Thomas Sowell has had a huge impact on me and my views on economics. I'm from a poor working-class background and am often irritated by the needless language barriers of academics.
> “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech.”
Sowell is unique in this respect. He's book, "Basic Economics" is full of extremely relatable examples of economics in practice. It's one of the few books on economics that's a great read regardless of your background or level of academic achievement.
I wish other writers would take this to heart. Reading The New Yorker it’s as if their language is a shibboleth and if they didn’t use it, it would alienate their audience for using average language, yet they are the same people who pontificate and pretend they advocate for the lower classes.
Let them. If you have the psychological need to constantly show how smart you are, your life will be very stressful indeed.
You will want to manipulate others to get confirmation of your acrobatics and always be on the lookout for disproof. This will lead to you limiting your life severely for fear of actually finding it.
Somewhat a tangent. I used to play a lot of poker. One angle that would work frequently to get information from people is exactly this.
Say something like "Ah you had AJ", even though you don't believe that. Then you might get a response "No I had __" or they might even show you their hand.
It's all tide to the need to prove how smart we are as humans.
> Years ago my mother used to say to me, "In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.
I don't think they're signaling intelligence as much as they're signaling a specific subculture of East-Coast WASPy humanities-focused aristocrats that the most "prestigious" papers are steeped in. For example, the famous blind animus that that memeplex has towards tech certainly isn't rooted in looking down on the _intelligence_ of those steeped in Californian tech culture, but rather their will and ability to signal social class effectively.
It's a weird inversion, since the signals being defended are deeply illiberal: they exclude individualism, weirdness, inclusiveness, systems striving to be built on merit, etc etc.
I'm pretty familiar with this tendency because I come from a family who's pretty steeped in this kind of subculture. Growing up in CA and moving to the Bay as a teen, I absorbed the tech/Burning Man/CA memeplex of humanism and inherent equality and individualism way too deeply not to overwhelm my upbringing, but there are certain class markers I haven't shed, and un-self-conscious use of dense prose is one of them[1]. I actually did try to make my speech more casual when I became aware of these class markers during a period of teen rebellion, but changing how you communicate is a pretty complicated uphill battle, so I ended up with a weird hybrid of big words and idiomatic expressions (and lots of cursing, in verbal communication -_-)
[1] I want to emphasize again that this isn't quite an intelligence thing: my best friend is definitely smarter than me, and he speaks significantly more casually/colloquially than me because of his family's background.
I personally find much of the prose in the New Yorker clear, even inspiring. Especially w.r.t. its travel writing, I don't think any publication better captures the magic and the essence of the experience. [0] [1]
I also think Emily Nussbaum is a wonderful TV critic and more or less deserves credit for elevating TV criticism to equal status with art & movie reviews.
Having said that, I quite take your point and I am always pleased when a researcher takes the time to write clearly. It's a skill that needs to be practiced and developed, but unfortunately, for most academics, investing in that skill isn't obviously a good career choice.
It's not just the vocabulary, but the structure, the whole style. It's long, it's very meandering, it's very illustrative, but rarely direct and informative. Not many people have the time and desire to read something that presents so little value to them.
I might be a minority, but I'm willing to stick out my neck for meandering, illustrative, and indirect writing.
Don't get me wrong, if it was the only thing available, I'd probably go crazy, too. But I believe there is a time and place in my "reading diet" for this kind of long-form journalism.
As your adjectives suggest, New Yorker articles are less bullets of breathlessly-repeated facts, and more illustrations of nuanced scenes and interactions. I think it's natural, because life is messy and meandering, too.
That being said, most of their articles have very well-defined and well-informed points. They don't make them by stating it up front, but by drawing a picture, observing some of its details, and asking you to form your own opinion. We can disagree, but to me it feels more intellectually-honest than other forms of journalism.
Yes, it takes longer to get there. Yes, some of the details (what clothes people are wearing, what the rooms smell like, whatever) could probably be removed without compromising the structural integrity. But the New Yorker is about structural integrity and style. It's like the "literary fiction" of news. I don't read each article in each magazine, but it's still pretty rare that I've regretted finishing one; maybe once every other month.
What about the bleatings of a person like Kevin D. Williamson, whose prose I identify as horrifically boring, not only because he isn't a deep thinker on any of the subject matter he writes about, but also because he spends about 80% of any essay trying to beat his audience over the head with how familiar he is with obscure and / or inconsequential tangential topics to the matter at hand. I don't have an issue with writers being descriptive. I very much have a problem with writers trying to prove they're the Dennis Miller of serious thought.
I can't say I've heard of Mr. Williamson, but it looks like he hasn't written for the New Yorker.
I'm talking more of the style used by Ben Taub [0] [1], or Sam Knight [2] [3]. More investigative than "think piece", although there are some big ideas in the presentation.
I can understand this point of view but the point of elevated language and academic jargon is to allow for a more accurate and nuanced discussion without having to re-state assumptions and underlying principles. It's often not done well or used to obfuscate ideas, but the core principle has merit.
Yes, but. Somewhere along the way science, research, the topics science "concerns itself with" and everything suddenly exploded over the last hundred or so years, and especially since we have this thing called the Internet the number of published papers, science journalism and journals grown exponentially.
One one hand, it's great. More science/research is being done, but on the other hand it becomes less and less accessible due to the extreme specificity, very narrow scopes and due to simply being on the very edge of human knowledge accumulation.
And of course, theoretically whatever paper one is reading one can "simply" follow the references and look up the introduced technical terms. Occasionally there are great survey papers that take a look at a (sub-sub-sub-)field, and again from time to time there are amazing science communicators that allow laypeople to have some kind of real grasp on these questions and topics.
Yet, I think, it's clear that publishing terse PDFs is not the best way to communicate research and results.
And one of the big finding is that being stubbornly terse is bad.
And it's just a step, that this trial did not check, but maybe requiring researchers to spend a few days of their precious time to write a few pages about what they are actually doing, introduce the terms, techniques, methods, wouldn't be that bad, maybe even it would be helpful ... and this is basically pre-registration, and this is basically the grant proposal. And it'd be double-plus-good to link all of these in an open and really accessible manner in those fancy PDFs. (Or better yet, just use a HTML site. LaTeX is nice, but.)
The New Yorker is an upper-middle class publication. That is its target audience. Other magazines owned by the same media conglomerate, Conde Nast, are broadly similar in orientation: Vogue, Bon Appetit, Vanity Fair, GQ, Architectural Digest. I don't think they 'advocate for the lower classes', subjectively or objectively. I read very few socialists and communists in the New Yorker!
People should be in control of the money they earn, because that's the only time there's any skin in the game.
If you think The Government == The People, you're out of your mind. It's a nice ideal, but it's never been achieved in a modern nation state. Some nation states are less abusive than others, but that's as good as it gets.
The government is careless with spending and can't be trusted with people's money because they didn't earn the money they have. They took it out of people's paychecks, and if they run out, they can levy more taxes or just print more, there's no incentive to be thoughtful, careful, or diligent. At any rate, when the government is reckless with people's money, it's never the government that has to feel any pain.
I think you’re talking past each other. In communism, in principle, things belong “to the people”, but in reality they belong to the state which can decide what you get, and taken away (as form of punishment). On the other hand, in democracies governments rarely leave things to “the people” they take the money to the feds, the state, county and then the local gov... Do I want my money going to podunk or a mismanaged (corrupt city), or locally where we have more of a voice?
That's entirely the point of the idealogy. The problem is that after the anti-communist purges of the 60s', there's no representation of the lower classes in academia or political science. This is less of a problem in European countries where their socialist parties actually have a strong working-class background.
Depends on the socialists or communists, but historically - often, yes. Certainly more so than capitalists, who are either indifferent or actively hostile, but may pretend to be otherwise as a matter of political expediency.
Overall, I like his writing, but his style can also come across as dismissive; as though he is obviously right, before he has really addressed all lines of criticism.
When used to explain something, this style is great, because he gets his point across efficiently and provides enough backing so that you can remember it. And if you read enough of his writing, he brings out the nuance in other books and the intellectual detail is clearly there.
But I can see how his straightforward style would be unpersuasive. Any one statement or paragraph or essay can be picked at by someone looking to do so.
As a teacher and thought leader, he's been very successful. As a political commentator, he's preaching to the choir.
This is why I've never been tempted by his books. His editorials come off not so much dismissive as smugly dismissive: he's not only obviously right, anyone who questions him is obviously stupid.
I don't know about him as a teacher, but as a thought leader, he is successful because he says the things that the right people want to hear.
Try a Conflict Of Visions. It's not at all smug or dismissive. In fact it's one of the most balanced books I've ever read. I didn't know who the author was before I read it, and by the time I finished, I felt I still knew nothing about the author. But I also felt I suddenly understood politics and the world, for the first time in my life. It was a mind-expanding experience. I immediately bought several copies so I could give them away to friends and family.
Later I found his videos and was surprised to learn he's a black conservative. That wasn't apparent from the book.
I would guess what you’re seeing is not an arrogant man who anyone would be stupid to question (though most would, to be honest), but someone who has devoted 50 or so years to learning and seeing every new generation make the same mistakes that he once made. He was originally a marxist.
But if you aren’t even willing to listen to him, it’s moot anyway.
That's a standard rhetorical technique you'll see in much right-wing writing. Statements are made as if they're simply correct by definition, and there is no space for argument or dissent.
Is he genuinely objective and data-driven? How many of his studies have been replicated? How many competing studies - which he fails to mention - disagree with his conclusions?
It's easy to be right when you simply assert your idea of truth. But that's rhetoric, not science. Science is peer review and open debate, and I don't see him engaging in that.
It's also a common technique among teachers, because teachers are not trying to persuade skeptics. You are presenting it as some kind of manipulation, but it's really just a different audience. And it's a lot easier to read the straightforward style, and learn a lot of stuff quickly.
His conclusions are not really the most important thing about his writing, anyway. He brings forward a lot of good approaches that are an improvement over other common approaches. For instance, he avoids grouping people by a snapshot in time, and instead analyzes them over their lifetime, or even generations.
And he also just asks a lot of interesting questions and dives into the data and finds interesting results.
He's also less US-centric than many writers. Sometimes that alone is enough to advance the conversation by breaking us our of our bubble.
Not just right-wing. I've seen the same approach from marxists. (Not an exaggeration or a projection - from literal marxists.) The unstated, unproven assumption is that Marx was right, and the analysis proceeds from there to make dogmatic statements about the economy and/or society. That's fine, if the readers are also convinced marxists. But if someone else reads it, they very quickly think "Wait a minute, I don't agree with your premise, and you did nothing to convince me. Why should I believe your conclusions?"
If you're familiar with Lakoff you'll know there's a difference in tone which is based on a difference on associated family positioning.
Conservatives tend to paternalism. Marxists are more likely to be oppositional, because Marxism and socialism are underdog discourses, and they don't have the advantage of assuming that general readers will agree - especially in the US, where the default position for most of the population is aggressive hostility towards Socialism and incandescent fury towards Marxism, without really knowing much about either.
That may be true. But in response, they should write differently. If you're the underdog discourse, don't start the conversation by assuming that you're right. Worse, don't start it by assuming that the reader agrees that you're right.
I picked up on that too, such a shock of recognition when the author hit us with that one. It's so true, there's something effectively plainspoken about his prose that has such economy to his words. It's incredible stuff how crystal his writing can be.
I recently started to read his book Intellectuals and Race, but stopped because his putative citations did not support his claim that whites in America are at a disadvantage relative to Asian Americans w.r.t. mortgage applications and keeping their jobs during downturns.
I think he has interesting things to say, and is certainly a great interview subject, but I would approach his claims with caution.
I spent months working 20 hour days on a major project. Got a huge bonus.
More than half removed for taxes. I suddenly had opinion on tax policy.
Basic Economics was such a huge eye opener on how things really work. Not just aristocratic theory talk. So much better then college economics class I took.
One important impact he had on my thinking is that he rejects groupings of people based on snapshots in time.
For instance, it is very common to use income as a proxy for your economic success, and then to group people into quintiles, calling the bottom quintile "the poor". It seems reasonable, but it's wrong enough to lead to very wrong conclusions. A college student living on their own will appear to be a "poor household", even though many are likely to be in the top quintile later on in their life. These scenarios seem like exceptions, but when you add them up (as Dr. Sowell does), they show a very different picture.
Following people (statistically) through their lives, and across generations, is a common theme in his work. It's harder to get good data than the snapshot-in-time approach, but he does the work, and it's so much more informative.
> A college student living on their own will appear to be a "poor household", even though many are likely to be in the top quintile later on in their life.
A great example from the other side of the spectrum is house sales: Anyone who needs to move and owns a house typically sells their house and buys a new one. During that year, they'll sometimes show up as having extremely high income. Depending on how often they move, this could have a real impact.
I don't know if that's true. A house sale goes on a Schedule D, which gets pulled into Gross Income. I don't think Gross Income is what's used in those income calculations in the stats being discussed here?
