Walter Block is on the faculty at Loyola New Orleans, PhD in economics at Columbia University.
He's written a lot of stuff, including many books, more than 500 articles, and I guess
there's no stranger to controversy, but we're going to find out because he's on the phone
with us as a guest.
Hello, Professor, how are you?
Pretty good, thanks for having me on your show.
My pleasure, may I call you Walter?
Please.
Thank you, and you know, keeping with American informality.
I don't know if you know the latest, but the Loyola College Economics Department has apologized,
saying that your views or the remarks you expressed were not representative of the department's
views. So this is an inanimate thing, sort of a collective that is apologizing for you.
There's no individual identified in this, but the Loyola College Economics Department
is apologizing because what you said obviously does not reflect the views of anybody who
is scared to death of being deemed racist, sexist, misogynist, whatever in the world
it may be.
What was this?
How did this flap take place?
What was it that you said that caused such consternation?
Well, before we get into the substance, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to just mention
I want to follow up on what you said. It's more than passing curious that a department
can apologize.
I know.
It's a department of individuals and I know that the professor who's in the department,
Tom DiLorenzo, who invited me certainly wouldn't apologize because he was congratulating me
as was another professor there who actually, I think, signed on. So that's one little bit
of curiosity.
Well, Tom is a friend of mine and I know that he wouldn't have been apologizing for your
The American University at work with its defense of diversity as long as, as you put it, the
It's not diversity of opinion.
Right, as long as we can have diversity of skin color, diversity of sexual preferences,
diversity of everything under the sun, except for the one thing that university is supposed to be standing for
and that's intellectualism or ideas or information, things like that.
There, they pretty much demand a lockstep leftist kind of appreciation, which is horrific.
So one problem is an apology on the part of a department, which is silly.
I know. That's why I brought it up first thing.
Right. But another thing is, you know, look, Ron, if you do something wrong, you have to apologize for it.
I can't apologize to you. And vice versa. If I do something wrong, you can't apologize to me.
So how are they apologizing? How is an economics department apologizing?
Oh, I see. They're apologizing for inviting you.
No, no. They're apologizing to me. And they didn't invite me. So they can't apologize for inviting me because they didn't invite me. Tom DiLorenzo invited me. And they can't apologize for me because they didn't do anything wrong, at least according to their likes. I did. So, you know, the apology has to come from me. They should have written me and say, hey, you idiot, you moron, you sexist, racist pig, whatever. You apologize because you're a pig or something. But they didn't write me. They just went ahead and apologized to me.
Professor Block's remarks also included offensive comments regarding the source of wage disparities between men and women.
Offensive is the key word because you responded to a question about the differences between average earnings of African Americans and whites in America.
Maintaining the disparity could be explained by differences in average productivity.
That was offensive. And we're sincerely sorry for it.
When you say something's offensive, you're not saying it's untrue.
Right, that's the key. I mean, what a professor is supposed to do
is to profess the truth. And if the truth is offensive, I mean,
look, at one time to say that the earth revolved around the sun was offensive.
As a matter of fact, it was capital offensive.
Yes, capital offenses, I stand corrected. But it was true. And, you know, it seems that truth is no longer a defense on many college campuses.
Well, actually, the truth, if we're to take a look at a big picture, Professor, I would offer this suggestion.
The truth is never a defense if something violates any society's taboos.
Okay, I mean, it doesn't matter. Every society has its taboos because every society has a
ruling orthodoxy and their views must not be challenged because you'll be punished if
you do.
Right. Well, the overall society doesn't have this taboo, but the leftist academics or the
leftist universities certainly have this taboo. What you're supposed to say is that when women
earn less than men, it's due to the innate sexism of capitalism. When blacks earn less
Walter, the apology to the Loyola community from the Adam Smith Society and the Economics
Faculty said that your remarks that they're apologizing for were not only insensitive,
but they were incorrect.
So let's tell people what these remarks were.
You started off, as I understand it, by saying how the Jesuits have been hijacked by a bunch
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
And that's when you got into IQ differences, which, of course, is a minefield.
The IQ thing I think was a little bit misunderstood by the journalist Laura Vizella. That had to do just with the black-white differentials, which, as I say, was a very small part of my talk.
The reason women are less than men has something to do with what in economics is a very basic thing, but I guess it's escaped my colleagues in the economics department, namely a thing called opportunity cost or alternative cost. And the idea here is that whenever you do anything, anything, that means you can't do something else.
You mean like having children?
Transcription of interview questions and answers.
In the case of male-female, what is it that women are doing that makes it as if they're
carrying a 50-pound sack in a race against somebody who's otherwise equal to them?
What it is they're doing is getting married and having children and caring for them in
a disproportionate way.
