Culture Matters

with Lex Fridman

The difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome is a long-running theme for me, because it exposes a fundamental dispute between opposing camps in the debate over group disparities. Those who believe that racial equality requires proportional racial representation in all areas of life essentially misunderstand and oversimplify the origins of group differences. Mandating that, say, an incoming class at a university or partner-track hires at a law firm reflect the overall distribution of race in a given society begs the question. Why is the mandate “necessary” (I don’t really believe it is necessary) in the first place?

If your answer is “because of systemic racism,” you’re on the wrong track. As far back as my 1976 MIT dissertation, I’ve argued that alleviating inequality between groups—that is, ensuring that individuals enter markets with more or less the same opportunities, regardless of their social origin—requires intervention way before people ever fill out a college application or encounter a hiring committee. The social networks into which individuals are born will help determine which skills they acquire and how well they acquire them. If you’re raised within an environment where good grades accord you social esteem, there’s a better chance you’ll spend your free time studying than if no such social reward existed. And, on average, students who spend more time studying are going to be more successful in the college admissions process.

A progressive might point out that not everyone has the same resources to devote to nurturing their children. Wealthy parents can afford skilled tutors and all kinds of other enrichment that poor parents cannot. I agree this is a problem, and the solution is to devote more of our resources to leveling the playing field as early as possible—that is, alleviating true inequality rather than adjusting outcomes and pretending that fixes the problem. I’d be much more willing to hear arguments about wealth redistribution if that wealth was devoted to the development of infants, children, and teens rather than if it took the form of payments to adults.

Redistribution of that kind sounds like a relatively easy sell to progressive policy makers. But it isn’t, because it requires accepting that cultural differences matter, and those cultural differences can manifest in material disparities between groups. In this clip from my 2022 conversation with Lex Fridman, I explain why attempts to artificially adjust equality of outcome risk blinding us to the importance of equality of opportunity. If we want real equality, the kind Martin Luther King dreamed of, we need to take culture seriously and do something about it.

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LEX FRIDMAN: So here we are on this topic of equality in the twenty-first century. What does equality mean today? If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome, or the injustice of inequality, at which point is equality of outcome just? At which point is it unjust? Looking at our world today, and looking at inequality, how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice, and some is the way of life? So what does equality mean when we look at the world today? [Is it] different from Dr. King's speech of the basic humanity?

GLENN LOURY: I don't think King's speech—“I have a dream that one day my four little children will [live in a nation where they will not] be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—requires equality of outcome. He says his children will be judged by the content of their character. That's a conditional statement. That is, the judgment will depend upon the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

But it doesn't follow from that that whatever outcomes we consider—wealth and economic power, position within the society, representation in the various professions the various measures of social achievement—it doesn't follow from judging by the content of character and not color of skin that when we look at the end of the day at the social outcomes that they will be equal across the different groups. In fact, I think there's a contradiction in the idea that groups will be equal in all of the various social outcomes, that they will be equally successful in business, that they will be proportionately represented in the various professions, that they will have the same educational achievement, that the occupational profiles will look the same.

If they are, in fact, distinct groups with their own cultural traditions and practices, with their own ideals and norms—various immigrant populations, people coming to the United States of America from all corners of the world, the descendants of the African slaves, the black Americans here today, who are ourselves various with different origins and so on, the different religious practices and commitments that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever. However, we parcel up the total population into the various groups, these groups are themselves different from one another. They have different norms within their own cultural practice.

How would we expect—if, in fact, we recognize that the groups are different from one another—that in a world that is fair, they would all come out equally represented in every undertaking? They're not equally represented. And that fact, I'm arguing, is in and of itself insufficient to justify the conclusion that they're not somehow being fairly treated. Fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes in a world in which the populations in question are themselves different with respect to their culture, their practices, their norms, their traditions, their beliefs, their ideals and so on. And the fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs, cultural orientations, and ideals have consequences in terms of their different social outcomes. I just think it's a mistake that people are making when they think fairness of treatment implies equality of outcomes. It does not.

We're speaking now in the midst of the National Basketball Association's playoffs. I confess to being a Boston Celtics fan. It's a very good team, and I'm excited about my Celtics. We defeated the Brooklyn Nets, we defeated Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and company in a playoff series. We whipped them, and we're on our way to the Eastern Conference finals, and we're on our way to the NBA finals. If I were a betting man, I put down a few bucks that the Boston Celtics, underrated as we are, have a very good chance of winning the NBA finals.

Okay, so that's the NBA. That's the National Basketball Association. I'm a sports fan. I like basketball.

Slightly biased prediction, but yes.

Yeah, it is somewhat biased. All I'm saying is, if you take a look at who the star players are in the National Basketball Association, you're gonna find that there's some Eastern Europeans. There's some really good basketball players coming out of Eastern Europe, and more power to them. And there are a lot of African Americans. We're overrepresented. There are not that many Jews, as far as I know. No offense intended there, Lex. But the NBA is not equally representative of all of the different populations in the United States.