A researcher having the tools to exclude a particular type of income that throws off a statistic is a different matter than that researcher having the knowledge of those tools or the lack of ideological bias required to use them.
Interesting read, but supposedly when we're talking about changes in social mobility we really care about the change in the percentage of people that are richer than their parents? Indeed towards the end of the article the author says:
> There is one study of progress over time that follows parents and children that is gloomy and that is “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Mobility Since 1940” by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang (Chetty et al) They find that if you were born in 1940, you had a 92% chance of surpassing your parents income. But if you were born in 1984, the number is a depressing 50%. Chetty et al control for age — this is for parents and children when they are both 30. This does suggest that the American dream is dead or at least dying — half of the children do better than their parents but half do worse, suggesting no progress over time.
The author then says that we should measure income differently by using a non-standard measure of inflation. But if we had just used that non-standard measure on the wage data of Piketty et al., we would've arrived at the same conclusion anyway?
I'm not sure "richer than their parents" alone, is a fair metric for social mobility. If you're born in the top 20% and stay in the top 20% (not advancing higher), is that really a social concern? I mean, Bill Gates kids are unlikely to do better than their parents, but that's ok.
From what I've read, most social mobility metrics are from low quintiles to higher quintiles.
So if in 1984, 50% of children do better than their parents, and that 50% is mostly the bottom half (I have no idea if it is), then you're doing pretty good in terms of social mobility, no? People making below the median are doing better.
And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.
> And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.
They address that in the paper:
> Higher GDP growth rates do not substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents because a large fraction of GDP goes to a small number of high income earners today. To see why absolute mobility is insensitive to the growth rate when growth is distributed unequally, consider the extreme case in which one child obtains all of the increase in GDP. In this case, higher GDP growth rates would have no effect on absolute mobility. More generally, GDP growth has larger effects on absolute mobility when growth is spread more broadly, allowing more children to achieve higher living standards than their parents. Higher GDP growth and a broader distribution of growth have a multiplicative effect on absolute mobility: Absolute mobility is highest when GDP growth rates are high and growth is spread broadly across the distribution.
What I've seen contradicts the authors rosy glasses. 5 to 10 really good years often doesn't add much to 40 iffy years. And 5 bad years does a complete number on people.
The problem with Dr. Sowell is that he believes that "when he adds everything up" that it tells an accurate and whole picture. To him, people are a simple variable to plug into an even simpler economics equation.
He could learn a few things concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty from Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman.
A few points...
+ Sowell never truly questions the data that's the foundation of his work. For Sowell, history and historical data as reported by "conquerors" is never to be questioned. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have famously proved how problematic this approach is.
+ Sowell refuses to address human decision-making, judgment and uncertainty. For him, power and violence do not matter. If the black family structure was better and enough for self-improvement post-slavery then why did millions of blacks flee the South before the enactment of massive liberal civil rights policies?
In Sowell's world, America was great from 1863-1930. A time of great uncertainty and white terrorism that resulted in the Great Migration.
Hmm, I don't recognise that description. His books "A Conflict of Visions" and "Intellectuals and society" are all about human decision making, judgement and uncertainty.
I've read six Thomas Sowell books in the past few years. His book Basic Economics is a classic, but my favorite of his is Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One. It covers the things that the former does but, as the title suggests, applies it to a real-life scenario. He then walks through the scenario as it plays out to demonstrate his point to the reader. For example, when a city artificially lowers the rent, it makes apartments more affordable, but what happens afterwards? he would then play the scenario out as it affects tenants, landlords, and the rental market. I highly recommend it!
Does he talk about job creation? I'm curious because, as much as people talk about job creation, it doesn't seem to be part of most economics curricula.
I’ve been reading a lot of his books lately, I cannot recommend enough. He does take a conservative approach to a lot of topics but the way he breaks things down helps you understand why.
His book Basic Economics taught me more than any economics classes did in school.
I also enjoyed Basic Economics. It really encourages thinking in terms of second order effects, unintended consequences or what Bastiat referred to as the unseen.
City I lived in announced they were implementing rent freeze on all the mobile home parks. I explained to my parents (in a mobile home) that this was bad news.
Few days later they, and everyone in city got an exviction notice. Mobile home parks all decided to close down and sell the land.
Basic Economics is must read book - and he keeps improving on it. He releases new editions every few years with more recent examples of principles at work. He never stops working on it.
Basic Economics is required reading for anyone who wants to claim they understand economic principles. Even if you are a hard-left Marxist you must understand classical economic theories in order to feel comfortable debating them and more firm in your own beliefs.
Basic Economics isn’t even required reading in an intro econ course. It probably has value for its alternative perspectives on a lot of economic concepts, but to say it’s “required reading for anyone who wants to claim they understand economic principles” is pretty demonstrably false.
As someone whose introduction to economics was Basic Economics, I don't think the statement reflects poorly on either the book or academia.
The book is a pithy, digestible introduction to a bunch of basic topics in economics. It is also lacking a lot of the detail and mathematical explanation of introductory university courses.
For example, I understood the basic concept of comparative advantage after listening to the book, but when I later revisited the topic using a textbook, the graphs and worked examples gave me a clearer picture and it was better related to adjacent concepts like marginal cost, the production-possibility frontier, etc.
I don't have the impression that academic economics as presented to undergraduates diverges greatly from the book, although it has been years since I heard it and my recollection is fuzzy.
It’s a more telling statement about the book. “My book is too edgy for academia” is a worn out trope used by pseudo intellectuals. The real reason Sowell’s book is not required is because it does not involve the necessary rigor or mathematical methodology when introducing economic principles. If people want to pretend that’s elitist, so be it. Antivaxxers do the same thing.
Mathematical rigour doesn't necessarily translate to correctness. A mathematics-first approach encourages oversimplified assumptions. An example is the efficient markets hypothesis, which is the "spherical frictionless cow" of economics.
We don’t use mathematical models because they are correct. We use them because they are more concretely measurable, and thus falsifiable. Without them, it becomes too easy to make vague statements about economics then make ad hoc explanations for why you were right. This is what so-called economists like Sowell do.
Wrong. It makes the oversimplified assumptions more clearly identifiable, instead of concealing them in prose which is not measurable. This is why they are superior, because we can clearly identify why they are wrong, and by how much. This is how science and the positivist framework improve our knowledge.
Perhaps, but in physics the maths and experiments run very close.
In fields like economics it's easier to make a grandiose and "falsifiable" piece of math that is absolutely correct but doesn't actually reflect anything real.
Or more often reflects a tiny part of a first order effect.
Nobody is "blinded because the math is right". You're using the same sort of argumentation that is used in all of the pseudo sciences.
If you know of a way to improve upon the existing methodologies, then show it to us, and be precise. Then you will have an argument that deserves to be engaged with. Ambiguous claims that the math "doesn't actually reflect anything real" sound intelligent, but really aren't saying much at all.
> He does take a conservative approach to a lot of topics...
Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles [1] is, ironically, a very good starting point in understanding what makes Sowell "conservative" (the Constrained Vision) vs "progressive" (the Unconstrained Vision). I think this is the work that impressed Steven Pinker.
The categories get really messy, for example when he describes Marxism as a hybrid ideology, but the core idea is that people tend to believe either: 1. we are made of crooked timber and are made better by social structure, or 2. our potential is being held back by selfish oppressors/exploiters.
Regardless of which vision drives you, I imagine Thomas Sowell would do very well in Bryan Caplan's Ideological Turing Test [2].
I agree with some of the criticisms, but in general I think the dichotomy of the two visions is appropriate for explaining why two individuals may irreconcilably disagree on a particular issue at a given point in time.
"Constrained" is in the spirit of Adam Smith, Burke and Hayek (all of whom would be aghast at being labeled "conservative"); "unconstrained" is in the spirit of Rousseau, and in particular his claim that "man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
The Constrained vision assumes that the best we can do is choose a set of trade-offs that are least bad; the Unconstrained vision assumes that trade-offs are illusions imposed by defective institutions, and so if we improved/reformed/abolished the institutions, we could eliminate the trade-offs.
There's a lot more to it, so you should read the book, but that's the basic thesis.
It's a great book and one you should truly read before passing judgement on. It's helped me rationalize the various current political and social issues in the US a lot as I've read it.
I'll definitely add it to my list. I've generally found that a healthy study of psychology and economics, along with a deep dive into US history has given me a fairly clear picture of where things are today, how we got there and noticeable forces at work in public messaging/trends.
> If you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, “What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?” A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?”
Krugman overlooks that many conservatives were once liberals, while the reverse is typically not true. That doesn’t mean that those folks were wrong before and are correct now. But in terms of Krugman’s proposed test, they can probably at least articulate the opposite view based on having once held those beliefs.
Speaking for myself: I was a pretty standard agnostic coastal liberal back in high school, while wife was in Iowa reading National Review. We’re the same age and have experienced the same political history over the last 20 years. But I don’t think it was until recently that I could’ve cogently articulated her views on those various events. More importantly, I don’t think I could even have cogently articulated what she viewed as the parameters of what was being debated. (That is to say, I perceived a political debate being about X, while she perceived it being about Y.) She, on the other hand, is pretty good at articulating what I thought back then—like most young people her friends held liberal views.
Opposite of my personal anecdata as well. In the 90s I was a National Review-reading, Limbaugh-listening conservative. It started changing in the early 2000s when GWB invaded Iraq. Voted for Obama in '08 (a centrist) and Bernie in '16 (a Leftist). Now I identify as a mostly Left of center progressive.
Most young people of "political age" (over 16 or so) in the 60s, 70s, an 80s were to the left. Today, those older demographics tend to swing to the right. I suppose you could make the case that Democrats die earlier than Republicans, but I doubt that is what's happening here.
Just about every Marxist on the planet believes that we are "made better by social structure", so I think that characterization of what Marxists vs. non-Marxists believe is unhelpful.
I haven't read Sowell but is this what he means by a 'hybrid ideology'? My impression of Marxists is that they view the world through both lenses and believe #1 can be achieved when #2 is solved through revolution or other means.
Isn't that the opposite of what Marx believed? His world view was that a perfect society (communism) would arise when virtually all institutions were abolished, because in his view, the imperfections of human nature were all caused by "alienation" which itself came from the capitalist system.
Actual communists tended to start out living that creed: they'd systematically destroy any existing institution. But then they'd find society didn't work at all without them, so they'd pretty rapidly build new institutions, that all happened to be controlled by them.
Conservatives on the other hand are, by their nature, conservative about changing things. They tend to regard existing social structures as evolved and thus encoding great wisdom, even if it can't be easily articulated. To change those institutions is thus highly risky, even if it may not be immediately apparent why that is. This is the opposite of Marxism, which is a utopian ideology in which changing everything at once is not too much.
A Conflict of Visions is not a book about Marxism, it is a description of a model to help us understand our ideological preferences. Like all models, it is wrong but sometimes it is useful.
I strongly disagree with Sowell on almost every topic one can think of, either in terms of philosophy, society, or economics, but I admire his outspokenness and plain speaking, as the article notes he is known for, and it's a shame to read ad-hominem style attacks have been made against him. From what I can gather, however, the academic literature engages better with his arguments than journalists do.
It's not that I disagree with his use of statistics, but my own philosophical framework (particularly inspired by the ideas of J.E. Roemer, Gerry Cohen, Nitzan & Bichler, and more recently Roberto Veneziani) sees serious problems (I think exploitation, domination, alienation, and insufficient focus on capabilities qua equality of opportunity) with not only capital in general but the state too.
I can't easily recall the statistics or framework he used, though the disagreement between our frameworks of society (such as methodological individualism) was what stood out to me. I recall Pikkety making a more convincing case on the economic side, and Frederic Lordon making a more convincing case on the philosophical side. I also disagree with Sowell on his position on sweatshops (again, not rejecting the principle on which it is made, which is that the workers would not be employed otherwise, or have lower wages from domestic companies, but rather a disagreement on the reach and justification of that argument).
>>with not only capital in general but the state too
Why should capital in general be a problem? Isn't it crony capitalism the actual problem? If you are very rich, that isn't usually a problem to your neighbor. But if you are very rich and can thus get away with tax evasion but your neighbor lands in jail for the same reason, isn't that when it actually becomes a problem?
I haven't read Taleb's response; I might, though Pikkety is less my focus, because I think he spends a lot of time arguing for the system, but continuing along the line of reducing inequality, rather than questioning the system itself.
I see capital as a problem precisely not as a matter of quantity (one person having more than another), but as a matter of quality. While 'crony capitalism' is obviously a problem, I don't think it's the root of the problem, philosophically speaking. I'd still think that a system in which a rich person can't get away with tax evasion has serious problems. This is where I likely diverge from, say, Warren's or even Sanders' platform (speaking as someone not from the US).
I think deep issues (exploitation, domination, and alienation) deserve a look, even if they seem to be an alien perspective from the outset.
