Knowledge And Decisions

As a necessarily limited sampling of what has been called a “litany of woe and crisis,” there have been recent assertions by intellectuals that “human society is in a stage of comprehensive breakdown,”¹⁸⁹ that the United States “disintegrates,”¹⁹⁰ that the nation is “essentially evil and the evil can be exorcised only by turning the system upside down,”¹⁹¹ that “the civil rights legislation is absolutely meaningless, and it was meant to be meaningless,”¹⁹² and that “life has broken down in this country.”¹⁹³ Although intellectuals often pose as articulators of a general malaise, in fact neither the general public nor the designated “victims” share this vision of the intellectuals. Among the supposedly embittered and disenchanted youth, 90 percent describe their past life as happy and 93 percent expect their future life to be so.¹⁹⁴ From 80 to 90 percent of the supposedly alienated workers with “dehumanizing” jobs describe themselves as satisfied with their work.¹⁹⁵ Significantly, about half felt that others were dissatisfied with their work;¹⁹⁶ the intellectuals’ outpourings were not ineffective, in matters outside people’s direct experience. More blacks were satisfied than dissatisfied in such areas as work, housing, and education.¹⁹⁷ In contrast to the intellectuals’ preoccupation with “distributive justice,” there were four times as many blacks who thought that people with more ability should earn more as there were who believed in even approximate equality of earnings.¹⁹⁸ As for “women’s liberation,” fewer women than men were sympathetic to it.¹⁹⁹ For Americans as a whole, only 12 percent would like to live in another country — less than in Sweden, Holland, Brazil, or Greece, and less than half as many as in West Germany or Great Britain.²⁰⁰ Among those in foreign countries who would like to live somewhere else, the United States was either the first or second choice in Sweden, West Germany, Greece, Brazil, Finland and Uruguay.²⁰¹

Where the public differs from intellectuals, it is often taken as axiomatic that that demonstrates the misguided ignorance of the public and their need to be “educated.” However, the supposed “alienation” of workers, “black rage,” and the opinion of women are subjects on which these respective groups are themselves the experts. Moreover, insofar as there are hard data on such matters, these data almost invariably support public opinion rather than the intellectual vision. The supposedly “meaningless” civil rights revolution saw black family income double in the 1960s while white family income rose by only 69 percent,²⁰² black college enrollment almost doubled in less than a decade,²⁰³ and the number of black foremen and policemen more than doubled during the 1960s.²⁰⁴ While statisticians keep large-scale poverty alive with data limited to cash income, in-kind transfers (food stamps, housing subsidies, free medical care, etc.) have reduced it drastically in fact.²⁰⁵ The tripling of government welfare spending from 1965 to 1973 provided a total value of resources consumed by the poor in 1973 which was “enough to raise every officially poor family 30 percent above its poverty line.”²⁰⁶ Yet the official census data are based on samples in which people “are not even asked if they receive food stamps, live in public housing, or are eligible for medicaid.”²⁰⁷ Independent private researchers who count in-kind transfers find only 3 to 6 percent of the American population poor²⁰⁸ by the same standards as the government uses. One perhaps revealing statistic is that 30 percent of the families with official incomes under $3,000 have air conditioners and 29 percent have color televisions.²⁰⁹

Intellectuals almost automatically explain the misfortunes of groups in terms of victimization by elites who are rivals of intellectuals. By asserting or defining (seldom testing) misfortune as victimization, all other possible explanations are arbitrarily ruled out of order, and with them perhaps hopes of in fact remedying the misfortune. The victimhood approach also requires ignoring, suppressing, or deemphasizing successful initiatives already undertaken by the disadvantaged group or portions thereof — thereby sacrificing accumulated human capital in terms of know-how, morale, and a favorable public image of groups usually portrayed as a “problem.” In the victimization approach, intergroup statistical differences become “inequities,” though in particular cases they may be due to group differences in age, geographical distribution, or other variables with no moral implications.