I took a survey of my audience there and I said, if you're married, answer this survey
question in terms of your own marriage and if you're not married, answer this survey
Question in terms of the marriage that you most intimately acquainted with, presumably
a parent's marriage, this is an audience mainly of students.
And I gave them three choices, and I said, in one case you have a house husband where
the house husband does more than his equal share of house cleaning and shopping and cooking
and childcare, and I got one or two out of about a hundred.
And I said, how about if it's equal?
And it's equal to be 45 to 55 in length, and I got about five out of a hundred, and
In this marriage that you're most acquainted with, how many women do way more than the husband about shopping and cleaning and housekeeping and this and that and the other, and they all raise their hands.
And I said, well look, if women are busy doing other things, even if they're equally able, and I think they are equally able, maybe not in the previous century because in the previous century, upper body strength meant a lot in terms of knocking down trees or mining.
In the 20th century and the 21st century, the way you do these things is with steam shovels and women are just as capable as men. So I assume that men and women are equally capable, equally productive and therefore should get equal wages, except for the fact that women are busy taking care of children. I gave two proofs or two bits of evidence of this.
Transcription of interview questions.
Walter, we have a caller who's been waiting to talk about political correctness in high
school, so let's say hello to Ray.
Ray, go ahead.
Hi, Professor.
Hi, Ron.
It's funny that the economics department of Loyola didn't recognize the opportunity cost,
but another thing they should have gotten from what you just said was the law of comparative
advantage.
I think it's funny that they don't realize that the women should raise kids because they
do that best, and I guess Jesuits should be left to do whatever they do best, I forgot
what that was.
Maybe the Spanish Inquisition, I'm not sure if they did that.
Oh, no, no, no.
That's not right.
Don't blame them for their forefathers.
I take that back.
They couldn't have been their forefathers, never mind.
The high school example, I teach AP Economics in high school.
Do you have podcasts, Ron, so I can play this to my students tomorrow?
No, but we can put it on my page at wbal.com.
Ryan will do that, so there will be audio of it.
We'll talk about a teachable moment.
We're doing this tomorrow, we're going to take a little time out from our Keynesian curve to do this.
Rule story, these are how bright my students are.
There was an outspoken faculty member that was saying, finally with President Obama, we can really do something on the minimum wage.
And immediately, four guys in the class said, what, are you crazy?
And then they went up to the board and they started graphing price floors and price ceilings.
and uh... they're just saying you want to lay off thousands of people and i got
that story from another faculty member i was so proud of these guys
they had learned well
they well they're they're they're bright and they're uh... ambitious and they they uh...
it just stays in there you know and uh... when i hear stuff like this it just
uh... i hear
Professor Flock's
stories and i just get so sad
well you know speaking of specialization and comparative advantage that too is one of the
The Basic Building Blocks in Axiom of Economics, however it doesn't apply entirely to this
case because there are women who have never been married and they earn just as much as
men.
So I don't want to say that a woman's place is in a home bringing up babies, I'm just
saying that if they choose that they have to forego other things just as Michael Phelps
has foregone a career as a cellist or grandmaster in chess or something.
That's true, we all make our choices.
Thanks a lot. We'll be tuning in tomorrow.
When you take males and females who are from 18 to 24, and you don't even look at marital
status, because most of these people have never been married, again, the wage gap almost
entirely disappears.
So that's the second bit of evidence that I gave, and the third bit of evidence is that
if you assume that men and women are really equally productive, but you can get a woman
for $3 less than a man, let's say they're both productivity at $10 an hour, and you
have to pay the man $10, but you can only pay the woman $7, if you assume that as the
So-called feminist assume namely that this is the actual gap that women are really equally
productive and make less money, well then an employer would give his eye-teeth to hire
women and fire all the men because he could make more profits off them and this is silly
because then you have more profits in industries where there are women a disproportionate number
like insurance or banking, whereas in mining or woodworking or something like that where
it's mostly men that they would be making zero profits.
Let me address this, okay? Women are better students than men, on average. There's no question about that. And there are any number of reasons for it, some of which we can't even figure out, but many of which we can. But I've just got to get you to explain this outlier thing.
Let me explain that. You've been very patient with me. I have. That's something that fascinates.
Now we get to the piece de resistance. What I want to say is that the men and women have
equal productivity and roughly equal IQs, although there's some debate about that, but
the phenomena is that women have a very low standard deviation or variance. Namely, they're
all bunched toward the middle, whereas men are just all over the lot. If you will, men
Women are God's crapshoot and women are God's or nature's insurance policy.
Now let me give you some evidence on that.
If you go to jails and just look at the males and females in jails, you'll find virtually
all men.
