Critical Thinking ASSIGNMENT: Middle Man Minorities

What are the origins and common characteristics of middleman minorities and why have they been subject to mob violence. Does game theory explain why the use of violence against middle man minorities was seen as fair? Does segregation of middle man minorities help to sustain a storyline about them and, at the same time, sustain a storyline that middle man minorities might have about outsiders? What difference in ideological perspective is there when comparing Thomas Sowell’s “Is Anti-Semitism Generic?” article (in modified extract below) with the “Middleman Minorities” article in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences?

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. (June 2, 2013). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045301549.html

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The following is an extract (with some sentences deleted or altered when shortened) from: http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/7727

July 30, 2005 hoover digest » 2005 no. 3 » history and culture

Is Anti-Semitism Generic? by Thomas Sowell

What do Jews have in common with Armenians, Ibos, and Marwaris? An historically similar pattern of economic and social roles—and of persecution. By Thomas Sowell.

Mob violence and mass expulsions have been directed at various times in history toward the Jewish diaspora. Yet many of the same attitudes and actions—and some of the very same words and phrases—have been directed at other groups. What these other groups—the Armenians in the , Ibos in , Marwaris in Burma, in Southeast Asia, and Lebanese in a number of countries—have had in common with the Jews has not been religion, race, or language, but their economic and social roles.

These groups have all been, at some point in their history, “middleman minorities”—that is, people whose work takes place somewhere between producers and consumers, whether in retail trade or money-lending. Often these middleman minorities began at the petty level of a peddler with a pack on his back or a little pushcart. Even such large enterprises as Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Levi Strauss among the Jews, and Haggar and Farah among the Lebanese, began at the level of the lowly peddler.

These and other similarities among middleman minorities in countries around the world have caused the overseas Chinese to be called “the Jews of Southeast Asia,” the Ibos to be called “the Jews of Nigeria,” the Parsees to be called “the Jews of ,” and the Lebanese to be called “the Jews of .”

What is chilling is what other things these groups have been called. “Parasites” has been another epithet applied to middleman minorities because, as retailers or money-lenders, they do not produce any physical product but are simply intermediaries between manufacturers and customers. “Bloodsuckers” is another epithet expressing the notion that middleman minorities do not add anything to the wealth of a community or nation but simply manage to extract a share of the existing wealth for themselves, at the expense of others. This charge has rung out against innumerable middleman minorities, from the villages of India to black ghettos in the United States.

“Clannish” is another epithet applied to the Parsees in India, to the Jews in the United States, and to other middleman minorities in places in between. To a certain extent, clannishness goes with the territory, so long as these groups remain locally predominant in retailing or in money-lending. Where a minority operates most of the retail stores or pawn shops and other money-lending places in a community with a different majority population, the whole basis of the middleman minority’s livelihood is their cultural difference from that majority. Southeast Asian peasants who did not save could get loans and credit from overseas Chinese middlemen only because the overseas Chinese did save. For the overseas Chinese to allow their children to become part of the larger culture around them and absorb their values and behavior patterns would have been to have the family commit economic suicide. The same has been true of other middleman minorities around the world.

The economic necessity of maintaining a separate culture has meant not only social separation but also resentments of that separation by the surrounding community—resentments that could easily be whipped up to political hostility or outright violence by suitably talented demagogues. This has happened in innumerable times and places, as mobs have been aroused to lethal fury against the Marwaris in Burma, the Ibos in Northern Nigeria, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the overseas Chinese in Saigon, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, and the Jews in many parts of both medieval and modern Europe.

Why such venom against this particular kind of minority? Why such violence against groups who are themselves typically non-violent?

Part of the answer may be the role of middleman minority, as such. Retailing and money-lending have long been regarded as not “really” adding anything to the economic well-being of a community, even when the people engaged in those activities have not been a separate group within the community. After all, both medieval Europe and the Islamic countries regarded the charging of interest as a sin and, in other societies in Asia and Africa, it was considered morally suspect, even without a religious prohibition against it. An often-cited article by a British economist who was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II pointed out how middleman economic activities arose spontaneously among the POWs—and how the individuals who engaged in these activities were resented by the other POWs, even though these individuals were not from some middleman minority, but ranged from a Catholic priest to a Sikh.

For much of human history, most people did arduous work in agriculture, and the rise of industrial societies meant for most of them simply the transfer of the scene of that arduous labor from the farm to the factory. In that setting, people who made a living more easily, and with clean hands, just by selling what others had produced, and who received back more money than they had lent, were readily resented. Add in the factor of ethnic differences in the case of middleman minorities, and there are the ingredients for resentments to arise spontaneously and for demagogues to be able to raise those resentments to a higher pitch.

Even middleman minorities with little or no education themselves have often seen the value of education for their children. Thus, even though the Chinese immigrants who arrived in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century were often illiterate, once they began to prosper in their little shops and other enterprises, they began to finance the creation of Chinese schools. In later generations, the Chinese minority in Malaysia produced an absolute majority of the students at the University of Malaysia, until government-imposed quotas cut back their numbers. They were an overwhelming majority of those receiving degrees in engineering in the 1960s—404 Chinese to 4 Malays. This concentration of college and university students from middleman minority backgrounds in the more difficult and more remunerative specialties has been a common pattern, whether among the overseas Chinese in Malaysia, among the Lebanese in Brazil, or among Jews in a number of countries.

In schools and colleges, the children of middleman minorities tended to excel, whether among the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, or the Jews in the United States. But even the Jews, with their legendary reverence for learning, did not rise in America initially through education. A survey of students in the College of the City of New York in 1951, when the students there were predominantly Jewish, showed that only 17 percent of their fathers who were born before 1911 had completed the eighth grade.

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the .

Adapted from the new book Black Rednecks and White Liberals, by Thomas Sowell, published by Encounter Books. © 2005 Thomas Sowell.