I know that; I think his book on Marx(ism), from the parts I've read, is actually one of the better ones written by mainstream economists, but that's quite a low bar. There are some good criticisms of it floating around on the 'net.
The best criticism of Marxism I've read is in the introduction to Human Action by Mises where he shows that the concept of class struggle, specifically class itself, is illogical.
Also FWIW I have been upvoting you as you get downvoted.
Personally I would recommend starting with Human Action by Mises as it represents essentially the purest distillation of that school of thought and the culmination of a lot of Mises' earlier works. Rothbard studied under Mises so it would serve as a good introduction to him as well.
At the end of the day, when it comes to Ludwig von Mises, it's a question of whether or not you believe humans have free will. If you've studied long enough to become a neurologist, you find that free will is laughable.
The one place where I align with the Piketty-neo-Marxist crowd is that economic ignorance leads to some terrible, terrible public policy. I daresay Sowell believes the same. But it ends there.
His argument that Donald Trump would be a better choice for President than Hillary Clinton because the former would be easier to remove from office than the latter, arguing specifically that "congressional Republicans would [not] automatically spring to his defense, if he overstepped the line". Doesn't seem like a great example of keen political judgment in hindsight.
"Numerous examples" is fantastic but what he said was a generalization and as a generalization it holds up. What % of congressional Republicans would you estimate "did not automatically spring to his defense"?
That's a pretty uninformed reading of the situation as it happened. If you followed conservative media throughout the process it wasn't at all obvious that establishment Republicans were going to actually mount a defense of the President. There was a lot of wavering back and forth as the narrative evolved and was fought over. It was not automatic at all.
Your reading of the situation seems predicated on a conveniently pedantic definition of "automatic" from my perspective. I watched the entirety proceedings as they transpired and don't recall witnessing much hesitation from Republicans, but it's definitely possible that by not "following conservative media" I overlooked the actually agonizing deliberation that transpired behind the scenes. I would love to educate myself more on this topic, can you link to any examples of what you're talking about?
> but it's definitely possible that by not "following conservative media" I overlooked the actually agonizing deliberation that transpired behind the scenes.
This is actually exactly what I'm talking about, not the proceedings themselves. With the exception of the potential wildcard of the Bolton testimony (which never ended up happening) at that point the party had essentially been whipped and it was just theatre.
Up until Matt Gaetz did his stunt disrupting the private/secret hearings of House witnesses there wasn't very much fire on the Republican side which was why these close-door pre-impeachment vote hearings happened in the first place. Remember that at certain point there was a pseudo-impeachment process occurring prior to any impeachment vote having taken place. Even convincing Republicans that they needed to fight to get an actual vote on the record was not an simple process.
Most of the conservative establishment was against Trump at the beginning. Especially Fox News, the primary mouthpiece of the then-traditional Republican Party. Remember that Trump was/is quite critical of the Bushes and other neocons. Watch one of those "Trump won't be president" highlight reels on YouTube and you'll see plenty of Republicans included.
Even today, you have a fair amount of Republicans who criticize Trump for various reasons, including Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, and John Kasich. Additionally the new "Lincoln Project" is funded and run by anti-Trump Republicans.
The Lincoln Project is mostly a group of ad guys who would normally get paid at this time of year but have made themselves anathema for the time being from their traditional customers. They've just pivoted because the smart money is on getting funding from Trump oppo groups.
"Five days before the House even approved the articles of impeachment on Dec. 18, McConnell took to television to say he would be in "total coordination with the White House counsel" as the impeachment process moved forward.
"During an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, McConnell said that "everything" he does "during this, I'm coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this, to the extent that we can."" (https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/mitch-mc...)
"But it evidently has great value to the president and to Mr. McConnell, who had spent nearly a year preparing for it. From the instant that Democrats assumed power in the House last January, denying that they had any intention of impeaching Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell, a six-term Kentuckian and the longest-serving Senate Republican leader, directed his staff to quietly dig into the history of impeachments and consult with outside experts.
"“We thought they would finally work themselves up to doing this on something,” Mr. McConnell said. “It has been threatened endlessly. We needed to come up to speed on what actually happens, and that began in earnest last fall.”
"So when Mr. McConnell fielded a phone call from Mr. Trump days before Christmas, he was ready. Stung by the House vote to impeach him on two charges, the president reached out to the majority leader from his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., throwing out ideas about how to handle his coming Senate trial.
Mitt Romney was the first Senator, of any party, to cross party lines to vote for an impeachment of a President of their own party. Many Republican legislators immediately and publicly renounced Trump's comments[0] regarding delaying the election.
The [R]'s can read the wind and since their base is tied to the hip to Trump at the moment they'll play ball on day to day things and have his back on most things, but they are all quite aware he is a temporary force that will be spent eventually and the last thing they want to do is give him the permanent keys to the kingdom.
According to the OP he said Trump would be easier to remove than Clinton. The fact that Trump was not removed from office does not make the statement wrong.
I don’t think they automatically sprung to his defense though.
It seems to me that the Republican establishment didn’t support Trump but that he was able to rally his base in order force their support begrudgingly.
I believe the term that Trump’s base used for those Republicans was RINO, Republicans In Name Only. So the fact that this vocabulary existed among Trump’s base to me indicates that their support for Trump was not automatic.
I think there is merit to that, although I wouldn't care as much about republicans holding him to account. It would be nice but unrealistic from observations (not based in US).
I would argue that you should vote someone the press is actually critical of. Now, the press was very critical of H. Clinton too, but that was ignored because people made fun of Trump.
That's probably true, since Hilary's campaign cost 3 times more than Trump's campaign. In the end, both sides are there to defend their interests, and not yours.
I made this back in 2016, about voting and that famous paper that talks about how the opinions of voters are really only expressed for the top 10% of income earners in the US:
There is nothing simpler than misusing statistics.
The right wing does it all the time.
53% of all prisoners are black, ergo blacks are criminals.
Homosexuals represent 70% of all HIV infections, ergo homosexuality is inherently risky and should be treated the same way as hard drugs.
Now Thomas Sowell doesn't say any of those things himself. His points are much more interesting ... to people who have been only exposed to the liberal side of the story for their whole lives.
To someone who has read the original red in tooth and claw conservative talking points from the 80s his books are just a rear guard action and a not very interesting one at that.
Which is why the success of Thomas Sowell with people who have gone to university and then exposed to the real world is entirely the fault of the people who cancelled racism/sexism in the 80s/90s and are trying to do it again today.
Most conservatives I know understand that disproportionate black crime has nothing to do with race and everything to do with disproportionately adopted negative value systems in the black community.
Specifically, fatherless homes and lack of appreciation for education. These variables have the same impact on people of all races.
Unfortunately, instead of correcting the problem, movements like BLM think the idea of two parent families needs to be "disrupted".
Have you ever been to a Black public school, like actually attended one as a student? I promise you the #1 problem isn't lack of appreciation for education.
>fatherless homes
Except this actually has a pretty pinpoint time when it began to cultivate and it overlaps with the War on Drugs and the stagnation of Black middle class growth in the 80s. The modern situation is accumulation of these effects, not their cause.
The rate of non-marital births steadily increased for Blacks and Whites from 1950-1995 (although Blacks did start from a higher baseline). From 1995 until now it has mostly levelled off.
"Disruption" of the "nuclear family" comes from the Marxist view that a monogamous family unit leads to the holding of property. In earlier non-monogamous societies, only the women knew for sure which children were theirs. That meant that property tended to accrue to communities formed around matriarchs, rather than single families.
As a father, if you didn't know who your child was, you protected them all, and had to cede property to the matriarchs.
Engels wrote that this was why "the patriarchy" should be fought and "dismantled" because it led to property ownership, and sensitivity against redistribution. Therefore, this remains a core value of modern Marxists, to move society back to fatherlessness so that establishment of redistribution mechanisms is more palatable.
Seems like a fairly horrific goal to me. Property rights have led to the single greatest increase in standard of living for all of Western civilization. Seems like we would want more people joining the system than tearing it down.
His economics are sound, but I often find that his takes on social issues are extremely reductionist. His social views a lot of the time are just standard conservative views (and wrong IMO), I wish he wasn't being praised for that.
One example being his view on systemic racism, which he described as:
“It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels in the age of the Nazis, in which he was supposed to have said that people will believe any lie if it’s repeated long enough and loud enough. And that’s what we’re getting.”
I just can't take this sort of person seriously in regards to social issues. I just can't do it. And he does this all the time, all of his social views are just ultra-reductionist conservatives views that are identical to the things my hardcore mask-refusing conservative relatives post on facebook.
It is immeasurable, undefinable, unchangeable. As a propagandist you must take care to use things that can not be countered. Systemic racism is one of those.
What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US? That is his point, you can use that stick to beat anyone and anything you want without having to supply a shred of evidence. Just keep repeating it and call everyone who disagrees racist or Uncle Tom.
If it were immeasurable and undefinable, then we wouldn't have studies showing disproportionate sentencing of Black people [1] or the persistent negative effects of redlining [2]. And if it were unchangeable, we wouldn't be able to construct studies to show the specific choke-points of racial inequality, nor suggest policy solutions to remedy them.
> What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US?
I don't understand this. Why do you want to measure against other countries, and why phrase it like you just want one number? Is it not enough to claim that certain inequalities appear in certain aspects of our society?
It would be like asking for a measure of our foreign policy. Sure, we could probably make one, but that seems like an entirely inadequate means of actually assessing what's happening in a complex sociological ecosystem. Our assessments have to be more individualized.
> That is his point, you can use that stick to beat anyone and anything you want without having to supply a shred of evidence. Just keep repeating it and call everyone who disagrees racist or Uncle Tom.
You can do that with anything though. I've heard all the same language used in Climate Change discourse: "well, if you don't think humans caused climate change, they'll just label you anti-science and beat you out of the discussion." This is just a blatant rhetorical tactic to shift discussion from about the actual problem—and indeed all the evidence that this problem has—to nebulous Twitter mobs.
When it comes to redlining, sowell directly addresses it in in Vision of the Anointed. He points out that the kinds of houses blacks tend to purchase tends to be ignored in studies that find widespread discrimination.
For example blacks are much more likely to want to buy multi family homes. The income and other requirements for these are much stricter which is why they are denied loans more often.
Moreover, he points out that if blacks were being subject to stricter requirements then one would expect that they were less likely to default since the requirements are notionally to calculate default risk.
He points out that before the redlining legislation black and white default rates were broadly the same indicating that whatever criteria the banks used it fulfilled its main purpose of estimating default likelihood.
He then shows data that the anti discrimination legislation increased black default rates and questions whether you encouraging minorities to declare bankruptcy and enter financial ruin is really something to be desired.
Before you make blanket statements on the man you should be familiar with his stance on things. Your comment lacks the nuance that one is apt to find in any sowell book.
>He then shows data that the anti discrimination legislation increased black default rates and questions whether you encouraging minorities to declare bankruptcy and enter financial ruin is really something to be desired.
Stop the Sowell worship. Please, internet, for the love of god. He will always talk about how everything that democrats do is bad and everything conservatives do is good. He isn't right on everything all the time.
It's actually an extremely common argument that conservatives make to this day. Thomas Sowell blamed the CRA himself, so I'm not sure what your point is.
>>He then shows data that the anti discrimination legislation increased black default rates and questions whether you encouraging minorities to declare bankruptcy and enter financial ruin is really something to be desired.
He brought up anti discrimination legislation causing defaulting and bankruptcy, which the 2008 crash literally caused. I brought up a specific example of how Sowell is wrong. Sowell has directly commented on this matter. It is obviously relevant and doesn't require me to explain any further.
>He brought up anti discrimination legislation causing defaulting and bankruptcy, which the 2008 crash literally caused.
No he didn't, what are you talking about? Just because he mentioned foreclosures means he meant the CRA caused the 2008 housing crisis? No one was talking about it, you just brought it up out of no where.
His statement had NOTHING to do with the housing crisis, the only link between them seems to be "both involve foreclosures, so if I prove CRA did not cause the crisis I will prove his other statement is also incorrect... Because they both have the word 'foreclose' in them"
The OP brought up that Sowell said that anti discrimination legislation increased defaulting and bankruptcy. Thomas Sowell literally wrote an entire article blaming CRA about 10 years ago. I brought up how Sowell is wrong because studies show that he is wrong.
So even though you quoted one argument, you posted a document to prove a whole other argument wrong, never bothering to bring up that the other argument you just proved wrong. I still don't know what other argument you proved wrong, did Sowell go on record saying the CRA caused the 2008 housing crisis?
Yes, as I said he literally wrote an article about it. I literally cannot understand how you can't connect Sowell's claim that anti-discrimination legislation (like CRA) is bad to my argument.
Can you post a link? I'm honestly under the suspicious you just posted a PDF you did not read, or knowingly knew did not back up your arguments but hoped no one would read the 25 pages to find out.
Damn, guess I was wrong. Still nothing to do with the parents argument though, you should at edit your comment to include that link so people understand what you're taking about.
