Knowledge And Decisions

A major nonmoral, nonsocietal variable that is routinely ignored is age. As already noted, median age differences among American ethnic groups range up to decades. The median age of American Indians is only one-half that of Polish-Americans (twenty versus forty); the median age of blacks is a little less than half that of Jews (twenty-two versus forty-six).¹¹⁰ These differences affect everything from incomes and occupations to unemployment rates, fertility rates, crime rates, and death rates.¹¹¹ For example, Cuban-Americans average a higher income than Mexican-Americans, who are a decade younger, but in the same age brackets it is the Mexican-Americans who earn more.¹¹² Any attempt to explain gross income differences between these two groups in terms of either discrimination by “society” or by their respective “ability” runs into the hard fact that the gross difference is the opposite of the age-specific difference. Similarly, blacks have lower death rates than whites, but this in no way indicates better living conditions or medical care for blacks, much less any ability of blacks to discriminate against whites in these respects. Blacks are simply younger than whites, and younger people have lower death rates than older people; on an age-specific basis, whites have lower death rates than blacks.¹¹³ Age differences also overshadow racial differences in unemployment rates: Blacks in the twenty-four to fourty-four-year-old brackets have consistently had lower unemployment rates than whites under twenty — every year for decades,¹¹⁴ even though whites as a group have lower unemployment rates than blacks as a group. In short, the impact of age on statistical data is so great that to compare groups without taking age into account is like comparing apples and oranges. Yet “affirmative action” comparisons of group “representation” almost invariably ignore age differences.

Ages are important in another way related to “affirmative action” data. When prospective equality of opportunity is measured by retrospective results during a period of increasing opportunity, the gross statistics lump together different age-cohorts subject to the increased opportunities for varying proportions of their work careers — ranging from zero to one hundred percent. Older people whose careers began when there was less opportunity — or even total exclusion from some occupations — will have correspondingly less “human capital” with which to compete with their age peers in the general population. Younger members of the same ethnic group will be less handicapped in this respect, if opportunities have been increasing. Even if the ideal of equal prospective opportunity were achieved, retrospective data would not show statistical parity until decades later, after all members of the older age-cohorts had passed from the scene. This is more than a theoretical point. Black income as a percentage of white income is progressively higher in younger age brackets,¹¹⁵ and while the rate of return on education is lower for blacks than whites, the rate of return is slightly higher for younger blacks than for their white counterparts.¹¹⁶

Locational differences are another nonmoral variable having little relationship to the intentions of “society” but having a substantial impact on statistical data. No American ethnic group has income as low as one-half the national average, but two-to-one differences in incomes from one location to another exist, even within the same ethnic group. The 1970 census showed the average family income of blacks in New York State to be more than double the average family income of blacks in Mississippi. The average income of American Indians in Chicago, Detroit, or New York City was more than double what it is on most reservations. Mexican-Americans in the metropolitan area of Detroit earn more than double the income of Mexican-Americans in the metropolitan areas of Laredo or Brownsville, Texas.¹¹⁷ Given the size and regional diversity of the United States, the geographic distribution of ethnic groups affects the statistical averages that are often blithely quoted, with as little regard for geographic as for demographic differences. Each ethnic group has its own geographic distribution pattern, reflecting a variety of historical and cultural influences,¹¹⁸ and having little to do with the intentions of “society.” Some indication of the combined influence of age and location is that young black working couples living outside the South had by 1971 achieved the same income as their white counterparts in the same region.¹¹⁹ The disbelief and even denunciation which greeted publication of this fact indicates something of the vested interests that have built up in a different vision of the social process — and in programs built on that vision. Subsequent studies have reinforced the finding of income parity among these black and white younger age-cohorts with similar cultural characteristics.¹²⁰