of other effects which the bourgeoning government regulatory agencies gleefully take credit which were caused by increasing wealth, productivity, understandings of hygiene, and other causes. The gaps were closing before the laws, the gaps continue to close with the laws passed, but the closure of those gaps are unrelated to the laws.
There are other differences which increase over time, gaps which widen. It is the nature of certain things like wealth and capital accumulation which increases the disparity between the wealthy and the poor. It is this increasing gap which fuels jealousy and fears which propel socialists like Bernie Sanders to prominence decrying that the poor will be swept aside.
Technology gaps increase as well between those who are skilled in sciences and engineering and those who struggle at minimum wage low skilled jobs. There are those who are convinced that this gap will grow to the point where many people become superfluous and robots will be designed to work for those few people with the wealth to be able to afford them, thus leaving the vast majority of people with nothing.
Such fears ignore the history of technology and poverty where the poor in nations like America which are capitalistic live better than the rich lived a century or two ago. It can truly be said that the poor in America in some ways live better than kings of old; they may not have the gold and the big castle, but they live in greater warmth and comfort in insulated houses, with endless entertainment at the edge of their remote control, food prepared for them at their order, and instant communication across vast distances.
Sometimes it is not the gap, or relative differences, but the absolute which is important, but no matter.
Before you worry about the differences between peoples, it is important to understand the nature and causes of those differences as well as the current trends of those differences. Patience and understanding is what is missing from our discussions of gaps, and that lack fuels much of our most foolish public policies.
