Preferential Policies

...As for the contention that racial preference benefits society as a whole, Sowell counters that such policies "often cost the losers more than is gained by the gainers," citing cases where unprepared university students, having gained admission over more qualified applicants, nevertheless fail to graduate, with both groups suffering...

...El or an American to justify affirmative action as a means of guaranteeing employment for the unqualified would fatally undermine racial preference's political support...

...Other countries do not make the fictional claim that no one is really penalized by preference, or that it entails no lowering of standards...

...During the 1950s, policies were initiated to correct an "overrepresentation" of Tamils among the business and professional classes...

...In addition, the ambiguity—or, if you prefer, dishonesty—in America'simplementation of affirmative action has blunted its impact...

...His work has spawned a methodological revolution in the way economists and other scholars think about government and governmental activity...

...He cites the University of California at Berkeley, where, in an attempt to create the "gorgeous mosaic" favored by black politicians like Jesse Jackson, quotas have produced a student body closely reflecting the ethnic composition of California's high school graduating classes...

...The predictable results have been to stigmatize black professionals and academics as having achieved their position through an affirmative action track...

...PPa Policies leaves one with a feeling of vague depression, for the advocates of preference seem well on the way to winning in the arena of politics...

...Sowell reminds us that during the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the bill's supporters went to great lengths to deny that the fair employment clause would bring about reverse discrimination, as the measure's Dixiecrat opponents charged...

...He demonstrates how easily demands for "justice' by aggrieved groups degenerate into acts of oppression against other groups, citing Afrikaners' treatment of South African blacks, and Irish oppression of blacks in the U.S...

...It would not be uncharitable to remind the black leadership that these are themes Thomas Sowell has been sounding for many years...

...In subsequent debates over civil rights bills, however, Congress declined to include anti-reverse discrimination language...

...Meanwhile, affirmative action marches on, embracing, at the university level alone, student ad-missions, hiring and promotion of faculty and administrators, grading policies, and demands for a "multicultural" curriculum...

...At first modest in scope, the Sri Lankan equivalent of affirmative action soon evolved into outright quotas in university admissions...

...It gives a balanced and perceptive account of the 19th-century debates over central banking versus free banking through an historical survey of the arguments in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States...

...I know few works which convey a more profound impression of the logical unity and the power of modern economic analysis...

...292 pages...

...Nonetheless, demands for equal results have already brought about a lowering of standards in university admissions and job tests, measures which, in typical American fashion, are rationalized on the grounds that the tests were "culturally biased" or "not relevant...

...Another is the dominant role played by the private sector in providing professional jobs, in contrast to Third World countries, where the state is the primary source of employment for newly educated elites, thus facilitating the enforcement of preferential programs...

...Name Address City State/Zip Mail to: Liberty Fund, Inc...

...While some black professionals continue to see affirmative action as a crucial protective instrument, others, no doubt, are concerned that affirmative action is undermining their own real achievements...

...One prominent black leader has declared that "affirmative action is to blacks as Israel is to the Jews," and it would seem that the struggle for preferential policies stands today as the raison (Mire of the traditional civil rights organization...

...Hardcover $14.00 0-913966-64-9 Paperback $ 6.50 0-913966-65-7 LibertyPress, 1979 THE THEO Y OF MONEY AND C EDIT By Ludwig von Mises Foreword by Murray N. Rothbard Introduction by Lionel Robbins "In continental circles it has long been regarded as the standard textbook on the subject...

...There is no more insightful history of American banking than its two chapters on the United States...

...Justified as temporary expedients, preferential policies almost always become permanent features of the political landscape...

...Narrowly focused at first, they usually expand to embrace more and more favored groups and a larger part of the economic life...

...In Nigeria, preferential policies that penalized the successful Ibo tribe, encompassing education, jobs, and even land ownership, led to a horrifying civil war in 1966, in which the Ibos attempted to form a separate state...

...On an intellectual level, Sowell, along with other critics of affirmative action like Nathan Glazer and Shelby Steele, has scored what amounts to a walkover...

...Although a number of liberal intellectuals have joined the neoconservatives in questioning the wisdom of race-based social policy, no congressional liberal, and very few moderates, would dare denounce the concept of preferential treatment, as Hubert Humphrey did in 1964...

...thus the purpose of the country's policies has been the elevation of the majority Malays...

...17.95 Arch Puddington 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 ple from India have higher incomes in the United States than the incomes of white Americans...

...The defenders of racial preference, rather than confront the arguments for a racially neutral policy, have been reduced to the tawdry ploy of labeling Sowell and those blacks who share his views as craven apologists for white male domination, or even dismissing Sowell as a "crackpot," as one reviewer recently did...

...A Malaysian writer justifies preference on the blunt ground that Malays need protection against the "hardened and resourceful" Chinese, a Nigerian complains of the "tyranny of skills," while an Indian asks whether "we [are] not entitled to jobs just because we are not as qualified...

...The deplorable condition of black-white relations, he contends, is the entirely predictable result of twenty years of affirmative action, championed, though certainly not exclusively, by America's universities...

...In other societies, such as India and the United States, the objective has been the economic advancement of less prosperous minority groups, the untouchables Arch Puddington works for Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty in New York...

...For many Americans, insults, obscenities, and occasional violence, directed primarily at black students attending universities with liberal reputations, are a source of shame—and mystery...

...Sowell has earned considerable distinction for his writings on American race relations, along with the undying enmity of the civil rights claque...

...All orders must be prepaid in U.S...

