John Staddon, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, brings unusual precision to a subject that has long been governed more by social convention than by rigorous inquiry in his work, Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation (Academica Press, 2026). His background in experimental psychology and quantitative methods equips him to examine the empirical literature on group differences with a dispassion rarely found in this field. The result is a book that challenges, on both philosophical and empirical grounds, the dominant egalitarian framework shaping contemporary debates on race and inequality.
That framework rests substantially on John Rawls, whose difference principle holds that social and economic inequalities should be arranged to maximize the benefit of the least advantaged. Staddon identifies two problems with this. The first is technical: comparing how much one person values something against how much another does is, as mainstream economics acknowledges, scientifically impossible. The principle is therefore philosophical assertion rather than workable theory. The second objection is economic. Redistributing wealth downward consistently overlooks what the wealthy actually do with their resources. The affluent disproportionately invest in new technologies, businesses, and ventures that over time tend to produce broad-based benefits. Wealth directed toward the less affluent is more commonly consumed immediately. A principle that systematically diverts resources from those best positioned to deploy them productively risks undermining the very economic dynamism that raises living standards across the income spectrum.
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