It has been about a week since our last Ben Shapiro video, so I know you are getting the shakes. I spotted this excellent five-minute interview Shapiro has with Professor Thomas Sowell about his new book, Discrimination and Disparities.
Although the interview focuses on the issue of race it is relevant to the UK in that it sets out the basics of discrimination. The truth is that we discriminate all the time.
Discrimination 1: People who are very good at comparing things and making decisions accordingly. Discrimination 2: The opposite. Once you identify a person as a member of a group you discriminate against them based on their membership of a particular group and do not consider them as individuals.
Sowell points out the existence of the differences in outcomes between groups does not mean there is negative discrimination occurring against members of a particular group. Most government programmes aimed at alleviating outcomes are also bound to fail (mainly because they are based on dodgy data).
This short video really is important when considering the obsession in the UK with disparate incomes between men and women.
So far this week we have had stories saying that the BBC aims to have a 50:50 gender split among expert contributors on current affairs; the meaningless pay gap statistics are out and there is some campaign called #PayMeToo started by the usual collection of female MPs which encourages employees to interrogate their colleagues on what they earn.
All of this is stupidity, piled upon idiocy, piled upon ignorance by people who should know better.
As I said: watch the video.