...On the subject of black hostility towards Asian shopkeepers in American inner cities, he observes that the arguments made against the Asians "are the same as those made against the Jewish businessmen in the same ghettoes a generation earlier or against the Chinese businessmen in Southeast Asia, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, or small retailing minority groups in countries all over the world...

...Some observers place the blame squarely on the former President's shoulders, arguing, as the chancellor of the City University of New York has, that Reagan's "budget cuts" and his "elevation of unbridled greed to the status of virtue" stimulated an atmosphere of intolerance, ultra-competitiveness, and racial contempt...

...The current study is not likely to alter the judgement of his admirers or his detractors...

...To the claim that it can be controlled, Sowell offers case after case in which "temporary" remedies have been made permanent and preferential policies extended to groups "successively further removed from the original rationale of the policy...

...The ever-worsening problems of inner city youth have elicited a new interest in the importance of individual responsibility, and some have even turned their attention to the question of public welfare's effect on the work ethic...

...Thomas Sowell, a graduate of a black university, a distinguished economist of the Hoover Institution, and an authority on the politics of race, has a much more convincing, if obvious, explanation...

...The Census Bureau reports an increase in the number of black-owned businesses, and blacks continue to enter the professions in substantial numbers...

...Evidence of the psychological damage of affirmative action hiring tends toward the speculative and anecdotal, but Sowell provides hard proof that quota policies in university admissions can be a source of misery for even the intended beneficiaries...

...He notes that "an Indian businessman, entering the United States in the late twentieth century, was legally entitled to preferential benefits as an Asian, even though peoPREFERENTIAL POLICIES: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Thomas Sowell/William Morrow & Co./221 pp...

...In one sense, these policies "worked," as Sinhalese educational and economic levels eventually overtook those of the Tamils...

...It is indispensable background reading for anyone interested in the current debate over monetary institutions...

...The adoption of "affirmative grading"—artificially raising black students' scores—on a number of elite campuses cannot help but heighten racial tensions...

...For blacks, the consequence has been a failure-to-graduate rate of 70 percent...

...Preface, index...

...In Malaysia, a Chinese minority has long enjoyed economic dominance...

...TITLES F OM LIBERTY FUND ANKING New THE RATIONAL OF CENTRAL by Vera C. Smith Foreword by Leland B. Yeager "The Rationale of Central Banking is justly renowned for its excellent critical survey of the intellectual debate concerning central banking, and the alternative of free banking...

...Milton Friedman, Hoover Institution 227 pages...

...Department EE101 7440 North Shadeland Avenue Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 45...

...The United States, of course, has not experienced the degree of racial strife that has plagued various Asian and African societies...

...N owhere has preference been more disastrous than in Sri Lanka...

...Foreword, preface, appendix, bibliography, index...

...Vera Smith's book remains an authoritative and accurate summary of the theoretical arguments for and against free banking, a subject that has recently received renewed attention...

...Quite difficult to obtain until now, Vera Smith's well-known work has nonetheless become the standard reference on the debates over central banking versus free banking...

...One reason, obviously, is the much higher level of prosperity in this society...

...Hardcover $14.00 Paperback $ 6.50 Theory of Money and Credit Hardcover $30.00 Paperback $10.00 Subtotal ease allow approximately 4 weeks for delivery...

...Lionel Robbins 544 pages...

...Foreword, introduction, prefaces to earlier editions, appendices, index...

...dollars...

...Finally, they invariably contribute to racial strife, including some of the most violent recent Third World civil wars...

...By contrast, South Africa's apartheid system benefited one white group, the Afrikaners, at the expense of both the black majority and a smaller, more successful white group, the English...

...Hardcover $20.00 0-86597-086-6 Paperback $ 8.00 0-86597-087-4 LibertyPress, 1990 ALSO AVAILABLE WHAT SHOULD ECONOMISTS DO...

...Dreferential Policies is a lucid responsee to the myths and alibis served up by preferential treatment's champions...

...Hardcover $30.00 0-913966-70-3 Paperback $10.00 0-913966-71-1 LibertyClassics, 1981 Please send me: Quantity Ordered Title Edition Price Amount Rationale of Central Banking Hardcover $20.00 Paperback $ 8.00 What Should Economists Do...

...Predictable, because the backlash against racial preference conforms to a pattern well-established in Nigeria, India, Malaysia, South Africa, and elsewhere...

...On the other hand,there have been some modestly promising developments outside the realm of politics...

...By James M. Buchanan Preface by H. Geoffrey Brennan and Robert D. Tollison This volume, a collection of sixteen essays, provides relatively easy access to a wide range of work by a founder of the burgeoning subdiscipline of public choice...

...When these proved insufficiently effective, a policy called "standardization" was instituted, whereby the examination scores of Tamil applicants for university entrance were simply lowered to ensure the desired percentage of Sinhalese admissions...

...Its prose is clear and pungent...

...In India, initiatives on behalf of untouchables and other groups—including a wholesale lowering of medical school standards to accommodate low-achieving applicants—have triggered ethnic violence that shows no sign of abating...

...in the former and blacks in the latter...

...One would be able to say with confidence that Sowell has made an important contribution to the debate over affirmative action if such a debate actually existed...

...Promoted as a means of uplifting the impoverished, benefits are often limited to the best educated and most qualified—that is, those who would have succeeded under conditions of normal non-discrimination...

...Please send me a copy of your current catalogue...

...The cost, of course, has been a Tamil backlash that has led to one of the world's bloodiest and most intractable civil wars...

...The racial compositions of the societies examined by Sowell vary widely, as do the goals of their preferential policies...

...For whites and especially Asians, the result has been denial of admission to highly qualified applicants...

...Lawrence H. White, University of Georgia...

...Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...