Nah, you switched arguments mid stream without any reason or warning, besides that the crisis argument was easier to prove wrong than the parent's. CRA was introduced 43 years ago, the 2008 crisis was 12 years ago, there is no reason to link them today.
My entire point the whole way through was about Sowell being wrong about the CRA, and it literally doesn't matter when it was introduced. It was an example of anti discrimination legislation regarding loans that Sowell has directly commented on, what other example should I use?
Parent's argument can still be correct even though the CRA did not cause the housing crisis.
Those are unrelated. The first argument might be correct and the CRA increases defaults by giving loans to people who can't afford them, and still there was a regulatory failure with firms rubber stamping bad debts as AAA and packaging them up in 2008.
> Stop the Sowell worship. Please, internet, for the love of god. He will always talk about how everything that democrats do is bad and everything conservatives do is good. He isn't right on everything all the time.
Stop the bad-faith discussion. I never 'worshipped' Sowell. The commenter above claimed that Sowell has not grappled with various studies that show various racial disparities. I've read his works, and Sowell indeed does directly confront these studies, so to say he is ignoring evidence is wrong.
Whether or not Sowell is right is not really up for discussion. What was being discussed is whether Sowell acknowledges studies on topics he is interested in. Indeed he does, and he finds issues in many studies as well as other studies that have remained mostly unacknowledged by academia.
> He isn't right on everything all the time.
This is a ridiculous standard to judge anyone by. No one is right all the time. Stop changing the goalposts.
I'm not debating Sowell—I don't have the background to dispute his claims, I'm arguing against the notion that systemic racism is "immeasurable, undefinable, unchangeable" and is thus propaganda. Researchers might be wrong about their findings, like in any field, but you can't just handwave the research as dogma.
If Sowell is responding to specific claims made by researchers of systemic racism, then it can't possibly be merely empty rhetoric, it's a subject of active academic inquiry.
Sowell believes that systemic racism doesn't exist because he has examined the various research and finds issues with all of them -- namely that the various discrepancies they find can be explained in other ways.
He never claimed that systemic racism could not exist. In fact, in his books, he openly admits that he believes that it did indeed once exist. He just questions whether the studies being produced today are done so without pre-existing bias (are they looking for data to back up their belief, or vice versa) and whether the data produced evidentiates the conclusion. If indeed the studies you cite and that he refutes are looking for data to back up their pre-existing conclusion, then propaganda is the correct description.
No one has put forth the argument that Sowell believes systematic racism cannot ever exist. All that has been said is that he questions whether it currently exists today and the conclusions of the studies you cite.
> No one has put forth the argument that Sowell believes systematic racism cannot ever exist.
The comment I was responding to literally said "It is immeasurable, undefinable, unchangeable. As a propagandist you must take care to use things that can not be countered. Systemic racism is one of those." A very clear implication that systemic racism doesn't exist.
Now, this may not be Sowell's views, but fortunately for Sowell, I never mentioned him in my initial reply.
> He just questions whether the studies being produced today are done so without pre-existing bias (are they looking for data to back up their belief, or vice versa) and whether the data produced evidentiates the conclusion.
All science is performed with biases. We couldn't possibly form a hypothesis without following our intuitions first. The question is whether our biases conform to the data. Of course, biases may also shape how we interpret data, but this is true for everyone. Sowell may be right, but let's not pretend that he, or anyone for that matter, is the only one approaching this research with a truly neutral, unbiased approach.
I think it's fair to subject research into systemic racism to scrutiny, but that's merely the process of academic review. It should never be touted as cutting through the propaganda, as if Sowell is some kind of crusader against the dogmatic PC police left.
> In fact, in his books, he openly admits that he believes that it did indeed once exist.
Now, call me crazy, but given that he believes it once existed, I find it hard to believe that he also believes that it's just over and done with now. John Lewis just died recently, and I consider it unlikely that we'd ferret out racism from our systems in just that span of time, especially when I hear stories of, for instance, a North Carolina legislature disenfranchising Black people with surgical precision as recent as 2014. If we still have that kind of explicit racism in our public institutions, it's unreasonable to think more subtle forms aren't also causing unequal outcomes.
> Now, call me crazy, but given that he believes it once existed, I find it hard to believe that he also believes that it's just over and done with now.
Yes, he does believe racism exists within systems. But this is not what is meant by 'systemic racism'. Today, systemic racism is both a description of a problem, as well as an insinuation of its cause -- namely 'white privilege' and white hegemony --
and an insinuation of solutions -- namely progressive legislation. Sowell rejects these insinuated causes and insinuated solutions and instead believes discrimination and poor outcomes for blacks today is driven by progressive policies such as a lack of school choice, laws encouraging loans be made to blacks who cannot afford it, etc. He believes that blacks will be helped by a return to a less regulated market. While this viewpoint could be named under the umbrella of 'systemic racism', let's be honest with ourselves that that's not what the term has come to mean
See, this just comes off as reactionary, as if saying "I believe in systemic racism" somehow secretly casts a vote for progressive policies behind your back. Is it really so hard to say "I believe that our institutions are systemically racist, and I believe that egalitarianism is best facilitated by the market"? It just seems strange to get caught up in the "culture war" notions that terms are getting co-opted for agendas and the like, when we can just address the actual issues themselves.
Also, if you believe that institutions discriminate against Black people, is the direct implication not that Whites are privileged over them in these spaces?
And as for school choice, my understanding was that the research showed that school choice worsened racial education outcomes, like this paper claims [1]. I know I've seen other research to this effect, but this is just one of the first results of google scholar. If nothing else, I would assume that any school choice policy must be coupled with a progressive transportation program, lest that choice become determined by geographic disparities, which because of segregation policies both on the books and within people's historical preferences, just bakes in racial disparities.
Regardless, to act like school choice is some kind of underground counter-culture movement to a progressive-dominated education system, when Betsy DeVoss is Secretary of Education, seems misguided at best. I don't know why you feel the need to dance around terms like "systemic racism" as if it will inadvertently empower a progressive movement when that progressive movement isn't even in power.
Words take on new meanings. Look... you're expecting me to continue to defend a man who has written dozens of full-length books explaining his positions. I'm not going to respond to your claims on charter schools because Sowell has just released a new book called 'charter schools and their enemies', which goes very in depth into his support of charter schools. I haven't read it yet, but I imagine it would contain his response to studies like the ones you posted.
Thank you for linking to studies on the systemic racism issue.
"Using rich data linking federal cases from arrest through to sentencing,
we find that initial case and defendant characteristics, including arrest
offense and criminal history, can explain most of the large raw racial
disparity in federal sentences, but significant gaps remain. Across the
distribution, blacks receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer
than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. Most of
this disparity can be explained by prosecutors’ initial charging decisions,
particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Ceteris paribus, the odds of black arrestees facing such a charge
are 1.75 times higher than those of white arrestees."
It should also be noted that the vast majority of people talking about the sentencing disparity ascribe 100% of the sentencing difference to racism, when this paper states that it's actually a 10% delta, and the other 90% is due to previous criminal record, etc. It's not like activists ever cared about nuance.
The issue I have with the term "systemic racism" is that it is typically used in a purposefully nebulous fashion to capture and group a collection of specific, actionable issues that can be measured.
Physics is also a purposefully nebulous term used to capture and group a collection of specific issues that can be measured. God forbid people want to group together racial disparities caused by institutional practices under the term "systemic racism." We could call them "fiddledydoop" for all I care, but there is obviously a good reason to group these things together.
Of course, you seem to be implying that people aren't actually trying to address these issues individually, and you couldn't be more wrong. Academics and policymakers alike are forming and implementing solutions all the time. You might just be looking too closely at Twitter.
It's frankly insulting that, despite the ongoing tragedy of racial inequality and the abundance of experts actively working to resolve it, that you and others are so caught up in such meaningless semantic games.
> It should also be noted that the vast majority of people talking about the sentencing disparity ascribe 100% of the sentencing difference to racism
I'm not sure how you can substantiate that claim.
> it's actually a 10% delta
You say that like a 10% delta because the color of your skin isn't tragic.
> It's not like activists ever cared about nuance.
Are they supposed to? We have a representative democracy for a reason: average people and activists push for change, and experts and representatives try to enact that push a reasonably as possible. I wouldn't expect the average person to approach policy failures with moderation. Most don't have years of higher education or a heterogeneous voter base to appease to moderate them. That goes for all sides. Don't act like the constituency who decry systemic racism approach it with the same nuance as Sowell.
Your analogy isn't correct. Physics isn't used as a catch-all to explain things that haven't been researched.
And I never said the 10% delta wasn't awful. That is of course a horrific thing that must be addressed. It's also a specific issue that can be measured and solved.
Systemic racism is used just like God was when I, growing up in the south, had to defend my belief in evolution. The favorite weapon of the biblical creationists is termed "God of the gaps". They would look for some biological feature (their favorite was the human eye) that wasn't fully explained by evolutionary science, and then claim that gap in science had to be filled by God's existence.
Systemic racism is "racism of the gaps". Every discrepancy between two arbitrarily separated groups is termed evidence of some non-specific, internal bigotry that absolutely must exist. The fact that various cultural groups behave and raise children differently is ignored. Southern whites are much poorer than norther whites. Must be bigotry. It couldn't be cultural differences.....
Women are radically underrepresented as victims of police violence. There must be systemic bigotry towards men by police. Asians are underrepresented in police killings. Police must systemically favor them.
We know that this isn't true, and that women are underrepresented in police killings because they are dramatically less likely to be in confrontations with police. But this logic is willfully ignored in place of the "systemic racism" canard when looking at black male overrepresentation in police killings. It's exactly what you would expect when people who seek power instead of truth are dominating the conversation.
And since you are defending activists willfully misrepresenting data to feed emotional narratives, let's talk about the fact that BLM's hyperbolic language around police killings of black men has caused a large percentage of the population to think that police are a statistically significant threat to the lives of black men in America. The other impression left on the minds of the public is that black men are exclusively the victims of police violence, when the data says otherwise.
Here, you see that 76% of the people killed by police are non-black in the US. And yes, black men are overrepresented, and so are latinos. Asians are underrepresented. Activists have SUCCEEDED in manipulating the public on this, and have created social pressure that academics are yielding to.
Ask yourself why you have to use Google to find the name of a Latino who was unjustly killed by police in the last 5 years, but you (if you are like me) can list the names of multiple black men unjustly killed by police in the same time frame? Do you think that discrepancy in knowledge is natural, fair, or just?
The ethno-centric activists have taken the very real issue of police violence, and turned it into a race specific one, needlessly. Racial issues are easy to weaponize, and that's probably the motivation, but it comes at the cost of actual truth. Police kill citizens of all colors with impunity. George Floyd's murderers were arrested a day later. The killer of Daniel Shaver (the second most egregious police killing video I've seen after George Floyd) was given early retirement with a full pension.
I think you make some good points toward the end, which is why I wanted to say that, as a member of the general public, I don't feel like activists manipulated me. They brought up the issue, and some of them may have more extreme views than I, but I think it's clear that some examples of police violence are unnecessary, regardless of whom they're perpetrated against.
> Physics isn't used as a catch-all to explain things that haven't been researched.
Has systemic racism not been researched?
I feel like you're just grasping at semantic straws here. Systemic racism is a theory, like any other scientific theory. Believe it or not, it's a framework that informs research.
> Systemic racism is used just like God was when I, growing up in the south
God is a theory too, just an increasingly tenuous one. Systemic racism seems to bear out in studies.
I don't know why scientifically minded people seem to act like science is just a done deal, and that any theory they instinctively don't like is somehow newfangled. This is just not how science has ever been conducted. Every theory starts out new and strange, and we just have to see how it comports to the data.
> Every discrepancy between two arbitrarily separated groups is termed evidence of some non-specific, internal bigotry that absolutely must exist.
Except the term "systemic racism" literally means that this bigotry is externalized—it exists within the systems of rules we created.
It also seems weird to use "absolutely must exist" sarcastically when you agreed to that 10% statistic earlier. That's just one stat. No, not everything is systemic racism, but as we established earlier, that's not what anyone's saying. Research suggests that the problem is pervasive enough to validate the phenomenon of "systemic racism" is quite real.
> The fact that various cultural groups behave and raise children differently is ignored.
It isn't? Culture, much like individual action, is determined heavily by institutions. People can complain about rap music glorifying a distrust of the law, but when there are actual stats showing a 10% disparity in sentencing, I can't really be too harsh on the rapper here.
Frankly, I never understand this vector of attack. Like, let's assume that all this was actually 100% culture. How do we fix anything? How do you change culture? You can't just tell Black people "be better, and stop that rap music." It seems to me that the answer is still institutional change.
> There must be systemic bigotry towards men by police.
This is actually true. The justice system is disproportionately harsher on men, but that's because we perceive men as being stronger and more in control of their actions. Indeed, we do need to have a cultural shift towards the perception of men, but that shift starts by making our institutions more willing to consider men as vulnerable so we can address it.
