IN THE MAGAZINES
Morton, Brian & Levinson, Mark
Stephen Jay Gould: "Darwinism Defined." Discover, January 1987. Readers of the New York Times discovered last fall that Irving Kristol is not only an important philosopher, economist, political...
...Krashevski argues that, in fact, the labor force in the 1980s is changing in ways that should favor much lower unemployment rates...
...But the shifting composition of the work force toward more unemploymentprone workers—the entrance of baby boomers into the job market, the steady increase in the number of working women—presumably made it more difficult to achieve full employment without simultaneously increasing inflation...
...Williams goes so far as to say that mandatory integration, because it uses the law to change the racial composition of schools, "has more in common with segregation than it does with desegregation...
...In the 1980s the unemployment rate for women is lower than for the rest of the labor force...
...29492...
...W]hat challenge can the facts of nature pose to our own decisions about the moral value of our lives...
...the very concept of evolution [is] questionable...
...President Reagan has made similar claims...
...But why does he assume that this expenditure pains me more than it would pain me to live in a society that lets people starve...
...The result is a series of unemployment rates adjusted to remove the effects of changes in the demographic composition of the labor force...
...The real problem can't be so easily disposed of...
...Walter Williams: "Civil Rightsspeak...
...One of the more insidious ideas emanating from economics departments in recent years is the notion that 6 or 7 percent unemployment (between seven and eight million people) is "full employment...
...are persuaded that...
...The right of every child to an education, for example, "requires government, through taxation, to reduce another's right to his earnings," and therefore, in Williams's terms, "diminishes the rights of others...
...Evolution should be taught "more cautiously," for it is the "pseudoscientific dogmatism" of today's textbooks "that has provoked the current religious reaction...
...Any such system will involve certain "disadvantages" and social tensions...
...If I have a right to housing even though I can't afford it, others must have an obligation to provide me with housing...
...258...
...Affirmative action programs are therefore morally illegitimate...
...Those who contend that many U.S...
...The truth is that black people in America are still massively disenfranchised...
...It could hardly be otherwise...
...Civil rights advocates believe that "segregation" still exists in America, and seek to eliminate it...
...Some believe that change takes place gradually, some believe that it happens in quantum jumps...
...We seem light years from 1969 when, in the context of 3.5 percent unemployment, an article in the Brookings Papers was titled, "Why is the Unemployment Rate So High at Full Employment...
...By contrast, we cannot properly speak of the right to housing, food, or work, for these aren't rights at all, but "wishes...
...Many of our rights involve restrictions on the wealth or freedom of some individuals...
...It can ensure "that rights to voluntary exchanges are not infringed on by third parties...
...After peaking in the late 1970s, the share of 16- 24-year-olds in the labor force is the same as it was in the mid-1960s...
...Between World War II and 1980 the only time unemployment rose above 7 percent was in the deep recession of the mid 1970s...
...Williams, a neoconservative economist, argues that the very term "civil rights" is routinely misused...
...Science can no more answer the questions of how we ought to live than religion can decree the age of the earth...
...In William's terms I incur a "disadvantage" when I pay taxes to help finance the food stamp program...
...Richard Krashevski: "What is Full Employment...
...Slavery is the greatest example of failing to protect rights...
...In the 1960s it was possible to achieve 4 percent unemployment without inflation...
...Would God—for some inscrutable reason, or merely to test our faith—create five species, one after the other . . . to mimic a continuous trend of evolutionary change...
...As the graph shows, each successive business cycle has been characterized by higher unemployment rates...
...256 He establishes one linguistic truth beyond doubt...
...But this makes schools no different from "ice hockey games, churches, professional bowling, classical music concerts," etc...
...Finally, Gould considers Kristol's claim that "the current teaching of evolution in our public schools does indeed have an ideological bias against religious belief...
...Just because different ethnic groups are not represented proportionately in a given activity, it does not follow that discrimination is involved...
...He promises to establish "precise and operationally useful word definitions" so that we can "address the issues properly," but the definitions he ends up with are merely eccentric...
...Available from the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C...
...Krashevski concludes: Demographic weighting can account for only a small part of the worsening jobless of the 1970s and the early 1980s, and provides no explanation for unemployment's two-year standstill at 7 percent...
...It is neither "natural" nor "inevitable...
...schools are "de facto segregated" are really saying that they lack a "representative racial mix...
...After more than three years of economic recovery the unemployment rate hovers around 7 percent...
...After untangling one particularly unruly knot of misconceptions, Gould comments, "Our genealogy hasn't been threatened, but my geniality has almost succumbed...
...From his discussion of rights and wishes, Williams draws this moral: government "cannot create an advantage for one American without creating a disadvantage for another...
...and Gould more or less dismisses it as a non sequitur...
...Consider his discussion of rights and "wishes...
...The official unemployment rate, it should be noted, seriously understates the extent of unemployment...
...In other words, the 'right' to housing requires government, through taxation, to reduce another's right to his earnings...
...Available from 80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, N.Y...
...As Herman Schwartz has written, "only 3 percent of the nation's lawyers and doctors are black and only 4 percent of its managers, but over 50 percent 257 of its maids and garbage collectors...
...Gould is a marvel...
...Williams is dreaming if he thinks society could be organized in any other fashion...
...Kristol revealed that though evolution is "usually taught as an established scientific truth, it is nothing of the sort...
...Readers of the New York Times discovered last fall that Irving Kristol is not only an important philosopher, economist, political scientist, and historian, but a biologist, too...
