Jacob Savage has penned a brilliant piece about the discrimination faced by young white men in certain US industries, namely academia, journalism and creative arts. The article deservedly went viral. However, one weakness is that Savage left himself open to the charge of having cherry picked some of his figures.
He writes, “Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men.” And he cites similar numbers for a few other schools. Which seems to suggest that universities are discriminating against white men. However, you can’t infer that much from a handful of schools in a country with literally hundreds. Perhaps some universities hired few white men and others hired many, and Savage just happened to pick ones that hired few. (I don’t seriously believe this. I’m just imagining what a critic might say.)
As a matter of fact, Matt Bruenig ran the numbersand found that the percentage of white men employed in “arts, design, entertainment, sports and media” has remained relatively stable over time. He also observed barely any change in the percentage of white men aged 30–39 in the top 10% of the income distribution. Though as some commenters noted, Savage’s argument doesn’t necessarily predict that white men’s income should have declined because the alleged discrimination is happening in jobs that confer prestige and influence without offering particularly high pay.
Is Savage wrong? While he might have slightly overstated his case, I’m pretty sure he’s onto something. To begin with, some of his figures clearly weren’t cherry picked.
For example, he points out that the Disney Writing Program “has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past decade—none to white men”. Zero out of 124 seems rather unlikely to be a fluke.1 And while there might be hundreds of universities in the US, how many companies like Disney are there? Five?