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… is from page 152 of Phil Gramm’s, Robert Ekelund’s, and John Early’s 2022 book, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate [2]:
The primary reason for the improvements in the relative income distribution for Black households was that average hourly earnings by Black workers (adjusted for inflation) rose by 217 percent over the fifty-year period [1967-2017], while hourly earnings for White workers rose by a somewhat smaller 196 percent.
DBx: According to today’s ‘progressive’ intellectual convention, we must therefore conclude that this higher rise in the hourly earnings by black workers, compared to that of white workers, is explained by one thing and one thing only: racism! According to this convention, it must be that, over the half-century that ended in 2017, white workers in America were victims of black racism.
Of course, racism is not here a genuine explanation. And racism when used, as it too often is, as an ‘explanation’ for such statistical differences between whites and black, is utterly inappropriate.
Adult, informed, and open minds, when seeking to understand and explain social phenomena, do not ignore preferences and motives. But nor do these minds stop – as children’s minds stop – at preferences and motives, or refuse to consider that other causes might dominate and even utterly swamp preferences and motives. ‘Progressives” minds, alas, typically behave childishly.
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Pictured above are Phil Gramm and my dissertation director Bob Ekelund.