CULTURAL STRATEGIES JULY 11, 1996 TRANSCRIPT

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Cultural attitudes toward work explain why some immigrant groups find economic success, while others remain poor, Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, argues in his book Migrations and Cultures: A World View. David Gergen, senior editor at U.S. News & World Report engages Sowell in a discussion.

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DAVID GERGEN, U.S. News & World Report: Professor Sowell, in your new book, you've addressed one of the enduring mysteries about the human race, and that is why people leave one country that often is poor, go to another, and are fabulously successful. For example, the Germans who came to America and soon dominated the optics industry, were building a better piano, and of course were brewing the best beer in many cases, the Lebanese who went to West Africa, the Indians who went to East Africa, especially the Chinese who went to Southeast Asia, I think you said in your book, that Indonesia and Malaysia now have 5 billionaires and they're all overseas, Chinese--

THOMAS SOWELL, Author, Migrations and Cultures: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: All come from a poor area.

THOMAS SOWELL: Mm-hmm.

DAVID GERGEN: And, of course, the Jews--less than 1 percent of the world's population and over a 75-year period have won, I think you said 16 percent of the Nobel Prizes.

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: Now, you tried to address why this happens. What's the answer to the mystery? What was your conclusion?

THOMAS SOWELL: Oh, it would be the cultural capital they bring with them from where they came. And that would be a product of so many different factors that we can't isolate them all. There are a number of them. Groups differ for a lot of reasons, one being simply the geography that people who are in an isolated--geographically isolated--tend to lag behind people who are in touch with most of the people, other people in the world, so that even in a given country, people along the coast will tend to be more advanced than the people in the interior, even though they are the same people.

DAVID GERGEN: Now what do you mean by human capital? Define that.

THOMAS SOWELL: It would be skills. It would be disciplines, umm, attitudes towards the world. And so when you have people, for example, from the United States, from different parts of the world, they may sit side by side in the same school room, the kids may, and have the same objective opportunities, and yet they'll bring to that classroom sets of attitudes that developed overseas hundreds of years ago.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. But the--in some cases the skills seem to be so important along with the attitudes. The Germans, for example, came as artisans. They came as craftsmen to the United States--

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: --as well as they had--they were very industrious, hard-working, terrific kind of people; whereas, others, the Italians didn't come necessarily with the skills, especially those who came from Southern Italy to the United States, and yet, they were incredibly hard working.

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: And they still made it up.

THOMAS SOWELL: That's right. With them it would be the saving.

DAVID GERGEN: Yes.

THOMAS SOWELL: They would save a tremendous amount of money out of very small wages, so--and in Argentina, for example, in the 1880's, a third of the people, most of the people in the Bank of Buenos Aires, most of the depositors were Italian, not Argentine, even though the Italians were desperately poor. They would come down the gang planks in rags. But whatever they earned, they would save some of it.

DAVID GERGEN: So when you talk about human capital, it really--in addition to skills, it's attitudes toward work and values about work.

THOMAS SOWELL: That's right, and saving.

DAVID GERGEN: And savings.

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: And a willingness to work your way up from the bottom and just make it.

THOMAS SOWELL: That's right. Because most people start at the bottom and so that's the only thing you can do.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. Now you make a very strong argument that this is not genetic.

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: That it is--that history would show that some groups rise and fall, depending on their cultures, and the cultures are not genetically determined.

THOMAS SOWELL: That's right. And they're not permanent, so that a thousand years ago, China was far ahead of all of Europe, and yet, within the past couple of centuries, Europe has been far ahead of China technologically and otherwise.

DAVID GERGEN: Knowing that it's that--those attitudes and values, how does--why do some people develop those kind of cultural attitudes and a strong internal culture and other people don't?

THOMAS SOWELL: That's a tougher question that I'm going to leave for someone else to deal with after me. My biggest problem is trying to get people to accept that there are these patterns because the prevailing view in the academic world and much of the intellectual world in general is that people are the way they are because of society around them. And what I find is that if you look at Germans in Brazil and Australia and Russia, you know, look at Jews in Spain or the Ottoman Empire, you see that there are patterns that recur again and again in societies that are radically different from each other. But the people are not radically different from each other, i.e., the Jews are the Jews--

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

THOMAS SOWELL: --whether they're in Spain or the Ottoman Empire.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. And what you're saying is, is they shouldn't either blame society or, you know, they shouldn't consider themselves victims.

THOMAS SOWELL: That's right. The whole notion of blaming the victim, and I think is one of the great distracting phrases, because there's not a question of blame. People can't--people were not responsible for where their ancestors developed--geographically, historically, or whatever. But neither is the society responsible. I mean, in the United States, virtually every and perhaps every major beer company in this country was created by people of German ancestry.