> women are underrepresented in police killings because they are dramatically less likely to be in confrontations with police.
But why is that the case. It's not random.
> And since you are defending activists willfully misrepresenting data to feed emotional narratives
You can be dismissive of activists, just make sure it's universal. No side has ownership of "calm rational discourse." I just see a lot of people focus on the temperament of activists rather than the actual policy being considered. It's just a pointless ad hominem. Everyone can point to some group of the unwashed masses and say "look at all those dumb people supporting you, don't you look silly now!"
> The other impression left on the minds of the public is that black men are exclusively the victims of police violence, when the data says otherwise.
Sure, I also think "defund the police" is a misguided slogan. Fortunately, laws aren't written by slogans, they're written by experts.
> Ask yourself why you have to use Google to find the name of a Latino who was unjustly killed by police in the last 5 years, but you (if you are like me) can list the names of multiple black men unjustly killed by police in the same time frame? Do you think that discrepancy in knowledge is natural, fair, or just?
No, but the reforms that BLM protesters are asking for would also help Latino people. I agree that it would be great that the discourse could be on all police violence, because it certainly is pervasive, but I'm not really going to blame Black people, who have an incredibly unique history in this country to focus on their own community's strife.
I also wouldn't expect an organization called Black Lives Matter to be advocating for Latinos (though, I think the work that they do conveniently does). No one is suppressing a Latino Lives Matter movement, it's just that the Latino experience in this country doesn't seem to coalesce in that way. I'm sure there's a very interesting investigation one could perform to figure out why.
> The ethno-centric activists have taken the very real issue of police violence, and turned it into a race specific one, needlessly.
I don't see why that's a problem when the goal is the same. Proposed police reforms aren't race-specific.
"I don't see why that's a problem when the goal is the same. Proposed police reforms aren't race-specific."
It's a problem because making it race specific undermines the goals of police reform. BLM the slogan isn't the same as the organization. The organization conflates the goals of police reforms with a lot of the typical ultra-left wing ivory tower identity ideas like claims that the nuclear family is internalized white supremacy. These ideas are unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans on all parts of the political spectrum, and weaken the goal of police reform.
I grew up in a mostly black county, and the first time I walked into a classroom that wasn't mostly black was freshman year in college. I've noticed a pattern among whites who grew up in segregated suburbs of holding black people to a lower moral and intellectual standard than they hold themselves to. Words like "its understandable that they would" are used to justify BLM willfully, actively, and purposefully misinforming the public on police violence. A consistent minority of people of all racial categories are inherently wired for bigotry. White people need to get more comfortable calling out these hard-wired bigots when they DON'T share their own skin color. Stop celebrating this behavior. It's bad, and needlessly divisive. I got my ass kicked several times by the minority of black kids in my school who were bigots. Most of the non-bigoted black kids stood by and watched. A minority would intervene on my behalf. This is pretty identical to historical acts of white racism. The conformists are what worry me the most. You know, people who suddenly, because the New York Times said so, start capitalizing Black when they've never done so in their entire lives. NYT did so because they think the tiny ivory tower academic community that told them to capitalize black was representative of the black community. As if white academics are remotely similar to the typical white American.
I was honestly unaware of the difference. Upon looking up the term on Wikipedia, the first line is "Institutional racism (also known as systemic racism)." Every subsequent article I looked at under the google search "systemic racism vs institutional racism" seemed to make roughly the same equality.
I'm under the impression that institutional refers to specific formal institutions, like policing, jobs markets, etc. Systemic refers to that plus informal cultural biases, that is institutional is a subset of systemic.
Of course, patriarch theory completely accounts for this. The common view that men are more powerful and autonomous, and therefore dangerous, can probably account for some degree of their harsher treatment under the justice system, just like this view probably helps them in acquiring positions of power in the workplace.
I don't see how. If men are perceived as being stronger and more rational, that will help them in acquiring jobs, but hurt them when being found culpable of a crime.
I'm not sure where you learned feminist theory, but it's fairly resolute about the fact that Patriarchy is deleterious to both men and women.
Nobody learns feminist theory because it's not a learnable topic, it's just a collection of nonsensical anecdotes bound together with clever sounding words.
If men get sentenced more harshly because they are "stronger" and "more rational", or even just perceived that way, then there's no problem with them dominating roles that benefit from a lot of strength or rationality, roles like CEO of a company. But feminists have a big problem with that notion. They're all about how women are just as good as men at everything, equal in all respects and thus deserving of equal outcomes, right until there's an outcome that's better for women than men. Then suddenly there's an intellectual sounding but illogical explanation.
Something being difficult to precisely measure does not make it a Nazi tactic. This is just an attempt to reframe the argument to be more charitable to Sowell, but no, his argument is bad.
Sowell has some well-thought-out views on these issues, and he’s been expressing many of them for decades, but he has a curmudgeonly side as well. And I think if you understand his more well-thought-out views on these issues, I think you’ll also at least understand his curmudgeonly attitude.
Oddly enough, what you’re doing now—if it were done to dismiss the thoughts of a “progressive” black person—would probably be characterized as “tone policing”, and to whatever extent that’s a legitimate concept I think it applies to someone who makes his fair share of curmudgeonly remarks in the context of many decades of otherwise thoughtful and reasoned argument.
I cannot agree more. I think he's brilliant, and I've learned a lot from his ideas. However, I've seen him in multiple interviews putting forth evidence-free ideas aligned with Republican talk points.
Did you mean to reply to a different thread? This was about Sowell’s conservative social views and the sometimes intemperate way he expresses them, not about his economics (which the person I’m replying to expressed an appreciation for).
Looking at his claim isolated from his evidence is hard to discuss. I think that also came from a TV interview, which is not the ideal forum for him to present evidence.
(When discussing "systemic racism", let's set aside specific racism, which can (and should) be specifically called out and changed.)
To explore systemic racism in more detail, we'd want to look at some measure (not necessarily a single number) of systemic racism. Once we have a way of measuring it (even crudely), we could compare across various races, countries, states, and regions. Importantly, we could compare it within a given race -- if systemic racism varies within a race, then clearly we need to revisit the definition because there are other factors at work. We could also look for other signs that something is awry, like areas that are "systemically racist" against the most politically powerful group.
Dr. Sowell has been performing this kind of research and analysis for decades, and documents it extensively in his many books.
From the quotation above, it seems that he believes that he believes that the term "systemic racism" has no useful definition remaining after this analysis, and that it's being used as propaganda to undermine institutions that stand in the way of political goals.
If you believe that systemic racism is a useful construct that leads to solutions for a better world, then by all means follow where it leads. But please focus on offering alternative policies that lead to good results, and adapt (or revert) those policies if they lead to bad results. Don't just turn it into a never-ending "discussion" that divides people with no solution.
His social commentary is some of his most important work. If you had to isolate Sowell's most repeated, potent point, it would be that disparities in population outcomes are nowhere near sufficient to infer discrimination as a primary contributor. If people better understood this single fact, it would go a long way to disentangling the absolute mess of a concept that is systemic racism.
If you're a little older and were reading papers in the late 80s and 90s, Thomas Sowell was a fixture of the Op-Ed as a reliable apologist for capitalism and white supremacy.
It's definitely _why_ he was so prolific at that time because back then papers published hardly any Black views in editorials, much less left/liberal Black ones. Concepts that are common now (slavery's legacy is still with us; criminal justice is a huge problem for minorities; etc) would get you banned from pretty much anywhere then. But cheerily offering views like "Stop helping Black people" and "people are poor because they're lazy" with a Black writer was positively applauded.
There was kind of a moment around then, you had Ward Connerly on the UC board of directors busily dismantling affirmative action, Clarence Thomas' appointment, and Sowell blowing up the op-ed pages. There was no question that if you were a conservative Black you would be amplified and supported all over the place.
Needless to say, this led me to dismiss him intellectually then, as his political arguments are threadbare paleoconservativism. I haven't looked at his economic work, but given the appaling history of arch-conservative economics from "giants" like Friedman, I can't imagine I'd find anything very persuasive.
Invoking similarity to Nazi propaganda is almost always a strategic error, and Thomas Sowell should know better. The actions of the third reich were so heinous that they are mostly recognized as precluding any comparison with the thoughts or actions of any normal, nonheinous people, and when you try to articulate such a comparison you come off in many or most people's eyes as totally hyperbolic.
Still, if you're willing to remain cool headed and entertain the most reasonable interpretation of what's being said, you'll have to admit that claims about 21st-century sociopolitical rhetoric having features in common with Nazi propaganda does not need to imply any kind of moral equivalence between the relevant 21st century activists and the Nazis.
The rhetoric of the third reich is probably the most famous example of a particular strategy, in which particular bugs of human psychology are exploited using scapegoating and the cultivation of a sense of victimhood. One could very reasonably believe that either (or both) of Donald Trump and lefty-social-justice-warrior types have been using such strategies to garner support WITHOUT thinking even with a few brain cells that either is morally comparable to the Nazis.
I have to think that this is how Mr. Sowell expects you to interpret what he's saying. It would be nice if he had an example other than the Nazis to use, since the holocaust carries so much emotional baggage, but there's just no other historical example of this rhetorical strategy that is so well known or so universally recognized as being in the wrong.
The idea that calling out systemic racism is like a Nazi propaganda tactic. Look up any of his other views on literally any social issues, it's just whatever Fox News-esque conservative would want to hear. Like, somehow it's not the government snatching people up in vans that is Nazi-like, it's actually the anti-racist protesters that are Nazi's to the genius brain of Thomas Sowell. How do people idolize this guy?
if you define “conservative” as “wrong”, then I understand your point, but then your statement is trivial - it’s a statement of opinion, “sowell is wrong”, masquerading as evidence and using 12 times as many words as needed.
Yes, I am giving my opinion on Thomas Sowell in a post about Thomas Sowell. My post is very short, like a third of it is a quote from him. And I didn't define conservative as wrong, I said he is a standard, non-special conservative AND wrong. What are your actual disagreements?
Well, the problem with opinions is that they are not that helpful. For example, I could say the following:
Sowell is a classical liberal and right. Sowell is a neoconservative and wrong. Sowell is a traditional conservative and right. Sowell is a neoliberal and wrong. Sowell is a classical liberal and wrong. Sowell is a neoconservative and right. Sowell is a traditional conservative and wrong.
Without some way to separate the true sentences from the false sentences none of them are very helpful, even if one in the pile happens to be true.
Well, by no means am I trying to shut you down, I'm doing the opposite, asking for more details. For example another comment on this thread pointed out that apparently Republicans usually sign some kind of "loyalty oath" that's associated with him. I would consider that strong evidence for his association with traditional conservatism.
If you check that part of the thread again, you'll see that that "loyalty oath" is associated with Grover Norquist rather than Thomas Sowell (although I'm fairly sure Sowell also thinks that taxes and government expenditures in the U.S. are way too high).
What specifically is he right about? Why do we require evidence when someone says he is wrong, but we do not require evidence for the numerous times in this thread where people say his book is “required reading”?
First, everyone here who likes Sowell can put forth specific, concrete examples where he is right, instead of making vague statements about how brilliant he is and then demanding evidence only when someone disagrees.
> First, everyone here who likes Sowell can put forth specific, concrete examples where he is right, instead of making vague statements about how brilliant he is and then demanding evidence only when someone disagrees.
Why? The positive argument already exists. It's Sowell's writing. What are you asking for a cliff's notes? The disagreement you're talking about must obviously stem from something in the source material we're talking about. So what is it?
Do you expect to be taken seriously when you dismiss someone with a resume like his as “nothing more than a common twitter conservative”? How do you even fool yourself into believing that?
None of his books that I've read are about economics, they're all about social issues, including very deep ones like why people separate into opposing camps on political issues.
It's really just worth reading some of that stuff before you decide he's just a Tweeter. He's basically the opposite of that.
I'm asking for concrete evidence that his opinions have predictive power which has been assessed independently.
If no such evidence exists then all we have is just-so story-telling, which can be discounted.
The fact that a lot of people seem to believe his ideas are convincing is irrelevant to this discussion.
People believe all kinds of things because they sound plausible to them - partly because other people have made careers out of working out how to push people's "This sounds plausible so I shall believe it" buttons.
Which is why reproducible evidence and independent peer review are things. And why it's absolutely reasonable - in fact required - to question assertions that can't be grounded in them.
> The idea that calling out systemic racism is like a Nazi propaganda tactic. Look up any of his other views on literally any social issues, it's just whatever Fox News-esque conservative would want to hear.
With regard to the Fox News-watching American conservative base and bad Nazi analogies, it's useful to keep in mind what you're dealing with. Grover Norquist said in an interview in 2003 that the estate tax is equivalent to the Holocaust. When Terry Gross politely allowed him to walk that statement back, he said that it's just morally equivalent to the Holocaust. [2] Of course all the thinking involved is total bullshit and the man is batshit crazy, but the interview is not without interest.
