Here’s a response from Thomas sowell to you via ChatGPT. “The problem with this kind of reasoning is that it treats disparities as proof of injustice and systemic inequities as permanent explanations rather than challenges to be overcome. But disparities are not necessarily evidence of discrimination. They are often the result of cultural, geographic, educational, and behavioral differences. If outcomes alone are the metric, then success is forever unreachable for anyone born into disadvantage. That is a deeply fatalistic view with little room for human agency.
The example comparing a child in Mumbai to one in London assumes opportunity is a fixed quantity handed down by external forces. But history shows us that people from dire poverty, whether in Asia, Africa, or the Bronx, have dramatically changed their station by leveraging the tools they do have: family, discipline, education, community. These are not myths. They are the stories of immigrants, former slaves, and poor farmers who went from obscurity to prosperity in a single generation.
To say that you don’t have to do anything about it is cloaked moral indifference disguised as intellectual detachment. Worse, it subtly implies that nothing can be done because the system is too big, too unjust, too old. But that is a deeply corrosive idea. If belief in victimhood becomes your primary mental model, then your growth is already capped, not by the system but by your surrender to it.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the assumption that spending more money or passing more laws will produce better outcomes flies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What lifts people out of poverty isn’t abstract awareness of injustice. It is behavior, incentives, and opportunity. It is not a system that owes you. It is you who must adapt, strive, and rise.”