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

THOMAS SOWELL: You know, the Germans created the--they were the biggest brewers of beer in Buenos Aires. I've been to a German brewery in Australia. You know, so it's not--it's not the society. It's what the people brought with them. But they brought more than skills because the Chinese and the Japanese often left with no particular skills. They started off as plantation laborers in many parts of the world, including the Western Hemisphere, but they had this tenacity, they also had the saving tendencies, and so, therefore, even when they were on the plantation, they had these what are called starvation wages, they saved out of them. There was a saving in the Philippines that the average Chinese makes $16 a month out of which he saves $18.

DAVID GERGEN: (laughing) Let me come to the delicate question because you addressed the groups like the Italians and Germans and Jews and the various Asian groups. You did not address blacks or Hispanics in this particular book. Now, talk about those cultures, the cultures of the blacks and Hispanics, and the difficulty blacks are having making it in American society or in other societies, and you obviously think that's culturally related.

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes. Yes. Well, if you look at the history of Africa, and particularly of the geography of Africa, it is really astonishing that people survive there, uh, much less how much--they were not in touch with the outside world. It's the same contrast you find between coastal people and inland people, that they were inland. They're on a continent which is, most of it is a thousand feet or more above sea level, which means that all the rivers must drop a thousand feet, which means they're not navigable.

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

THOMAS SOWELL: And so even where they are rivers--and there aren't that many rivers in Africa--you can't go very far on them and you can't go there in large ships, uh, and so you couldn't have international trade. One period of history, centuries ago, much of the trade of the world went from Europe around Africa to Asia, but it never stopped.

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

THOMAS SOWELL: Because there was no place it could have stopped or very few places.

DAVID GERGEN: As I read your book, there are certain geographic reasons why Africans were behind. That was very heavily determined. There is also a history of oppression that these people have often faced in other--

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: --when they've been taken to other societies as slaves, and so that's put them behind, uh, but that your argument would now be rather than making this a political issue, trying to gain--move forward through the politics, other groups have moved forward through cultural changes.

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: And what--what I hear you saying between the lines is that that's the best way for, for African-Americans to move forward in this society and other societies now.

THOMAS SOWELL: It's what's worked. I have--I'm still looking for the group that has risen through politics. Now, the, the Irish were quite successful in politics, but they were more successful when they were poor, and when they became more prosperous, they had less and less dominance in politics.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. But that's--those are cultural changes within those communities?

THOMAS SOWELL: Oh, absolutely, with the Irish, it was the Catholic Churches that made great efforts to create these changes.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. Let me ask you another area which is very sensitive in this country today. We--America today, of course, is in a time of great immigration around the world. About half the world's immigrants come to America, so it's a hot issue here. Toward the end of your book, as I understood your argument, it was very much that we ought to be--you know, we're too politically sensitive here, and we ought to look to the groups who are coming in and accept more of those who have these--this human capital, and a few of those who don't have the human capital.

THOMAS SOWELL: Absolutely.

DAVID GERGEN: And we ought to be rational about that.

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes. Unfortunately, there's a great deal of emotion that's churned up because although I deal at great length with history, we have to make our decisions in the present, and things have changed. And one of the things that's changed is that you can now transfer human capital without transferring a lot of bodies, so the Japanese can come here and set up Hondas or Toyota factories and have Americans produce the way they produce in Japan without moving a lot of Japanese here.

DAVID GERGEN: But your argument would be we ought to look to people who have either the attitudes toward work or have the skills as engineers and physicians--

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: And those--the Indians, for example, have sent a very high proportion of people here who are engineers and physicians.

THOMAS SOWELL: Oh, yes.

DAVID GERGEN: I think some 30,000 who came here in the 70's or the early 80's; whereas, some other countries, especially some in Latin America, you argue, have not been sending us those kind of people, and, therefore, you would, you would base immigration policy on those kind of considerations.

THOMAS SOWELL: Oh, absolutely, although I must say that in many fiends Americans are falling so much behind that if it weren't for the foreigners in fields like sci--like engineering and mathematics, we'd be in very bad shape.

DAVID GERGEN: Mm-hmm. Well, it's certainly an argument that one hears from Silicon Valley, right where you teach--

THOMAS SOWELL: Absolutely.

DAVID GERGEN: --out at Stanford.

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: You know, they say they're very dependent on people of those skills.

THOMAS SOWELL: Some of the companies were themselves established by people from India.

DAVID GERGEN: Right, right. Well, thank you very much for being here, and it was good to talk to you again.

THOMAS SOWELL: Thank you.

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