Such a lunatic must be the object of widespread derision on the right, right? Nope. Almost all Republican lawmakers sign his bizarre loyalty oath upon taking office, pledging they're not going to raise taxes. [3]
Well in fairness he didn't actually compare anything to Nazis. He compared something to one single precept that was espoused and made well-known by them. Unlike say the "Punch a Nazi" movement from last year that literally claimed modern day Nazis are numerous and living amongst us.
So then, how does a black person adopt, of their own free will without a thought of "white belief", a conservative outlook an not run afoul of your complaint?
Are you suggesting that they stay silent? How is injecting race into the political discourse at this level not in itself patently racist?
Are you suggesting that only whites are allowed such free choices in their beliefs?
Are you suggesting all white conservatives are racist? Doesn't that sound like an overbroad, racist generalization itself?
I'd like to find a good faith interpretation of your statement, but it really seems like your world view is that someone's skin color and political inclination determines their moral standing and beliefs.
> To say things that white conservatives believe but suffer ridicule for saying.
This is so ridiculously racist and uninformed I don't know where to begin.
First, it assumes Sowell hasn't made any unique contributions to economics or politics. This is completely false but you presume it because... he's black? If he were white would you take him more seriously?
Second, you presume the only reason he is allowed to speak is to justify the racism of others. Which reduces Sowell to a useful idiot or a token. It completely strips him of his accomplishments. Imagine saying that a former member of government, a PhD, award winning economist, author of more than a dozen best selling books, and fellow at more than a dozen prestigious institutions is only listened to because he's black.
Could you clarify "the point of Thomas Sowell"? It seems as though you are ascribing a "point" to an individual, what do you mean by that?
It seems like a non-sequitur to bring racism in on this thread - how does Sowell appeal to "white conservatives" more than conservatives of other backgrounds?
because they can hold him up as an unbiased intellectual despite the fact that most of the opinions that he voices are trite, and honestly just sound like talk radio. I mean, just go through a few of his statements:
"Instead of trying to propagandize children to hug trees and recycle garbage, our schools would be put to better use teaching them how to analyze and test what is said by people who advocate tree-hugging, recycling, and innumerable other causes across the political spectrum."
"What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice."
If you think that's uncharitable go read what he's written over the years, in particular on politics, it's indistinguishable from my rambling grandfather. Even pay attention to the title of the post. "Thomas Sowell, the Nonconformist". How is he nonconformist as far his views go? He isn't, what's nonconformist is his background.
A lot of stuff that goes into the recycling bin doesn't actually get recycled though, right? [0] So if your reason for recycling is "that's what good people do", and you don't actually know what happens to your stuff...you're not actually helping. You're doing a useless ritual that makes you feel better.
"What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice." This just sounds like a modern rephrasing of Murray Rothbard, I wouldn't necessarily call it "trite".
> "Instead of trying to propagandize children to hug trees and recycle garbage, our schools would be put to better use teaching them how to analyze and test what is said by people who advocate tree-hugging, recycling, and innumerable other causes across the political spectrum."
Advocating for critical thinking is not bad. You shouldn't tell children what to believe. You should give them the tools to determine their own beliefs.
> "What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice."
Are criticisms of social welfare limited to talk radio hosts?
> How is he nonconformist as far his views go?
He's nonconformist for the class he occupies. I.e. the "intellectual elite" (or however you want to refer to them).
Strawmanning the education systems by ranting about tree-hugging hippies who indoctrinate the children and calling taxation theft isn't critical thinking, it's living in the bizarro world that is modern American conservatism.
His views also aren't non-conformist at all, they have a deep history in US politics. Friedman, Hayek, and so on for a large time during Sowells career practically dominated public discourse. Friedman alone probably is the single most influential economist of the last few decades as far as public discourse is concerned.
And that is squarely where Sowell is situated given that he hasn't ever actually worked as an economist, but basically as a pundit. Within American conservative punditry his views are as standard as it gets.
Maybe he is. If that's the case, let's "steelman" his position and do better. Do you feel that Thomas Sowell would read your response and feel you grasped the argument he was making to the fullest extent? Do you feel you've honestly and accurately portrayed his position after understanding it fully?
In my opinion, you haven't. I think you're upset and its preventing you from understanding the argument being made.
Sowell has published over thirty books, but I can find virtually no actual academic research. One of the last papers dates to the 60s, where he debates Marxism, but I think this is actually just a sort of philosophical treatise.
He's repeatedly rejected modelling, mathematics and virtually every other econonmic tool, so to call him an economist is kind of a misnomer.
And actually I do think I've portrayed his position fairly accurately. When you read his stuff it's often hard to tell if you're reading Sowell or Ann Coulter.
Btw I'm not opposed to conservative intellectual work in general. Chesterton is great, Carl Schmitt is probably one of the most intelligent writers of the last century. But Sowell isn't, and American Conservatism is in an intellectual crisis to put it mildly.
I'm not a neo-nazi, I'm personally not even conservative. But Schmitt is probably one of the most influential conservatives of the 20th century. He's not only influenced conservative thought but people ranging from Arendt, to Habermas, Strauss even Derrida among others. His writing on the state of exception or the friend-foe distinction had wide reach from theory to policy-making.
Meanwhile in US Conservatism you have people ranting about taxation being theft, I mean if that's the intellectual elite I don't know what's going on exactly.
I think Sowell is a very important thinker in his own right.
At the same time, there is nothing conservatives love more than a black intellectual who strongly agrees with them. Perhaps for both good and bad reasons. That adoration does color the perception of people like Sowell.
Not a joke. I got heated over (what seems to me) whitewashing of liberal racism. It is a very real problem that liberals can spout blatantly racist garbage ("You ain't black") but never actually get classified as racist. Yet merely thinking capitalism is a good system is enough to get one classified as a racist and a fascist.
I apologize for getting triggered on the second part of your post and forgetting the first, but I think it's very important to call racism racism. Calling racism "colored perceptions" is so misleading as to be false.
> I just can't take this sort of person seriously in regards to social issues. I just can't do it.
Unfortunate, but it’s your loss. I definitely understand where you’re coming from, as I thought the same a few years ago. Challenge yourself to objectively listen to people who you think you disagree with. You might find that things you were certain about have serious flaws.
There are many reasons why terms like “systemic racism” are not constructive, and frankly, he’s not at all wrong on that point.
Spurious comparisons to Nazis are a favorite tactic of his -- he famously compared Obama to Hitler because they both had enthusiastic crowds for their speeches. It's a mystery to me why anybody takes this man seriously.
Everything you've said has demonstrated that you're _choosing_ not to understand, or agree with, his arguments rather than disagreeing with them through counter arguments and evidence.
His writings do exactly what he states: Sowell insists that his work “stands or falls on its own merits or applicability” and is not “enhanced or reduced by [his] personal life.”.
And they will continue to stand, objectively, for a long time to come.
But his life and character are inspirational examples of self-determination and leadership that we need far more of. It is a shame he is not more often cited as an example that others can learn from in their personal lives.
"Even if 90 percent of all Muslims are fine people, and we admit 10,000 refugees from the Middle East, does that mean that we need not be concerned about adding a thousand potential terrorists — even after we have seen in San Bernardino what just two terrorists can do?*"
The all too common argument that there's no problem since it's only a minute minority that is problematic is in contradiction with a huge chunk of human history.
On this particular topic, we in Europe are increasingly frequently getting a painful refresher.
Basic Economics is a very good book. Even if you taken University economics you will learn something and you will definitely learn how to explain things to those who did not.
His debates are also great to watch highly recommended.
I very much prefer his older TV appearances to his more recent ones as he used to elaborate and present you with evidence on the spot. Nowadays, he keeps his input to a minimum on a given interview which is often unconvincing and borderline dismissive. I should keep in mind that he's 90 of age, though.
I've read a number of his books, and I reflect on them regularly. They stand the test of time.
More important than the specific facts and arguments in his books is that he checks up on the results of theories and policies. That's not common enough among social scientists and certainly not among politicians.
Does "the peace process" produce peace? Do anti-poverty programs raise people out of poverty? Surely some do, and surely some don't. Figuring out which is which is critical to success -- preferably by learning from others' mistakes, but if not, at least learning from your own mistakes.
It's too easy to get a sense of moral superiority just by supporting a policy with a noble intent, and then move on before the consequences arrive.
His book "Intellectuals and Society" helped me better understand the difference of visions between the "right" and the left. Highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in politics.
Am I the only one here who thinks that "Basic Economics" is overrated? I loved the first chapters but I didn't finish it because of his obvious bias against regulations. While I enjoyed his analyses of failed regulations, the book makes it seem like there're no successful market regulation laws in place and every attempt is doomed to be short-sighted like all his examples. This [1] review on Amazon from someone else expresses my concerns in more detail.
Can someone recommend me an alternative book, that at least tries to be a little bit more well-balanced? I'll probably finish this book for the conservative perspective anyway but it doesn't seem like a good starting point despite its name.
I didn't finish it either, but mostly because of lack of time. However, I was also having an almost visceral reaction to his aversion to regulation, because I was comparing it to the situation that I know in some European countries and his claims seemed to clash with what I knew.
I wouldn't dismiss the book just because of that, but it did make the lecture rather difficult because it was challenging my assumptions and knowledge quite strongly. I guess that's good :-)
I like Ha-Joon Chang's "Economics: The User's Guide" as an introduction to economics. It's understandable, it has plenty of references and is written in a pleasant tone.
> I know in some European countries and his claims seemed to clash with what I knew.
To be precisely, I would say his conclusions and the lack of other perspectives clashes with what I know about economy in European countries because I see how his reasoning makes sense in a vacuum.
> I wouldn't dismiss the book just because of that, but it did make the lecture rather difficult because it was challenging my assumptions and knowledge quite strongly. I guess that's good :-)
Exactly. I want to finish it someday for that exact reason.
> I like Ha-Joon Chang's "Economics: The User's Guide" as an introduction to economics. It's understandable, it has plenty of references and is written in a pleasant tone.
Try "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan [1]. In my opinion, he does a good job of providing examples both of failed regulation and also situations where regulation is necessary and beneficial.
Could it be that you, the person who has almost certainly not had the degree and intensity of experience in this field as Thomas Sowell (as so few have), are the one with the bias in favour of regulations that are not strictly necessary?
1. I'm sorry if you misunderstood me and think that I'm downplaying his work in this field. But I'm also kindly asking you to not just argue with appeal to authority [1].
2. Why do you think that I rule out that I'm not biased? If you read my other comment [2], I actually want to finish this book someday to challenge my assumptions and because his critique seemed reasonable! Unfortunately this book seems to paint an incomplete picture of my reality. The economy in my country should be totally unstable because of its regulations according to his views in this book but that's not the case. I want to understand the whole picture and this book falls short of doing it.
3. Why do you think that I'm generally in favor of regulations? It's simply not all black and white.
I've read a few Sowell books and I don't always agree with his conclusions but I do always enjoy the historical context he puts behind his arguments. I find most political pundits, journalists, etc to lack a grounding in history when they take opinions on various things. Sowell's books are usually give you a historical context and then the argument. It makes his books a good read even if you don't agree with them.
wow, for someone who has gotten pretty much nothing but praise for his supposed amazing writing ability and though process - this article is a complete steaming dumpster fire
Someone should create a list of books that comprise a beginners manual of living in a modern society, and “Basic Economics” would fit perfectly in this list.
I usually think this, but then I'll see some random piece of advice from thousands of years ago, e.g. Seneca, Sun Tzu, Jesus, Plato and it seems very relevant.
We've got a lot more bells and whistles these days, but maybe the absence of reddit, imgur, youtube and the general dopamine hamster-wheel allowed them to have a better understanding of human nature.
Counter-point is that we are more likely to live longer and have to fight fewer threats of disease, famine, predators and war, so maybe we have more time to contemplate higher thoughts.
Thomas Sowell is a critic of the climate change/environmental science initiatives, and it's one of the reasons I heavily question his other views. Here's a 3 min video of him talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rweblFwt-BM
The points he makes are quite fair. The science isn't perfect, yes. Often, people try to hide that the science isn't perfect, too. But the impact is roughly the product of the magnitude of the impact and the probability of the event. In this case, the magnitude is enormous and the probability is less than 100% but seemingly quite large. Dr. Sowell seems to simply argue that climate reports suggest that the probability is higher than it truly is. But if a report suggest 95%, and Dr. Sowell thinks it's more like 40%, the core issue is still enormous. I would want him to talk about why he thinks the huge effects of anthropogenic climate change are such a vanishingly small probability to the point that we shouldn't do anything about it.
Indeed. I cross a lot of party lines with my beliefs and it's almost a case of diglossia with the way I have to phrase arguments towards the group I'm talking to. You can have one central idea but the way you have to word it makes it sound repulsive to the counterpart of the group you're addressing.
Not any measure that makes sense to me, and I've lived through a few decades now. I don't even think America represented such a menagerie of viewpoints in the late '60s.