...This is true, but it isn't serious...
...The case for affirmative action can't be refuted by pointing, as he does, to the imbalance between blacks and Jews in major league baseball: I know of no civil rights advocate who wants to bench Dwight Gooden and replace him with Elie Wiesel...
...The argument runs something like this...
...It is a good question, to which now we have to add, "Why Does the Definition of Full Employment Keep Changing...
...Indeed, it has been precisely that duty which government has historically failed to fulfill for black Americans...
...In an op–ed piece titled "Room for Darwin and the Bible," Kristol criticized scientific textbooks for their foolish "dogmatism" about evolutionary theory...
...No one believes that the ethnic composition of every profession should mirror that of the country as a whole...
...The civil rights debate is serious...
...Kristol believes that "the religious fundamentalists are not far off the mark when they assert that evolution, as generally taught, has an unwarranted anti-religious edge to it...
...Krashevski calculates what the annual unemployment rates would have been over the past two decades if the labor force share of 12 major demographic categories (based on age, race, and sex) had remained exactly the same as in 1965...
...Gould argues that Kristol is confusing two different aspects of evolution...
...New Perspectives, Winter/Spring 1986...
...The class of rights that Williams tries to define out of existence is recognized by everyone in our society...
...Commission on Civil Rights has become a contradiction in terms...
...The "real" unemployment rate, which includes involuntary part-time workers and discouraged workers, is almost double...
...A true right—such as freedom of speech or religion—is "an entitlement that all Americans hold simultaneously without contradiction...
...It doesn't, of course—it never does...
...Are these "statistical disparities" also the result of differing "preferences...
...Most biologists "assume that the earth's species were not created by divine command . . . [but] they agree on little else...
...Gould gives examples from human, plant, and animal life to show that "the fact of evolution is as well established as anything in science (as secure as the revolution of the earth about the sun...
...What alternative can we suggest to evolution...
...Consider the evidence for human evolution in Africa...
...In the age of Reagan, the U.S...
...and "many younger biologists...
...It's improper to speak of segregation in today's U.S., for the simple reason that the legal structures of segregation have been abolished...
...Why is this man clowning around...
...Does Williams define the right to an education as a mere "wish...
...Stephen Jay Gould, who also knows a bit about biology, has a different view...
...but this belief, according to Williams, rests on another linguistic error...
...it's disappointing to see Williams try to sneak past the problem by talking about baseball and bowling...
...As Michael Walzer has written, every state in history has been in some sense a welfare state—has featured a system of communal provisions...
...10504...
...In any case, the claim that "government cannot create an advantage for one American without creating a disadvantage for another" rests on an arbitrary idea of advantages...
...With wit, with modesty, with literary grace, he puts across serious scientific ideas in language even I can understand...
...It should be clear that Williams is eminently qualified to speak about "linguistic sleights of hand...
...We don't see electrons, or quarks, or chemical bonds, any more than we see small dinosaurs evolve into birds, or India crash into Asia to raise the Himalayas...
...Thus, when the unemployment rate was 6.7 percent, Herbert Stein, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and currently at the American Enterprise Institute, asserted "the nation is now at full employment...
...Theories as to the causes of evolution are in dispute, and have been ever since Darwin...
...Uncomfortable news to both major parties, who perhaps thought they had a good excuse for their inaction on unemployment...
...What I can't figure out is how he does it...
...Thus, the increasing number of women in the labor force has reduced the unemployment rate...
...Contrary to what we learn in high school, science does not always involve controlled laboratory experiments yielding replicable results: many scientific problems simply can't be approached that way...
...Challenge, November/December 1986...
...Williams's comments about discrimination are on the same level...
...Writing in the journal of the U.S...
...But the reality of evolution itself—the development of forms of life in "structurally intermediate stages"—is accepted by all biologists...
...Can government do anything at all to further civil rights...
...In Gould's view, Kristol's belief that evolution is still in doubt stems from a misunderstanding of scientific method...
...My right to speak does not infringe on any of your rights...
...In this analysis, slavery was an evil chiefly because it impeded the orderly functioning of the free market...
...It has too many lacunae...
...Unemployment is caused by slow economic growth and inadequate trade, industrial, and labormarket policies...
...Kristol provides no evidence for this claim...
...Though elementary- and high-school textbooks give no hint of this, biologists are bitterly divided about the idea of evolution...
...Whatever plausibility this argument once had has been discredited by Richard Krashevski, an AFL-CIO economist...
...We have a temporal sequence displaying clear trends in a suite of features, including threefold increase of brain size and corresponding decrease of jaws and teeth...
...Direct vision isn't the only, or even the usual, method of inference in science...
...Even if the means favored by civil rights advocates were not illegitimate, the ends they seek would still be misplaced...
...Commission on Civil Rights, Williams sets out to expose the "linguistic sleights of hand" that have confused the civil rights debate...
...Krashevski's analysis demonstrates that by 1985, changes in the work force account for only 0.1 percent of the rise in the unemployment rate...
...One can't, for instance, speak of any of America's schools as segregated, "since there are no longer legal barriers to keep blacks who reside in a school district from attending its schools...
...Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's," Gould writes, "but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome...
...A little like import quotas, but even worse...
...The 'right' of one diminishes the right of another...
...Does he want to do away with it...
...He argues that many occupational differences among ethnic groups are the result not of discrimination but of differing "preferences...
...Not long ago this level of unemployment would have been seen as a sign of recession...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
