Matthew Lau: Education, not racism, drives the difference in earnings between races

2024/12/11 Leave a comment

What Lau fails to consider are the barriers that affect education levels and enrolment in STEM disciplines. The numbers are correct but the analysis is overly simplistic:

Significant federal program spending is premised on the idea that visible minorities in Canada are systemically disadvantaged.

Take the latest: Earlier this fall, the federal government released a 45-page anti-racism strategy for 2024-2028, which “aims to tackle systemic racism and make our communities more inclusive and prosperous.” Such a strategy is necessary, according to the government, because systemic racism exists throughout our institutions and “[perpetuates] a position of relative disadvantage for racialized persons.”

But where is the evidence for this premise? Not in the income statistics.

Directly contradicting the idea that visible minorities are systemically oppressed, a new Statistics Canada study shows many Canadians from minority backgrounds thrive and even do better on average than their white counterparts.

The StatCan study started with 1996 and 2001 census data, used T1 and T4 tax files and other data to measure cumulative earnings over 20 years among Canadian-born men and women from four racial cohorts — white, South Asian, Chinese, and Black — and found minorities outperforming the majority population.

Specifically, among Canadian-born men, cumulative earnings over 20 years were highest on average among Chinese men ($1.58 million in 2019 dollars), followed by South Asian men ($1.51 million). Only Black men ($1.06 million) earned less than white men ($1.31 million).

Clearly, if Chinese and South Asian men have higher earnings power than white men, it is difficult to conclude Canada is systemically racist against minorities.

What about the inverse? Does the data suggest Canada is systemically racist against white men? No. “The fact that Chinese and South Asian men have higher education levels than white men and are more likely to be in STEM fields is the single most important factor explaining why these two groups have higher cumulative earnings than white men,” the StatCan report found.

In other words: education, not racism, drives the difference in earnings.

So what happens when we control for education and other factors like employer size, industry, and geography? The earnings gap between white and Black men remains. As well, while Chinese and South Asian men out-earned white men, after controlling for education and other factors, white men actually earned more.

Alas, have we found evidence of systemic racism? Is this evidence that the country is systemically racist because these employers paid minorities less than their white counterparts with similar educational backgrounds?

There’s no hard evidence of this. First, discrimination by employers against visible minorities has been illegal for decades. Second, as the study itself even suggests, many factors affect earnings besides the ones researchers can observe and control for, including differences in social networks, job search methods, and preferences for certain working conditions, so automatically blaming racism doesn’t make much sense. Third, if Canada is systemically racist against minorities, how did Chinese and South Asian men find themselves overrepresented in the higher-paying STEM fields to begin with?

And if racism against Black Canadians is to blame for the earnings gap among men, what explains the fact that Black women earned more than white women? Among Canadian-born women, before controlling for education and other factors, the cohort that earned the least over two decades was white women ($0.80 million). Chinese women had the highest cumulative earnings ($1.14 million), followed by South Asian women ($1.06 million), and then Black women ($0.82 million). Is Canada full of racists who only discriminate against Black men but not Black women?

Another outcome of the StatCan analysis is that after controlling for the same factors (e.g. education), Chinese women out-earned white women — by $38,000, on average. So, do racist employers systematically favour white men over Chinese men, while also disfavouring white women relative to Chinese women?

The narrative that Canadians from visible minority backgrounds are systemically disadvantaged just doesn’t hold up to the data.

Moreover, this latest StatCan study only considered four groups (Chinese, South Asian, white, and Black) of Canadian-born individuals, but other StatCan research provides similar evidence against systemic racism. Weekly earnings data from 2016 show that in addition to Chinese and South Asian men, Canadian-born Japanese and Korean men had higher earnings than their white counterparts. Among women, seven of ten minority groups (Korean, Chinese, South Asian, Japanese, Filipino, “other visible minorities,” and Arab or West Asian) had higher average weekly earnings than the white population.

Simply, the earnings data do not provide evidence that Canada is a society that systemically disadvantages minorities. Rather, the data show the exact opposite. Politicians and bureaucrats might want to consider these facts before wasting large sums of taxpayer dollars drawing up lengthy “anti-racism” plans.