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Now, we could go into the reasons why, but I'm just saying the process by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair. If you can play, you can get on the court. All they're looking for is people who can play. I think something like that is true in many different venues. I expect if you're a really good technical engineer, companies are going to employ you. And if you can make money, they're gonna advance you, and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession. I expect that the people who are engaged in financial transactions, who are actually making bets on the market, by and large, are the people who are good at that activity. And if you're good at that activity in this world, in this modern world, you're gonna rise to the top.

I'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination. Of course, there are of many different sorts. But I'm saying, let's look at who's actually writing code, let's look at who's actually trading bonds, let's look at who's actually starting businesses, and so on. That, in a fair world, I would expect that if blacks are 10 percent of the population, they'd be 10 percent of every one of those things is to ignore the reality that the differences in the culture and practices and norms of the various population groups will lead to differences in their representation amongst people who are outstanding performers in one or another activity.

How do you know if the difference in culture accounts for the difference in outcomes or if it's the existence of barriers, especially barriers early on in life, of discrimination that are racially based? If you think about affirmative action, in which ways is affirmative action empowering? In which ways is it limiting for this early development of the different groups?

But let's just speak to African Americans. We should say that you went to some no-name “Northwestern University” at first, but then you ended up with the great university of MIT. That's your not early but middle development. So speaking of the development, the opportunities, the equality of opportunity, how do we know we got that equality right?

Yeah, I'm glad you put it like that. We were talking about results. Now we're talking about opportunity. I was taking the position that, when King says “I have a dream,” and he envisions a world where his children will not be barred from the good things in life because of the color of their skin, we're talking about opportunity, not about results. But opportunity is not just something that depends upon what the law is and what public policies are. Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions in which people are raised, the social and economic conditions. So the child of a poor family that has no resources doesn't have the same opportunity as a child of a wealthy family to realize their full human potential.

You asked me, how can we tell whether or not a difference in outcomes is a reflection of unequal opportunity or a reflection of differences in culture and interest and practice? And I don't know that there's a single answer to that question. But I think one wants to look at the data. One wants to try to measure. As a social scientist, I would say you what you want to do is you want to estimate the significance of various factors for determining the outcome. If the outcome is, how much money does a person make when they work in the labor market, you look at their wages and you think, that depends upon a number of things. It depends upon how educated they are, what kind of skills they have, what kind of work experience they have and so on. And those things are all legitimate factors that might determine how much they end up making in the labor market.

But you also want to—perhaps controlling for those things—see whether or not the fact that they are black or they are Latino or whatever, the fact that they are male or that they are female, the fact that they do or do not speak English as their native language, whether those factors also are implicated in determining how successful they are in the labor market. And if you find that, after you have controlled for the things that are legitimately determining success and failure in the labor market, like skills and education and experience, having control for those things, the fact that a person is black or is a woman or is an immigrant or is of Latino background also affects their earnings, then you might conclude that, to that extent, they are not getting equal opportunity in the labor market. That kind of idea.

But I want to focus a little bit more here on what we mean by opportunity, because it's not just whether employers treat the worker on a fair and even basis, regardless of the worker's racial or ethnic background. That's one opportunity issue, but that's at the end of the development process. They are now presenting themselves to the market, trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage. That's the end of the line.

What about the developmental opportunity, the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place? That goes all the way back. That goes all the way back to birth. It even goes back to before birth. The mother carrying the infant in the womb, she has certain nutritional practices. She might be smoking or drinking alcohol or something like that. I'm not saying she is, I'm not saying she isn't. I'm just saying whether she is will affect the development of the fetus, the newborn.

Now there's a question of environment. There's a question of the development of their neurological potential. Do they learn how to read? Are they stimulated verbally? How many words have they heard spoken? Are they being nurtured in a home environment so as to maximize the possibility of them achieving their human potential? What about the peer group influences? What about the values and norms of the surrounding human communities in which they're embedded? Do they encourage the young person to apply themselves in a systematic way to their studies and to their focus on their acquisition of language command and of their educational potential?

So development is not only something that is controlled by society's practices. It's also something that is influenced by the cultural background of the individual. And those things are not equal. Those things vary across groups and in a very significant way, and that too will be a factor determining disparities of outcome.

So when I see outcomes that are different, I see wealth holding that's different, I see educational achievement that's different, I see representation in the professional schools and law school and medical school that's different between groups, one question is, are the institutions treating people fairly? But another question is, do the background and social and cultural influences equip people in the same way?

And we know that the answer to that: Not in every instance do they equip people in the same way. So it makes the moral judgment that we make when we see inequality of outcome complicated. Inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree. But it is also a cultural factor to some degree, I want to say, and that's controversial.

I know a lot of people, they think of themselves as being progressive. They want to point a finger at society whenever they see a disparity. But I think that's a mistake. I think it misunderstands the difficulty of the problem. You think that if you get the right law, if you have the right public policy, if the right politicians are elected to office, suddenly those disparities will go away. And I'm here to tell you that that's a false hope. And moreover, it is probably the wrong goal.

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