The Wolf Magazine

Issue date: 3/13/09 Section: Features

Illustration by Cat Cotton

Freedom of speech isn't always absolute.
At least that's what economics professor Walter Block, the driving force behind what he calls the "big brew-ha-ha" of Loyola controversy that erupted in November after his speech at the Loyola College of Maryland, believes.

Other members of the Loyola community, from New Orleans to Maryland, tend to agree. The devil of difference in Block's views and in those of others lies in the details of this statement. Block limits free speech at the point of direct threats, while other members of the administration, faculty and students limit free speech in terms of its offensiveness. It is this difference, and the much-debated comments that Block made in his speech about male and female, black and white productivity in the workplace, that has created the "free speech controversy" that has much of Loyola wondering who has the right to say what. The Wolf interviewed Block about his take on the hullabaloo surrounding his actions.
Here's what he had to say about the matter.

THE FACTS

• Block was invited to speak at the Loyola College of Maryland last fall to the university's Adam Smith society and to an economics class. In his speech and during the question and answer session that followed it, he said that the pay gap in jobs between males and females - which has created the infamous "glass ceiling" concept - is not due to discrimination in the workplace, but instead to differences in productivity.

• Block said women's productivity is decreased by what he called the "asymmetric effects of marriage," an institution that naturally enhances male earnings and reduces that of females - because, according to Block, in most marriages, wives do most of the cooking, cleaning and child care.

•Block then said that the pay gap in jobs between black workers and white workers is also not due to discrimination, but to lower black productivity. His two theories on why this was so: one, what he called the "politically correct" theory - blacks' wages are lower than that of whites because of "slavery, Jim Crow laws, discrimination, lynching, poor inner-city schools, etc. The other, what he called the politically incorrect theory, was "lower black IQs."

•This theory, Block said, was mostly drawn from the controversial 1994 Hernstein and Murray book "The Bell Curve."

•Days after Block's speech, Loyola Maryland president The Rev. Brian Linnane issued a letter of apology to the university, saying that many who attended the speech found Block's comments "insensitive and incorrect," and that "racism, sexism, or any other form of intolerance" will not be endorsed or supported by Loyola Maryland.
The Loyola Maryland's economics department also wrote a letter to the university's student newspaper, The Greyhound, that decried Block's views, calling them the products of "poor-quality scholarship," and cited links to scholarly evidence showing that the actual reason for the pay gap was indeed discrimination. They went further to announce their refusal to "tolerate or sympathize with gender or racial prejudice in any form."

• Rev. Kevin Wildes, S.J., university president, issued a press release later saying that Block's views were not those of the university, but said that "universities are laboratories of free expression."

•And in December 2008, the Diversity Task Force, made up of members that advise various student cultural organizations, programs and initiatives, expressed in a letter to The Maroon their commitment to upholding Jesuit values, and called Block's statements "reductionist to African Americans and women," and said that they "ignore critical factors and structural patterns of inequality."



Wolf: In your speech in Maryland you said, in answer to a question, that the pay gap between blacks and whites and was in terms of lower productivity. What about racism or discrimination in the workplace? Would you say this plays into the pay gap?

Walter Block: No. And the logic of why I would say that is: suppose you have two people, a black person and a white person, and each have a productivity at 10 bucks an hour. And due to discrimination, the white person got 10 bucks an hour, whereas the black person got seven bucks an hour. Now I ask, well how much profit could I make off of hiring the white person ... the answer is zero, if profit is the difference between the productivity and the wage. And in equilibrium, in economics, we call that an equilibrium situation. Now the black person is equally productive at 10 dollars an hour. Yet I'm paying him seven dollars an hour. Yet I'm making how much profit off of him? Three dollars an hour. Now is this a situation that can long endure? No.

Because If I hire the black person, I could make a lot of profit. And let's say you're a racist pig, and you're hiring the white guy. Well you're only making zero ... no profit. I'm making three dollars an hour profit off of hiring the black person. So I'll be able to underbid you, sell at a lower price than you, I'll be able to drive you out of business. So the situation where the wage gap is due to discrimination - namely they're equally productive, but just because people don't want to hire black people or something, they're making less due to discrimination, is not a situation that could long endure in the market.

There are market forces that would bankrupt the person who hired the white guy under circumstances. So that's why I say to your question, to go back to your question, could the pay gap between blacks and whites be due to discrimination. And the answer is no, not in equilibrium. And in economics, we think in terms of equilibrium. It's not a stable situation.