Source: Matthew Lau: Education, not racism, drives the difference in earnings between races

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Matthew Lau: Black justice strategy would be a disservice to Canadians of African descent

2024/07/22 Leave a comment

Second article critical of the strategy in a week in the Post:

….According to the steering group, the federal government should also “establish a committee of Black justice professionals, academics and community leaders to study options for reparations to Black people for enslavement, segregation and racially biased laws,” work to give lower interest rates and debt forgiveness to Black articling students and early-career lawyers, increase resources “for the development and improvement of Black businesses,” categorize Black people as a “priority group” in federal employment and housing programs and so on.

The steering group’s Black justice strategy focuses on dividing society by race and delivering governmental favours to the Black population. But this is a failing strategy, as seen most evidently in the United States and documented by, in addition to Thomas Sowell, prolific Black scholars such Walter Williams and Jason Riley. As their work has shown, Blacks and other communities make the most progress when focused on building human capital through education and economic advancement instead of trying to achieve political clout. Black Americans made much greater progress before the explosion of Black elected officials, welfare programs and affirmative action in the 1960s than after it.

It is no different in Canada. Among Canadian-born men and women, those of Japanese, Chinese and Korean ancestry have significantly higher average earnings than the white population. These groups are also underrepresented among criminal offenders. Their relative success in Canadian society has nothing to do with federal programs giving them preferential treatment or with the Department of Justice having a Japanese justice strategy, Chinese justice strategy or Korean justice strategy — that much is clear. Such government favours and strategies will not help Canada’s Black population, either.

Source: Matthew Lau: Black justice strategy would be a disservice to Canadians of African descent

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Aristotle Foundation: ‘Overwhelming majority of the Canadian poor are white,’ report finds [misleading use of statistics]

2024/06/01 Leave a comment

Both the article and the report misrepresent the data as it looks at number living in poverty rather than the percentage of each group who are in poverty. For example, stating that 58 percent of white people living in poverty is less than their 74 percent of the Canadian population.

The table below provides a more accurate picture by contrasting the share of the population and poverty rates by group and generation, compared to the non visible minority population. Poverty rates remain higher across generations for Blacks, Latin American and West Asians.

It is one thing to argue against the degree that race affects poverty rates or the effectiveness of specific policy approaches, another to present the data in a tendentious manner or to argue that systemic racism has no impact on poverty rates:

A new report by the Calgary-based think tank Aristotle Foundation suggests that Canada’s race-based approach to fighting poverty might be flawed, since it is based on an incorrect assumption that race, racial discrimination and poverty are tightly linked.

The paper, “Poverty and Race in Canada: Facts about Race, Discrimination, and the Poor,” analyzed recent Statistics Canada data and also looked at public policy initiatives at both the provincial and federal levels that are designed to fight poverty.

It found that between 7.4 and 10.6 per cent of Canadians are living in relative poverty, depending on how one defines the term.

At the low end, defined by low after-tax income, some 58 per cent or 1.6 million people living in poverty are white, or what StatsCan refers to as “not a visible minority nor Indigenous.” For the other figure, which measures poverty based on the cost of living, 2.5 million people or 64.4 per cent of the group living in poverty are white.

“In other words, the overwhelming majority of the Canadian poor are ‘white,’ and thus cannot receive race-based allocations from governments if unchangeable characteristics such as skin colour or ethnicity are accounted for in policy,” the group said in a press release announcing the findings.

The paper points to government documents that use the link between race and poverty to justify race-based remedies that it says ignore many needy people.

A federal document outlining Canada’s anti-racism strategy notes: “Anti-Black racism is manifested in the legacy of the current social, economic and political marginalization of African Canadians in society such as the lack of opportunities, lower socio-economic status, higher unemployment, significant poverty rates and over-representation in the criminal justice system.”

Ontario’s anti-racism strategic plan includes the same statement almost word for word.

What’s more, the report says, government anti-poverty programs with racial qualifiers can end up misdirecting resources to those who are not even poor.

It cites Ontario’s Racialized and Indigenous Supports for Entrepreneurs (RAISE) grant program. Using the low-income-after-tax measure, eligibility for this race-based funding would apply not only to 1.4 million low-income earners in Canada (the total low-income visible minority and Indigenous population) but also to nearly 10.5 million minorities or Indigenous who are not low income, while excluding non-minority, non-Indigenous low-income earners.

“Put another way,” the report says, “this funding would be inaccessible to 64 per cent of those who are low-income, and of those who do qualify for the funding based on race, only 11.9 per cent are low-income. This is not a sensible way to design an anti-poverty program.”

