Reparations: Theoretical Failure

Stephen Kershnar

Why Reparation for Slavery is a Bad Idea

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

April 15, 2019

            Leading Democratic Presidential candidates support reparations for slavery or a commission to study reparations. This includes Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Julian Castro, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

            The argument for reparations is that if the government unjustly harmed someone, then it should pay them compensation. Since the U.S. government unjustly harmed current American blacks, it owes them compensation. The underlying notion is that slavery, Jim Crow laws, violence, discrimination, and hatred harmed current black people by denying them access to education, jobs, and loans. This broke up their families, caused them psychological problems, and impoverished them.   

            There are several objections to this argument. Historic injustices did not harm current blacks because it led to their creation. This objection rests on two assumptions. First, something that causes someone to come into existence doesn’t harm him. This is particularly clear if he has a good life. By analogy, a mother who creates someone doesn’t harm him if he has a good life as opposed to no life at all. Second, past injustices led to the creation of current blacks. Slavery, early Jim Crow laws, racial exclusion, and so on affected which black men and women reproduced with each other. If they had reproduced with other people, they would have had different children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and so on. As a result, current American blacks would not have existed.   

            Even if past injustices did not lead to the creation of current blacks, there is a further problem in figuring out how much compensation is owed. In tort law, compensation aims to put the victim in as good a position as he would have been in had the injustice to him not occurred. In the case of reparations, roughly, this involves figuring out how well American blacks would be doing had slavery not occurred. But if slavery had not occurred, American blacks would be living in Africa. Africa is poorer, more violent, and less free than America. As a result, American blacks would be much worse off had slavery not occurred. If slavery affected current blacks in a relevant way, then, it benefitted them.  

 

In figuring out how much compensation would be owed, another problem arises. American blacks are roughly 25% white. If one’s genetics or ancestry are essential to him, there is no world in which current black people don’t have white ancestors. Yet the scenario in which a quarter of blacks’ ancestors were white but racial oppression didn’t occur is so different from the real world that there is no way to figure out how well blacks would be doing but for slavery and related injustices.

Compensation gets further reduced if a victim’s suffering results in part from her own poor choices. This is true of some American blacks. Writing for the Brookings Institute, Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins point out that an American is unlikely to be poor if she graduates from high school, has children in wedlock and after age 20, and lives in a household in which someone has a full-time job. Also, according to a 2015 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, the average black high school 12th grader reads at the same level as the average 8^th grade white student. In inner city public schools, more than 90% of black high school seniors are not at grade level in math and more than 80% are not at this level in reading. If some of this poverty and poor performance is due to poor choices rather than past injustice, it is even more difficult to figure out how much money is owed.  

            For the above reasons, then, past injustices did not harm current blacks and, even if it did, the amount of compensation owed is nearly impossible to figure out. Still, it might be argued that reparations are owed because blacks have been denied inheritance. The case for reparations would then rest on the idea that the government owed money to slaves and victims of early Jim Crow oppression and their descendants inherited this claim to the money. Alternatively, compensation might still be owed to past blacks. Because they are no longer around, the debt can best be paid by giving their money to their descendants.

The sum descendants are owed would have increased astronomically because of interest (or investment), inflation, and compounding. Given these factors, each slave’s claim would today be worth at least a million dollars today and perhaps a lot more. 

            The notion of stolen inheritance, though, has its own problems. Again, the amount the government would owe to descendants is nearly impossible to figure out. Some injustices were performed by the federal government, some by state or local governments, and some by private parties. It is incredibly hard, if not impossible, to divvy up who did what. The problem gets worse because harms that result from omission do not warrant as much compensation as harms that occur from commission. To see this, consider a case in which a cowardly bystander watches a woman get assaulted by a motorcycle club, but does not call the police or take other preventive action. Because he does not contribute to the attack, he does not owe compensation. In many cases, the federal government acted more like the cowardly bystander than the attackers because it permitted other groups to commit atrocities rather than committing them itself.

Also, once the government gets into the business of paying off inherited claims for past injustice (consider, for example, its Central and South American adventures), the number of claims would be staggering.

            In short, reparations for slavery is a bad idea. Slavery and historic injustices didn’t harm current blacks. If reparations are owed, they are owed as inheritance. Even if inheritance is owed, and this is unclear, the federal government would likely owe only a small portion of it.

What Explains the Outrage in the University Admissions Scandal

Stephen Kershnar

The University Admissions Scandal

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

April 1, 2019

The recent admissions scandal involved at least 50 people paying admissions guru Rick Singer more than $25 million dollars to get their children into elite colleges. Singer pled guilty to numerous felonies.    

