Social Justice Fiction

The social justice vision breaks down under scrutiny.

Many things that social justice advocates say are true are actually false. Their assertions don’t usually stand up to the facts. In Thomas Sowell’s latest book, Social Justice Fallacies, the facts are separated from the fiction. Sowell, an economist and fellow at the Hoover Institution, shows us that reality is often the opposite of popular social justice narratives. Here’s a sampling of common social justice assertions followed by a summary of Sowell’s analysis of them based on the evidence.

Fiction: Disparities are proof of discrimination. Fact: Many international studies have found that large disparities occur commonly in societies around the world. In fact, disparities are the norm. No one has been able to find societies anywhere—either today or in the past—in which all groups have developed equally. Many factors besides racism can lead to disparities. These include differences in the median age of groups and the proportion of single-parent families as well as differences in education levels, behaviors, preferences and locations.

Fiction: Law enforcement criminalizes criminals. Fact: Leftist elites blame crime on root causes such as poverty, unemployment and housing. But they offer no evidence that crime worsens when these factors are worse. What the data does show is that children raised by single parents have higher rates of social problems and crime.

Studies of boys raised without a father present have found them very much over-represented among people with pathologies ranging from truancy to murder. As one study put it, these pathologies were more highly correlated with fatherlessness than with any other factor, ‘surpassing even race and poverty.’ Fatherless boys had a higher than average rate of incarceration, whether they were black or white.

Fiction: Welfare has lifted minorities out of poverty. Fact: The opposite is true. The rise of the welfare state has trapped low-income families in poverty with no road to upward mobility. They become dependent on the government, maintained infinitely at low standards of living.

Many social justice advocates have shown little or no interest in remarkable examples of progress by the poor—when that progress was not based on the kinds of policies promoted in the name of social justice. The striking progress made by black Americans in the decades before the 1960s has been widely ignored. So has the demonstrable harm suffered by black Americans after the social justice policies of the 1960s. These included a sharp reversal of the homicide rate decline and a quadrupling of the proportion of black children born to unmarried women. Government policies made fathers a negative factor for mothers seeking welfare benefits.

Fiction: Progressives are on the right side of history. Fact: In the early 1900s, Progressivism took the form of genetic determinism. Progressives at that time believed that some races were genetically inferior. This led to the eugenics movement, sterilization procedures, the rationale for genocide, and the atrocities of communism and fascism.

Harvard professor economics Fran Taussig said of a variety of people he considered inferior, that if it were not feasible to ‘chloroform them once and for all,’ then ‘at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.’

Fiction: Progressive ideology is based on science. Fact: Progressives in the early 1900s, and again today, express absolute certainty about their conclusions and an intolerance for the scientific method and open debate. Typically, progressives ignore evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

Progressives in each era began with a preconception, and ended their examination of evidence when they found data which seemed to fit their preconception. Such a procedure may be enough to supply talking points. But, if the goal is to find the truth, the search must continue, in order to see if there are other data that conflict with the initial belief.

Fiction: The wealthy must be subjected to heavy taxation. Fact: A basic principle of economics is that increasing the tax rate does not necessarily mean the tax revenue will increase by the same amount, if at all. In addition, low-income Americans have higher standards of living as a result of the creations of people who have gotten rich.

There is no question that one of the most politically successful messages of the twentieth century was that the rich have gotten rich by taking from the poor. The Marxian message of exploitation helped sweep communists into power in countries around the world in the twentieth century. Communists are just one of the ideological groups to use it successfully for their own purposes, despite how disastrously that turned out to be for millions of other human beings living under communist dictatorships.

Fiction: It would be better if the government was in charge. Fact: This is the fundamental assertion of most leftists, from so-called “liberals” to Marxists. But big government inevitably leads to the loss of individual freedom.

The choices of institutional mechanism matter for the sake of preserving the freedom of millions of people to make their own decisions about their own lives as they see fit, rather than have surrogate decision-makers preempt their decisions, in the name of noble-sounding words, such as ‘social justice.’

Fiction: Misinformation should be censored. Fact: Progressives’ suppression of evidence and dissenting opinions is a threat to liberty and U.S. democracy.

The fatal danger of our times is a growing intolerance and suppression of both opinions and evidence that differ from the prevailing ideologies that dominate institutions…A prevailing social vision does not have to produce any factual test, when rhetoric and repetition can be sufficient to accomplish their aims, especially when alternative views can be ignored and/or suppressed.

In conclusion

Thomas Sowell in Social Justice Fallacies makes a final point:

Today it is especially important to get facts, rather than catchwords. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, more than a century ago, that catchwords can ‘delay further analysis for fifty years.’ —Thomas Sowell

This image conjures the dystopian future predicted in George Orwell’s classic novels 1984 and Animal Farm. In totalitarian regimes, if the government says so, 2+2 = 5. Previous issues of 2026 have reviewed these two books.