W: Your reasoning behind this was, and still is, that if black people had the same productivity as white people, but were paid less, then there would be profit opportunities available for all those who hired blacks instead of whites and the situation could never last. But what about the institution of slavery? Southern whites used free labor from enslaved blacks for hundreds of years, and gained enormous profit opportunities. This lasted for a very long time. Is it not sensible to say that a situation where blacks are exploited for their productivity could indeed last for at least a time span of another 100 years, if not indefinitely? After all, it has already happened.

B: Oh sure, of course. But that's not the free market. Slavery is opposite of the free market. The free market is voluntary interaction and slavery is just about 180 degrees off. So when I say that wages are due to productivity, that's only in the free enterprise system. But once you talk about slavery, that's not the free enterprise system.

W: When discussing black productivity you went further to speculate why this was so. You cited what you called the "politically correct" answer that it was due to slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, etc. And then you cited the book "The Bell Curve," which stated that IQ differences between the races were genetic. Why do you think that these statements generated the controversy that they did?

B: When I teach any course, what I do the first day is give a plethora of views. For example, in environmental economics, which I teach, we discuss global warming, species extinction, things like that. And I say we're going to look at each question, and we're going to look at four different points of view.

The right wing and the left wing, and under the left wing we've got the radical and the moderate, and under the right wing we've got the radical and the moderate. And then we go over speeches and such, and we say what do these four say? And that's what the course consists of. And that's pretty much my style. It's sort of like a checkerboard - you have the four columns and now you go down these rows of questions - and at the end of course, everyone is supposed to know what everybody says about everything.
So to answer your question, what happened was towards the end of my speech, a kid asked, "Well why is it that blacks have lower wages?" And I said, "It's the same thing, lower productivity." And they said, "Well why should blacks be lower productive? And I said, "Well there are two theories on this."

If I would have had more time I would have said that there are four or five, and I would have given all four or five that they said. But I only gave two, because it was toward the end of the period, and they were trying to get us out of the room. So I said, "Here are two theories. One theory is, well, it's slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, lynching, poor inner-city schools, yack yack yack. And the other is, lower IQ." That's it.

Why did I do it? Because I want to give my students, or any students, or anyone, the (range) of opinion. I'm an economist, I'm not really competent or capable of saying which one is right, or if they're both right, which one is more right, or what percentage, but, you sort of lay it out and then people decide. Now to answer your question why do you think they got ticked off at this, because IQ is sort of like the N-word. Or the F-word. You say IQ, and people are like, oh he's a Nazi, he favors slavery, yack yack yack, because we are so politically correct on these campuses that we just can't speak.

Now imagine if a chemist, every time he'd mention the word oxygen, everyone would go "Ooh, no, you can't say oxygen." It would diminish chemistry. Well, I don't want to have economics diminished by not being able to use language.

So to answer your question, it's because we are very politically correct. We are forgetting about our mission. Our mission is to understand reality and explain things and to have academic understanding. We have to do that whether it hurts people's feelings or not. Tough.

W: You also said in your speech in Maryland that the pay gap between women and men was due to the effects of marriage, because in marriage "women do the lions share of the cooking and cleaning, etc." But some would say that while this may have been the case 50 years ago, today, one sex doing the most housework is rare, unless the family is of a single-parent household. How would you respond to those who would say that the times of the stay at home mom have changed?

B: They're wrong. What I did in Baltimore was take a little survey. In the Baltimore case, I had maybe 80 kids in the audience, and 78 of them raised their hands (for their mothers doing the most cooking, cleaning, etc. in the household) and one or two of them said that (the household work load) was split evenly among mother and father. And one - liar - said that the father did more than the mother. Now it could be that the mother was sick in bed, but I'm talking about normal things. And not just these informal surveys of mine but the sociologists do surveys on this every year and there's no change. So the people who said that the stay at home mom or the mom who does all the house work is a thing of the past? They don't know what they're talking about.

W: Would you have taken back anything you said about male vs. female productivity in the workplace, or black people's vs. white people's productivity?

B: No. I've not only spoken about it, I've got a paper trail. Sometimes I have to take things back, there are cases, more technical things where I've made a mistake, and in the next article, I say, Guess who else made this mistake. Not too ashamed to take something back. But that's why they put erasers at the end of pencils, people make mistakes. But not here. This is very basic economics.

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