That’s what I’m wondering. The internet has sharpened so many viewpoints (not in a good way) . My question is sincere and curious. There might be lots of pressure to push opinions in one direction or another but that’s not conformism, quite the opposite.
I think a lot of people are rightly sensing a shrinking of the Overton window[0]. For example, I think the following is a perfectly reasonable position to hold: "It would be a remarkable happenstance if, in a perfectly free society, men and women were found in equal proportion in every industry. Indeed, the default expectation should be that there will be variability in this regard."
Saying that in today's environment with my name attached would get me fired, so I keep my mouth shut. A perfectly reasonable position, and I cannot speak it for fear of losing the ability to care for my family.
Well I mean at that level what counts as a difference and what’s the measure of that distance. I like that this is an attempt to define it even if is isn’t op and we do t actually have any actual numbers, past or present for comparison.
With enough issues, no one will be at the average, by the curse of dimensionality. On the other hand, making it obvious that we're all nonconformists (à la https://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.phpAnd Then There Were None?) might be an improvement.
'Cancel Culture' here seems to refer to the rash of firings and administrative punishments for academics who question the progressive dogma, especially w/ regards to BLM, the gender pay gap, institutional racism, etc.
Here is an academic 'cancellations' tracking document by the National Association of Scholars:
> The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is an American non-profit politically conservative advocacy group, with a particular interest in education.[2][3] It opposes a perceived political correctness on college campuses and supports a return to mid-20th-century curricular and scholarship norms, and an increase in conservative representation in faculty.
> What exactly is your point by posting that? Is it that these people should not have advocates?
That I wanted to know the orientation of the group, and thought I might save others the trouble of looking it up? I didn't know people would be so sensitive about seeing the first two sentences of a Wikipedia article.
I'm not implying this was your original intention, however without providing any commentary other than the Wikipedia quote your reply read to me like a "rebuttal" or counterargument to the OP. Furthermore, it comes across like a lazy one (perhaps explaining the downvotes?).
While interpreting it as such goes against the "assume the best" ethos of HN, in an argumentative thread such as this it's an understandable reflex.
Be charitable, he could be talking about the Dixie Chicks or anchors that were fired for questioning the Iraq war. Or for the biggest example of modern cancel culture, Kaepernick's firing after targeting by the president.
> Or for the biggest example of modern cancel culture, Kaepernick's firing after targeting by the president.
Kaepernick was "fired" because he was poor at his job. Defenses started to understand his 1-dimensional attack and then shut it down. He was cut after the 2016 season, but had been benched in 2015 because the 49ers offense was struggling.[1] This was nine months before he ever took a knee before a game.[2] Did the 49ers look into a crystal ball and decide to bench him in favor of a demonstrably mediocre quarterback because of something that wouldn't happen for nine months? If he didn't show actual improvement on the field, were the 49ers obligated to keep him? Is an employer obligated to keep any employee who says something controversial regardless of performance?
> Be charitable, he could be talking about the Dixie Chicks or anchors that were fired for questioning the Iraq war.
Which anchors lost their jobs for questioning Iraq? Dan Rather stepped down for his role in publishing a hoax memo about George W. Bush's National Guard duty.[3] Brian Williams was quasi-fired for embellishing a story about his time as an embedded journalist in Iraq.[4]
The Dixie Chicks were actually blacklisted by country music radio stations, so we'll give you that one.
Still, .333 isn't great unless you're playing baseball.
Kaepernick was blackballed by the league, full stop. Find me another instance of an uninjured QB under the age of 35 who led a team to a Super Bowl 3 years prior who was not only cut by his current team but not signed for even a backup role by another club.
There's a reason that Cam Newton has a job today and Kaepernick doesn't, and it's because Newton didn't get cancelled.
Both players debuted in the NFL in 2011. In 2015, Kaepernick led the 49ers to a 2-6 start, while Newton led the Panthers 8-0 (and to a Super Bowl berth). Sure, the QB isn't the only player responsible, but he is the single point of failure. Isn't it possible that Cam Newton is just a much better player than Kaepernick, all else being equal? If Kaepernick were so good and such a talent that teams should have been picking him, why wasn't he winning?
In 2013, Kapernick lead his team to the Super Bowl. By the end of 2016, he was completely out of the league after being blackballed. He hasn't played for a team in any capacity since. While one can argue whether his stats were great or not, he certainly was not anywhere near the worst STARTING quarterback in football.
From 2012 to 2016, Newton's Adjusted Net Yards per Play were .04 higher than Kaepernick's, a virtually statistical dead heat. After the 2015 season, Newton got a shiny new $100M contract for those efforts, and Kaepernick was shown the door after 2016.
In Kaepernick's 11 starts during the 2016 season, his team gave up more than 30 points 9 times. He had a new head coach that had just gotten run out of Philly for having no chemistry with his team, and he had one of the worst receiving corps in NFL history. He still managed 16 TDs to just 4 INTs.
So, for having one of the worst defenses in the league, coached by one of the worst coaches in the league, and throwing to easily the worst group of receivers in the league, his team didn't do so hot. But there's no reason why he shouldn't have immediately found another competition elsewhere, because he WAS a starting-caliber QB, and unlike Newton who was a similar player, Kaepernick had no outstanding injury issues. He wasn't coming off of foot surgery and shoulder surgery like Newton is today.
Puritans left England to escape the English Cancel Culture. Upon arriving, most of them then implemented their own cancel culture. After Massachusetts cancelled him, Roger Williams founded Rhode Island on the belief that religious persecution by the majority was wrong (note: moral, religious, ideological -- whatever you call it, it's the same idea).
This idea of personal tolerance is itself a moral position. Republic government reflects the will of the governed with emphasis on the will of the minority as a FUNDAMENTAL moral belief of the majority. "Free speech only applies to the government" is untrue because that is simply an outgrowth of the governed. When the governed majority actually start believing that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from results", you have opened Pandora's Box by shifting that fundamental moral belief.
Once you have decided Cancel Culture is moral, you are simply negotiating the terms.
The majority of the US believes homosexuality is morally wrong, but it's a personal decision/action. What if freedom to come out as gay doesn't mean freedom from consequences? What if the majority of people who believe abortion is immoral decide to lay on the consequences? There's a huge list of moral disagreements where the majority could decide to cancel the minority.
Finally, Cancel Culture ALWAYS leads to violence. If tolerance isn't part of the mix (and Cancel Culture literally means you aren't being tolerant), then either someone must change their fundamental morals or must start a conflict. Saying "I'm tolerant" and then persecuting everyone who doesn't say and do exactly as you think they should might be cognitive dissonance, but it isn't tolerance.
I think it’s a formula for poisoning the well. First, make vague complaints about conformism and “cancel culture.” Then, anyone who disagrees with you from that point must clearly be a conformist who approves of cancel culture.
First of all, we can omit anything dealing with real sexual harassment, abuse, or obvious discrimination by people in power; although I think the social witch hunt phenomenon of things like #metoo is problematic, I'm not going to defend any of the people caught up in that kind of thing. So I think it's fair to exclude people like Lawrence Krauss, Louis CK, and definitely people like Harvey Weinstein.
That leaves us with people cancelled for ideological reasons because of things they've said or written, because that ideology is felt to have a chilling effect on anyone interacting with them.
James Watson: cancelled
Tim Hunt: cancelled for sexist joke
Lawrence Summers: cancelled
Bret Weinstein: cancelled (from Evergreen, at least)
Erika Christakis: quasi-cancelled (left Yale voluntarily a year after the Halloween incident).
J. K. Rowling: ongoing attempted cancellation[1] due to being a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF), despite the fact that she didn't seem to be exclusionary at all, and definitely nothing at all like Camille Paglia who is more definitively a TERF.
Among numerous others. Including that PR rep who was fired within the span of her plane trip to Africa after making a racial joke about HIV on her personal twitter account.
That's to say nothing of people who would be cancelled if today's culture were transported back in time. Starting with William Shockley, and extending to a large number of notable historical figures.
[1] For some tweets and later elaborated on in a blog post, all detailed here: https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk... . Basically, her crime seems to be an attempt to frame her experience and sexuality around her biological gender.
Circa 2014, my economics mentor, who also mentored me in reading/trading free markets recommended reading Sowell.
We discussed Sowell at length, and my primary take away was that Sowell’s world view was that the individual is much better at improving their own lives than any intervening external factors. All in all, an ardent believer in individual capitalism. That is a high level assessment.
A more nuanced assessment is Sowell (like his mentor, Milton Friedman), is a true to earth anti-Keynesian. Fun fact, he considered himself a Marxist in his 20’s IIRC.
There are lots of anti-Keynesian economists. Though I think what sets Sowell apart is the way he uses widely accessible data to justify every single view on public policy he has, and to make it easy to digest for someone without an economics background (no easy task).
You can find a nice collection of his ideas online [1].
It is such a travesty that Thomas Sowell is completely absent from the mainstream conversation about race. I also can't recommend Coleman Hughes enough, as someone who has in many ways taken the torch from Sowell.
There are so many black Americans that have never heard a perspective on their standing aside from those presented within the context of critical race theory; a set of conclusions which are completely obliterated by people like Sowell, Hughes, Jason Riley, Larry Elder, Carol Swain, Desi-Rae Campbell, Josephine Mathias, Shelby Steele, Kmele Foster, Glenn Loury, Jonathan McWhorter, among many others in this realm, all of whom have largely differing opinions.
2 things that I liked him for (after reading/hearing just cursorily -- I would like to read more):
1) His perspectives on how the unfairnesses that life throws at you are part of, and incentivize you towards making your life better and not something that you should simply seek to eliminate without knowing what the unintended consequences are. See his essay on "Cosmic Justice": https://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html
2) That if we seek to have a sustainable approach to how society is managed, maybe we need to set up the reasonable rules and structures of how we want outcomes to be guided by, and not change them willy-nilly because of who happens to benefit at the time. There will be winners and losers no matter what. It's tiring to switch your rules every time you don't like who came out ahead.
I agree that his Basic Economic book is very easy to read. It completely opened my eyes as to how to think about economics in high school when I first read. I recently watched an interview about his latest book, which he just published at 90 years of age, on charter schools. It was fascinating when he goes through the data showing that when charter schools were used in New York, the race gap disappeared. All the special interests involved in schooling as well as lack of accountability is quite depressing. Here is a transcript: https://www.hoover.org/research/economist-looks-90-tom-sowel...
It's difficult for me to come up with a charitable reason why Sowell, an arch-conservative, is somehow interesting to HN (and, to be fair, I'd say the same thing about a sudden surge in interest in Brad DeLong or Matt Bruenig), or why we'd vote City-Journal, the house organ of the Manhattan Institute, to the front page. I think it's especially dicey given the climate.
If you're curious about Sowell, some policy positions worth noting: opposition to marriage equality on the basis of heterosexual marriage protecting women from the impact of their declining physical appearance as they age, full-throated support for the Iraq war, repeated comparisons of Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler, a spicy "Brown v. Board of Education was decided wrongly" take, opposition to criminal justice reform and particularly decarceration, support for Donald Trump in 2016 (and after), and opposition to the building of mosques.
It's not that these positions are beyond the pale (well: the mosque thing is), but rather that they're cut directly out of the coupon book of 1990s conservative think-tankism. Many dozens of public intellectuals held (and still hold) this same revanchist culture war portfolio of positions. Why is Sowell, long retired, so enthusiastically trotted out?
> Some seem to think that Donald Trump's lead in the polls and in the New Hampshire primary make him the most electable candidate, even if he often acts like an overgrown spoiled brat.
Secondly:
> opposition to criminal justice reform and particularly decarceration,
is a common position amongst blacks in America. Many civil rights advocates fought for tougher criminal sentencing in the 80s and 90s, including many in Congress, such as Charlie Rangel. In this regard, Sowell's position is more in line with the views of African Americans of a certain age, instead of his conservative beliefs (recall, many libertarians were against the war on drugs: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/praise-imp...)
> a spicy "Brown v. Board of Education was decided wrongly" take
Here is Sowell's opinion: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/5160. As someone who himself went to a segregated school, I feel he is entitled to his opinion on whether or not the children who went there feel inferior, which is the reasoning behind Warren's majority opinion. That being said, Sowell is extremely pro-school-choice and generally against publicly run schools, so in Sowell's America schools would have been naturally desegregated due to market forces.
He opposed Trump in the primaries, like many conservatives, and supported him in the general, like most conservatives.
Supporting Trump isn't some weird mark of shame or anything; it's not my point that he's worth dismissing because he tolerates Donald Trump. Rather: he's worth dismissing because he has practically no interesting perspectives. He's a US-style right wing conservative in the most conventional possible sense. That doesn't make him a bad person, but it does make him a weird topic for an HN discussion.
Later
You expanded your comment (which is fine, so did I!) and I just want to say: I'm not so much interested in debating the merits of Sowell's positions --- which would make for a boring political argument --- so much as just recognizing that he has them, and that they're the standard-issue intellectual uniform of 1990s American conservativism.
