When Branch Rickey
integrated major league baseball in 1947 by hiring the great Jackie Robinson
to play first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he did not do so because he was
forced into it by any “civil rights” law. The federal civil rights laws
at that point were almost twenty years into the future. Nor was he
motivated by a sudden enlightenment on the issue of race. As the
president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rickey was paid to
make the Dodgers as profitable as possible. In order to do that, he had
to recruit and develop the best baseball players he could find, regardless of
skin color or anything else. He succeeded immediately with the hiring
of Robinson, as the Dodgers went to the World Series in that year, in no
small part due to the efforts of Jackie Robinson.
The Branch Rickey/Jackie
Robinson story illustrates the economics of discrimination, which modern
economists associate with Nobel laureates Gary Becker and Kenneth Arrow, both
of whom wrote books on the subject in
1957 and 1971 respectively. The theory is straightforward: If an
employer exploits any worker or workers (because of race or anything else,
including plain greed), this means that the worker is being paid significantly
less than her marginal productivity (i.e., her additional contribution to his
revenues). If she contributes say, $1000/week in revenues through her
work efforts but is only paid $100/week, this fact creates a profit
opportunity for competing businesses. A competitor can hire her away
for say, $200/week, which she would gladly accept, leaving the new employer
with an $800/week increase in revenues. Then another employer would be
motivated to offer her say, $300/week, $400/week, etc. until she is paid
close to her marginal product.
As Ludwig von Mises put it in Human Action (Scholar’s Edition, page 592),
the only way employers in a capitalist economy could get away with wage
exploitation would be if there were “a universal monopoly of all kinds of
production activities which can be created only by an institutional [i.e.,
governmental] restriction of access to entrepreneurship.” The only
place in the world where any such universal employer monopoly has ever
existed is the socialist countries of the twentieth century, such as the
Soviet Union, where everyone was a government employee and paid
whatever crumbs their political masters deemed necessary to keep them alive
and working. The worst example in world history of the exploitation of
labor took place under the Marxian-inspired regimes.
Which brings us to the
recent Donald Sterling/Los Angeles Clippers saga whereby Mr. Sterling, the
billionaire owner of the professional basketball team, was drummed out of the
NBA (and of polite society) for making racist comments (telling a
“girlfriend” some fifty years his junior to not bring “black people” to his
basketball games).
From all news accounts,
Donald Sterling is a creepy character who may well have racial hatred in his
heart. But even so, in order to survive in one of the few remaining
industries that relies almost exclusively on meritocracy, he was forced by
competition to make multi-millionaires out of dozens of black athletes
over the past thirty years as owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball
team. Just this past season alone he paid the following
African-American athletes the following sums (according to the Web site “HoopsHype”): Chris Paul ($18.7 million); Blake Griffin
($16.4 million); DeAndre Jordan ($11 million);
Jamal Crawford ($5.2 million); Jared Dudley ($4.25 million); Matt Barnes
($3.25 million); Darren Collison ($1.9 million);
Willie Green ($1.4 million); Ryan Hollins ($1.2
million); Reggie Bullock ($1.15 million). Donald Sterling did not pay
these huge salaries because he loves black people; he paid them because he
loves making money (or at least trying to).
One of the leading tenets
of political correctness in the university world today is that, because
America is such a racist country, and because capitalism is supposedly such a
useful tool for the exploitation of labor, black people can never make it on
their own. They supposedly need to be coddled, protected, employed,
advanced, and babied by the state and its paid minions in the university
world and elsewhere. Nothing disproves this flaky superstition more
convincingly than the meritocracy of professional sports.
The economics of
discrimination is a well-guarded secret at most universities because it so
easily disproves the politically-correct “black-people-can-never-make-it-on-their-own”
theory. When an academic does make the economically-informed argument
about how competition deals with wage discrimination, he is typically
libeled, smeared, and denounced as a racist (or worse) by the cultural
Marxists on the faculty, if not the university administration as well.
This was the case with Professor Walter Block several years ago after
presenting a state-of-the-art lecture on the economics of discrimination at
Loyola University Maryland, based on the pioneering work of his old
dissertation advisor at Columbia University, the recently deceased Gary
Becker (R.I.P.).