Singer used two methods. First, he helped parents cheat on the SAT and ACT tests by paying people to take the test for their kids or paying a proctor to change their answers. Second, he bribed athletic coaches and staff to label kids as accomplished athletes when they were not.

Athletic staff can greenlight athletes’ applications even when academically weaker than other applicants. Singer allegedly bribed Georgetown’s tennis coach ($950,000), Stanford’s sailing coach ($270,000), USC’s women’s soccer coaches and athletic director ($1.3 million), UCLA’s men’s soccer coaches, University of Texas men’s tennis coach ($100,000), Wake Forest’s volleyball coach, and Yale’s women’s soccer coach ($400,000).

Among the celebrities ensnared in the scandal were C-list celebrities such as Full House’s Lori Loughlin and Desperate Housewives’ Felicity Huffman along with a number of CEOs, investors, and elite professionals. The scandal’s tentacles reached into A-list schools such as Berkeley, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale.

It’s hard to see why people are so outraged by the shenanigans. The outrage might be explained by theft of the university’s money, sympathy for students who were excluded or by the fact that, once again, the elites gamed the system or turned out to hypocrites.

The parents stealing from the universities’ overflowing coffers can’t explain the outrage. Far more money is wasted on silly things like diversity fiefdoms.

The university admissions system has long focused on things other than academic ability (or, perhaps, aptitude). Many students who have much less academic ability than other applicants are let in via affirmative action, athletics, legacy (a parent went to the school), or donation. At the big three military academies, students get admitted in part via dubious congressional nominations or after attending the academies’ even more dubious preparatory high schools. At West Point, students even get an admissions break if their parents won various medals. Despite all of this being well-known, most people didn’t get their panties in a twist over it. This was true even when the Ivies engaged in naked race discrimination against Asian-Americans.   

           

Writing in The New Republic, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out that no more than 10% of Harvard’s entering class is chosen on purely academic grounds. There is no evidence that I can find that shows that non-academic admissions categories, other than grit, are better than academic categories at predicting success at the university or later in life. Since IQ scores correlate noticeably with academic and career success, it would be surprising if there were such evidence.

Nor does outrage at the elites gaming the system explain the outrage. It is well-known that these schools favor legacy and children of bigtime donors. They also favor students who are elite in rich-kid sports such as crew, polo, sailing, and squash. Why does anyone care whether Stanford gets the best high school sailors or rather pretend sailors? On a side note, I don’t see why schools that focus on knowledge-based excellence spend on these sports any more than they would spend on bowling, jiu-jitsu, and rodeo teams.

Americans couldn’t have been surprised that some, and perhaps many, of the elites are hypocrites about their children’s education. The recently exposed Russia hoax involved numerous felonies, corruption, and coordinated misinformation campaigns by leading figures in the CIA, DOJ, FBI, NSA, and media. Why would anyone be surprised that this class included people who would bribe, cheat, and lie to get what’s best for their children? This is the same class of people who are hell bent for leather to flood the country with poor and uneducated illegal aliens while making sure that their precious children do not go to school with, live near, or socialize with aliens’ children. In any case, hypocrisy is a minor sin and not confined to the elites.

What’s likely going on here is that people are fed up with this country’s elites and this is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Consider, for example, the corruption that characterized the housing bubble, Russia Hoax, Uranium One, weapons of mass destruction, etc. The powerful seem immune to the rules that apply to the rest of us.    

The criteria that universities should use to admit students should depend on their purpose. State universities should promote their citizens’ aggregate interest and this is best achieved by focusing on, and only on, academic merit. This is because such factors predict success in college and afterward better than the smorgasbord of other factors, whether considered individually or together. State legislators should require flagship schools such as Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Texas to admit students solely on the basis of academic ability. This is likely best achieved by ranking students on the basis of a score that is no more than a weighted sum of their high school GPA and standardized test score (IQ, SAT, or ACT). Perhaps the score should also incorporate two other factors: grit (willingness to work hard and stay focused) and achievement (for example, advanced placement scores). Factors such as activities, college essays, diversity, hardship, interviews, leadership, recommendations, sports, and volunteer work should be dropped and most of the admissions staff should be replaced with a computer program.

Elite private universities should be free to admit students on whatever basis they want. However, if they continue to use affirmative action, athletics, donation, legacy, and other intangibles in deciding whom to let in, the government should disentangle itself from them in the same way that it should do so with regard to religious schools and private country clubs. This can be done by ceasing to fund or regulate them. The scientific research they do is valuable, but it can be kept separate from the education they provide to students or transferred to private industries or universities with respectable practices.