Negro na América: Glenn Loury Dá uma Aula de Bom Senso

 Excelente entrevista do notável economista negro de Brown sobre os negros americanos: Genetic arguments are off the table, and I’m not making one here. There are, however, huge cultural disparities between these populations—how the children are raised, what things are valued in the community, what aspirations are embraced, how hard do people work, how do they deal with their setbacks, and so on. Are they worried about disappointing their parents? Are the parents supervising their behavior to ensure that they apply themselves in ways that maximize the chance of developing their talents? These factors are vastly different between groups within the United States and, I expect, within any society. People who say that every disparity is an evidence of historical wrong are ignoring the differences between these human populations.

You can try to eliminate the achievement differences, but you can only do it by stifling and extirpating the behavioral patterns that produce the differences in the first place. And when you do that, you’re on a slippery slope to tyranny. You’re telling the parents who want to devote all their available income to child development that they can’t send the kid to a special school or hire a tutor. You’re saying that kids who want to spend eight hours a day studying instead of four hours a day studying somehow have to be prevented from doing that. What you’re going to have at the end of the day is tyranny.