Thomas Sowell
Investor’s Business Daily
4/8/2010
The blatant and undeniable fact that different racial, ethnic and other groups have had radically different economic and intellectual achievements for centuries, in countries around the world, has led to widely varying theories and widely varying political and other reactions.
A hundred years ago, during the Progressive era in the United States, the dominant explanation was that different genes made different races either more capable or less capable. Similar views prevailed on the other side of the Atlantic, among people on both the left and the right, many of whom urged eugenics, in order to prevent “inferior” groups from reproducing.
The problem with this explanation was that it ignored the great changes in the relative positions of races over the centuries. In medieval times, Europeans could not match the achievements of the Chinese, but in later centuries their relative positions reversed — and there was no evidence of any fundamental change in the genes of either the Chinese or the Europeans…
…Causation and morality are two different things, however much they get confused today by politicians and the media.
Read the entire article at IBD.
