Dumb Thinking Part 1: Averages Don't Apply to Individuals

A lot of public discussion on various issues is logically faulty due to thinking mistakes. This is not a right/left, blue state/red state issue. Both sides are guilty. I'll describe them in a series of posts. The first: Averages don't apply to individuals.

Havard University President Lawrance Summers recently created a controversy with comments suggesting that the reason most science and math professors are men was because of innate differences between men and women.

The people upset Lawrence Summers are forgetting that statistical averages don't apply to individuals. It is a statistical fact that men are on average a few inches taller than women. But that information isn't useful if you're talking about actor Danny DeVito and actress Gina Davis. Recent research has shown that boys tend to excel at math and spatial skills, while girls score higher in language skills. But just as there are tall women and short men, there are women who excel in math, engineering and science, and men who excel in language. If most science professors are men, and most English professors are women, it's not discrimination or anybody's fault. I'm surprised that Summers' comments are controversial.

Another example is the continuing battles over affirmative action programs to correct past racial injustices. These programs are justified by the generization that minorities are "disadvantaged" and need an extra boost to achaive eqaulity. This puts to the supporters of affirmative action into the uncomfortable position of supporting racial discrimination (treating people differently according to race) to avoid racism. They claim that to not discriminate according to race (by treating people of different races equally) is actually racist!

While it is true that on average, white people continue to have higher incomes that black people, at this point in American history plenty of well-educated black people earning good incomes, and there are still lots of poorly educated, low incoming white people. And the fact that most of the top one percent wealthiest people are white is of little help to poor white people.

And as for access to education, it is true that some segments of society have easier acccess to higher education than other segments. But are these differences based on race? I don't think so. I have a hard time believing that a young black person whose parents hold graduate degrees and earn a six-figure income would have a difficult time getting into a university. He or she would certainly would find getting into a good colledge easier than a white young person raised in a poor single parent household who has no relatives who made it past high school.

I am not against affirmative action programs that make college admission easier for people who have the odds stacked against them. But base the programs on factors that actually stack the odds against the applicant. The affirmative action program would weigh factors such as

1. The applicant comes from a low income household, especially one led by a single parent.
2. The applicant would be the first in his or her family to attend college.
3. The applicant comes from a low-income community where relatively few people attend college.

Such a program would certainly enable many black and other minority students who otherwise not have such an opportunity. But it would not discriminate according to race against white applicants who are disadvantaged by the same factors.