Okay, there's one Lucy Borden who killed someone with an axe, but virtually all people
in jail are men.
If you go look on the streets for homeless people, yes, there's a shopping bag lady every
once in a while, but 98 out of 100 are men.
If you go to a cemetery, you'll find an equal number, obviously, but if you look at people
who died before their time, say who died before they were 30 or died before they were 35,
again, all men.
And if you go to a mental institution, virtually all men, there are hardly any women in mental
institutions compared to the number of men.
So on the left tail of the distribution, if you will, men are vastly overrepresented,
and they're also vastly overrepresented on the right tail.
Yeah, in terms of geniuses.
In the wussy subjects like poetry, or some nonsense like that, where it's politically
correct and they give the award to whoever they damn well please...
Yeah, like that Indian woman from Nicaragua.
Well, yes, she would be a certain example, okay, they're the equal women, but if you
look at physics, math, there's no Nobel Prize, but the Fields Medal in math, if you look
at economics, there might have been one woman, there was this one woman, Joan Robinson, who
might have won it, but she lived before the Nobel Prize.
And the same is true in architecture, the same is true in literature, the same is true
In Masters of Painting, there are a couple of women who are up there, but for the most part, it's all men.
Yeah, look at music. I mean, there's Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi. I mean, you know, they're all men.
So, to make this clear, ladies, we're not denigrating women. We're saying that men are, and this is why this outlier is so important,
men are overrepresented at both ends, extreme genius and extreme dysfunction.
And if so, that must mean that the women are clumped in the middle.
Hi, Professor. My question actually was more of a statement, I guess. Does crime also be, is crime included in that disparity? Yes. And the fact that more women, I'm sorry, more men, you know, are serial murderers, rapists, things like that, I mean... He mentioned that. Well, I did mention that. If you go to jail, you'll see most of the cases.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Women outnumber women at both tails of the distribution.
For example...
No, but are you talking about in total numbers?
I meant general population.
No, no, no.
It's roughly equal.
Well, there's slightly more number of men who get killed, so it depends on...
If you take the overall population, I think women are like 51% or maybe 51.5% of the...
Yeah, they live seven years on average longer.
Right.
So there'd be a slight higher percentage of women, but nothing like two to one.
All right.
Jim, let me take Michelle next.
Go ahead, Michelle.
You're on.
Yeah.
I just wanted to make a quick point of that, I'm not sure if there's a lot of the listeners
out there that realize that when children are in school, when they're growing up, that
boys process way differently than girls do.
And that's part of the reason why you see more boys, per se, go into the sciences and
mathematics.
And dropping out.
True.
and that the girls tend to be more on the compliance side of following the rules and
doing what's right and more in the creative, artsy kind of thing.
That's why they're drugging millions of young American boys to make them behave more like
girls.
Right, right.
The dropout of boys, I think, is another function of the feminism run amok.
In the good old days, boys were boys.
and you can google it anywhere and look up any psychological report or background or whatever and you'll find it over and over again.
We've talked about that a lot over the years. One of my major betinoises is the drugging
of American schoolboys. It's a disgrace. It's ridiculous. It's profit-driven. It's driven
by profit and by the desires of the increasingly feminized schools to have the boys behave
like girls.
I would agree with the feminized school business. I don't think it's a matter of profits or
greed. I think right now all of us...
This is because you're an Austrian economist. But the fact is that this has been a fertile
field for fees for psychiatrists who prescribe the drugs and profits for the drug companies
that provide Ritalin and that family of drugs to make the boys behave. So I have to say
that plays into it.
Well, I think there's profit in everything, drugs or non-drugs. I don't think that profit
Dr. Block, it's a funny thing, you know, people claim to believe in free speech, but
when somebody actually practices it, they go up in arms.
And I didn't agree with everything you said at the talk, but I did agree with your right
to say it.
Isn't it information that you should have anyway, to reject if you wish?
I mean, why should it be hidden?
Right, exactly, and I think that it got a lot of people to at least think critically
and look at this information in a different way than they might have otherwise looked at it.
I'll bet you that the professors at Loyola, Maryland are probably out of, say, 200, about 170 are Democrats
and maybe 25 are Republicans, and there might be three or four libertarians.
The problem is that the students just get fed Marxist feminist drivel and they never get an alternative side because what they believe is having different skin color and different sexuality but not different ideas.
Exactly.
Students are getting cheated.
Billy, I wish we had more time but we're out of it. Thanks very much for joining in. We appreciate it. You were the frosting on the cake so to speak.
Professor, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us this afternoon and I'm all in favor of stirring up a fuss. Way to go.
Yes, thanks for having me.
All right, buddy. That's Professor Walter Block.