The study also found that some minority groups in Canada are as likely or in some cases less likely to be poor compared to white Canadians. These included Canadians of Japanese, Korean, South Asian and Chinese ancestry, all of whom have higher average weekly earnings that their white counterparts.

The study suggests delinking poverty from race, and says governments should strive to address the “root issues” of poverty by strengthening, or minimizing interference with, what it calls the “success sequence”: finish high school, work full time, and marry before having children. These markers, it says, predicate a non-poverty life for the vast majority of people in the U.S. and Canada.

“Systemic racism is not the cause of poverty in Canada,” says lead author and financial analyst Matthew Lau. “While some visible minority groups experience poverty in numbers disproportionate to the general population, it is also true that some visible minority groups are less likely to live in poverty, such as Canadians of Filipino, South Asian, and Latin American ancestry.”

“Poverty is colour-blind, and thus poverty policy which excludes some Canadians and favours others based on colour or ethnicity omits a vast swath of the poor in Canada, in addition to being illiberal,” adds co-author and Aristotle Foundation research director David Hunt, “The focus of anti-poverty policy in Canada should instead be focused on the individuals in need and on creating widespread opportunity for all.”

Source: ‘Overwhelming majority of the Canadian poor are white,’ report finds, Report link: https://aristotlefoundation.org/reality-check/poverty-and-race-in-canada-facts-about-race-discrimination-and-the-poor/#:~:text=In%20summary%2C%20poverty%20rates%20in,are%20truly%20living%20in%20destitution.

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Lau: Data clashes with claims of ‘white supremacy’ in standardized testing

2022/11/24 Leave a comment

While Lau is trying to be too cute in his commentary, the data undermines claims of white supremacy:

If I get a speeding ticket for exceeding the speed limit by 50 kilometres per hour in a residential zone, I plan to inform the police officer that the institution of policing, the radar guns, and even the posted speed limit are all manifestations of white supremacy. That’s sure to have the ticket withdrawn.

I take my cues from a handful of those in the esteemed social class of public educators. Some context: earlier this fall, the Education Quality and Accountability Office, which is arms-length of the Government of Ontario, released the latest standardized test results. As they have over the past decade, reading and writing scores fluctuated, but math scores continued their steady downward march.

In 2021-22, only 59 per cent of Grade Three students met provincial standards in mathematics, down from 60 per cent in 2018-19 and 67 per cent in 2012-13. Among Grade Six students, only 47 per cent met provincial standards in mathematics, down from 50 per cent in 2018-19 and 57 per cent in 2012-13.

Perhaps in anticipation of such dismal results, in the weeks ahead of the EQAO results release, the Toronto District School Board launched what might be seen as a series of pre-emptive strikes, giving presentations denouncing standardized testing as an example of “white supremacy in K-12 mathematics education.”

A member of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario’s executive staff, with similar ideas in mind, wrote in the union’s magazine that standardized testing is “biased towards upper-middle class white test-takers” and suggested that “EQAO tests are culturally and racially biased, promoting a Eurocentric curriculum and way of life that privileges white students.”

That administering standardized tests to measure student achievement is a manifestation of white supremacy is an interesting claim, but a little dubious. In the first place, if white racists are trying to use standardized testing to promote the idea that the white race is somehow superior to others, they’re doing a rather poor job. Students from many different racial backgrounds outperform white students (on average) on these tests.

The Peel District School Board reported last year, for example, that a higher proportion of students from East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern and multiple racial backgrounds reached the provincial standards in Grade Three mathematics than white students. Data in previous years and from other school boards, such as Toronto and Grand Erie, also show Asian students on average significantly outperforming white students in EQAO mathematics tests.

Survey data cast further doubt on the theory that standardized tests are tainted by white supremacy. In January a poll (conducted by Leger and published by the Fraser Institute) found 84 per cent of parents of children in K-12 schools supported having their children write standardized tests, including 92 per cent of immigrant parents. Unless we’re prepared to conclude that 84 per cent of Canadians and an even higher proportion of immigrants support white racist activities, we may have to conclude the tests are not racist.

On second thought, if I am pulled over for speeding, it may not help to inform the police officer that the resulting ticket is a manifestation of white supremacy. More likely, the police officer would regard me as an idiot. Similarly, reasonable people might regard as inordinately dumb the idea that standardized testing has anything to do with white supremacy.

Matthew Lau is an adjunct scholar with the Fraser Institute.

Source: LAU: Data clashes with claims of ‘white supremacy’ in standardized testing

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