If you want to rebut the point I'm making, I think the most effective way to do so would be to spot some position Sowell has taken that is far outside the mainstream of the Hoover Institution. Then we'd be discussing what makes Sowell interesting, rather than relitigating the most boring debate in American politics.
> He opposed Trump in the primaries, like many conservatives, and supported him in the general, like most conservatives.
I feel using the final election to say someone 'supports' a particular candidate is not really a good metric in the American voting system. Primaries are better since there is more policy choice.
Obviously, Sowell would support Trump over Hillary even if he didn't like Trump as a candidate, or even if he thought Trump was not the best candidate. Sowell is very conservative, and believes in school choice, free market healthcare, deregulation, etc. Clinton didn't want any of that. Like many people, Sowell's 'support' of Trump (I don't believe he ever even endorsed him specifically) in 2016 (and likely in 2020) is a vote against the other candidate.
> but it does make him a weird topic for an HN discussion.
Because they're same positions every mainstream conservative shares. They're the essence of what the guidelines refer to when they say "Off topic: most stories about politics".
Tech has a lot of libertarians, which vaguely attribute to a couple of things: the appeal of simplistic but clean-seeming free market economic models to kinds of people who are drawn to computers and (to a lesser extent) the influence of startup culture. People in tech are also typically pretty economically secure, which gives them the luxury of a certain amount of aloofness.
If I understand the article correctly, Sowell thinks that blacks have a highly inferior status today because they have a culture that is not suited to succeeding in modern society.
If we assume Sowell is correct about that, then my reply is that culture is not fixed. For instance, Western European culture is vastly different than it was 500 years ago.
So the question is why blacks have the particular culture they do at present. Does Sowell address this?
> The prevailing notion today is that your skin color, your chromosomes, your sexual orientation, and other markers of identity determine how you think. And it is generally those who see themselves as the most freethinking—“woke,” while the rest of us are asleep—who apply the strictest and most backward formulas.
I'm going to be a nonconformist myself and oppose the near-univeral approval of Sowell in this discussion. His book Basic Economics was the first book on econ that I read, and I was very impressed by it. It reaffirmed the rather right-wing political views that I'd inherited from my parents. However, after taking a few introductory econ classes at university and doing further reading on my own, Sowell starts to appear very ideologically driven.
Sowell is a free-market fundamentalist, in that he opposes most government intervention in markets, and universally trusts laissez-faire capitalism to provide the optimal social & economic good for practically any situation.
The problem with this position is that there's simply a ton of evidence that targeted government intervention provides far better outcomes in many situations.
Another classic example is environmental pollution, a classic case of tragedy of the commons. On the topic of global warming, Sowell doesn't even try to address the issue. He belives climate change is a hoax perpetuated by Democrats.
Sowell writes in a conversational style, which is great for accessibility for non-economics. However, he is rightly criticized as failing to cite rigorous studies to back up his opinions.
For a more balanced view of basic economics, I'd highly recommend Principles of Economics by Greg Mankiw.
Sowell even thinks that racial discrimination in hiring doesn't require government intervention. He constructs an argument in Basic Economics that market forces will rectify this kind of social ill.
I have read more books by Thomas Sowell than by any other author, by a very wide margin. The one which has influenced me the most is the one which best captures the fundamental principles underlying his view of the world: A Conflict of Visions. I'd suggest it as required reading for anyone who wants to fully appreciate Sowell's work, as it provides insight into how he makes normative judgments about the merits of economic policy choices.
In general Sowell does an excellent job of demonstrating through data that the outcomes of economic policies are often directly at odds with their stated objectives, but to really take a principled stand on what the proper objectives are in the first place you need a set of coherent first principles. A Conflict of Visions provides this backdrop, and once you understand that Sowell clearly adheres to the "constrained" vision of humankind then his other works fall into their proper context.
It's a great book, but not above criticism, so in the interest of thoughtful inquiry I'd encourage anyone to read the book as well as this review by Bryan Caplan, economics professor at George Mason University who is also an economic libertarian: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/sowell
There are righteous forms of hierarchy and tyrannical forms of hierarchy.
What your argument boils down to is an attack on hierarchy qua hierarchy. Very common to see these days as it is a classic revolutionary/Marxist ideal but it's also entirely inconsistent with natural law. Even within the revolutionary ideal, every revolution has its leaders and its strongmen because that's just how people organize themselves and those at the top live better off than those at the bottom (think Lenin and Stalin vs the starving masses).
> What other forms of righteous hierarchies are you thinking about?
Head surgeon and other surgeons. CTO and other engineers. VP of sales and sales people, etc.
Other forms of hierarchy would be upper and lower courts.
Whether or not these are righteous is dependent on if, for example, the head surgeon is actually experienced and talented and a good leader. If he's just some shmuck they pulled off the street or if he's only in that position because he's friends with the hospital president then that would be a tyrannical or dysfunctional hierarchy.
>That would be the tyrannical form and completely illegitimate.
That's my point. But hierarchy itself is not illegitimate. That hierarchy itself is legitimate is a reflection of natural law. That was my assertion.
There seem to be some mixing of hierarchies and authority here, but even anarchists aren't as dogmatically opposed to all kinds of authority that you seem to imply?
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult the architect or the engineer For such special knowledge I apply to such a "savant." But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the "savant" to impose his authority on me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure."
I was talking about Marxism and other revolutionary movements that spring from the French Revolution.
VP and CTO are actual titles that confer authority. What Bakunin is describing are hierarchies of competence in a particular art (techne) but what would he say about parent-child relationships?
I had never heard of Bakunin until now. I'm not an expert on the schools of anarchist thought by any measure so I won't pretend to really be able to hold a discussion you want to get into analysis of various schools of anarchist thought.
> Those are considered illegitimate since they are undemocratic.
But these are voluntary structures? That's kind of the beauty of the free market. You have these little monarchal structures that go out and create something in the world. If people want to join they can. If and when these structures become too dysfunctional they go away due to market forces.
It's not dogma to suggest that people want to be compensated for building houses and growing food and won't do that for free unless a gun is put to their head.
You're using the word Capitalism as though it's representative of an ideology. "Capitalism" is a term created by Marxists to describe a system that allows people to freely exchange with one another without force. No one is going to grow your food or build you a house without compensation. That's why Marxism requires slavery (public slavery).
You're clearly ignorant of left-wing theory. You actually think that the huge sympathy that socialism had and still have is based on people not understanding that it's actually slavery? A no compensation society? Come on.
I mean there's a reason these sorts of programs always end with mass murder and suffering. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn't make it legitimate. Lots of people followed the Soviet and Nazi programs and it created human suffering on a level never seen before in human history.
You really should read Human Action by Mises. It lays out on a philosophical level why all this stuff is fundamentally irrational and necessarily leads to mass human suffering.
Sigh. 99% of socialist want to expand democracy, not establish another dictatorship. Yet, people like yourself dogmatically focus on that other 1% that are authoritarian and paint every socialist as such.
71k people die every year in the US due to lack of healthcare. You need to open both eyes.
I should read a book by the some libertarian god that unsurprisingly dismisses socialism, while your own knowledge about socialism is obviously paperthin? If it's so clear and obvious then you should be able to explain it in a paragraph or two?
Yes I know they do. This is a bad thing. The Founding Fathers were famously skeptical of democracy as were many, many thinkers and societies before them.
And yes it's always democratic in the beginning but democracy is not a panacea (as the Founding Fathers understood) and quickly things devolve into despotism. Just because someone exists doesn't mean they should have a say in how a society is run. Existence is a pretty low bar compared to how developed and complex the structures of a well organized society are.
> 71k people die every year in the US due to lack of healthcare.
Millions are born each year due to abundance and millions more don't die for want of food and other essential services and that is because there's a functioning market clearing mechanism (price).
Again I think you should read Human Action, even so you can just understand your 'enemy'.
It's refreshing to see that this anti-democratic sentiment is said so bluntly, usually it's covered up in weasel words.
> And yes it's always democratic in the beginning
Please let me know which of the communist regimes of the 20th century that started out democratic.
> Millions are born each year due to abundance and millions more don't die for want of food and other essential services and that is because there's a functioning market clearing mechanism (price).
That's a sociopathic response to why on earth 71k people should die every year in a country of abundance simply because they don't have any money.
> It's refreshing to see that this anti-democratic sentiment is said so bluntly, usually it's covered up in weasel words.
This sentiment is at the core of America. It's not a secret at all.
Pure democracy is necessarily predicated on a rejection of human rights. We have a Constitution because individuals have human rights that cannot be violated no matter how many people vote on it.
Pure democracy is evil.
> Please let me know which of the communist regimes of the 20th century that started out democratic.
What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
> That's a sociopathic response to why on earth 71k people should die every year in a country of abundance simply because they don't have any money.
This is a utopian response which is actually indicative of sociopathy.
"There are three questions which will destroy most of the arguments on the left: 1. Compared to what? 2. At what cost? 3. What hard evidence do you have?" – Thomas Sowell
> We have a Constitution because individuals have human rights that cannot be violated no matter how many people vote on it.
That's implausible, since sufficient people voting on it can change the Constitution.
> What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
It means “council”. Leninism was vanguardist, not democratic; vanguardism is a top-down paternalistic elite-led structure based on the idea that the masses aren't ready to lead themselves, and would lead to bad outcomes if allowed to do so without guidance from their more sophisticated betters to direct them to observe proper ideological constraints. Basically, the same position your espousing, but differing only in what the right-thought is that it is feared the masses would depart from if not constrained.
> This sentiment is at the core of America. It's not a secret at all.
It's not a secret no, but it's certainly not part of the propaganda.
> Pure democracy is necessarily predicated on a rejection of human rights.
Why is that? Maybe you should be blunt here too and just say private-property enforcement instead of human rights?
> What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
Are you really going argue that it was a democracy because of the name? Why are you doubling down on your own ignorance? Even the link you yourself posted contains this:
"After Lenin's party, the Bolsheviks, only got a minority of the votes in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, he disbanded it by force after its first meeting".
The Bolsheviks took power in a coup for themselves and never let go of it.
> This is a utopian response which is actually indicative of sociopathy.
What? There's nothing utopian about universal healthcare and that's firmly established by now. That also sounds like a means to an end argument which is sociopathic if anything is.
No, it was a COINTELPRO operation. They made up a bunch of propaganda for character assassination that, to no surprise, never got released because it didn't exist.
> but it's unwise to trust people who consistently advise one behavior but do another themselves.
Well, clergymen haven't been strangers to that kind of inconsistency throughout history. Luckily it's been relegated to gossip tabloids in modern society.
I do not default to trusting pastors (despite being a devout Christian) - the United States is full to the brim of people who claim the title and act remarkably unlike Jesus Christ (a phenomenon predicted repeatedly in the first few decades of Christianity's establishment, I'll note).
> he United States is full to the brim of people who claim the title and act remarkably unlike Jesus Christ
Yeah, indeed. Even though I see myself as both a socialist and atheist I have absolutely zero problem with religious people or religion in itself. To each their own. I actually admire the commitment and self-sacrifice of monks/nuns of various beliefs. What leaves me dumbfounded however is how so many people have somehow managed to cherry-pick all the worst aspects - egoism, intolerance, greed, no empathy beyond the in-group etc. - but still somehow argue that they're followers of a religion based on compassion for others (and especially the less fortunate?).
FWIW, if you believe the Gospel accounts, that's exactly what happened in Jesus' day.
His interactions with the Sadducees and Pharisees are mostly him lambasting them for doing much what you describe.
As he himself said, regarding eventual judgement:
> Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
Comparing China and Rome to a modern economy is basically impossible. Those were agrarian societies whose net output per unit of territory was largely static, and determined by the amount of food that can be grown in the land. I don't think it's valid to categorize them as either socialist or capitalist societies. Marx agreed: he wrote of feudalism (and probably, by extension other agrarian civilizations) as a distinct kind of society that predated the capitalism that rose out of the industrial revolution.
The fact that they were agrarian societies doesn't negate the fact that both China and Rome often cycled between socialist and capitalist styled policies.
Feel free to substitute any modern economy in their place and you'll see a society that is capitalistic but uses socialist policies to constrain the amount of inequality (ie. healthcare, education, etc) driven by that capitalism.
You're missing the point that balance between the two usually is best for the populace and for the stability of the government.
This is a point that Thomas Sowell misses often as well. He strives for conformity with the conservative status quo.
That seems to miss a point, at least for Rome. Much of the work was done by slaves. Saying that it cycled to "capitalist styled policies" or "socialist styled policies" may apply to the free people, but for the slaves, life didn't change much. Given how much of the economy was driven by slave labor, I'm not sure that the swings changed things all that much.
There's no solid rule here though, because it depends on what people actually use their freedom for. That depends on history, upbringing, culture, etc.
It also depends on how large of a system you are talking about, and whether even well-intentioned people can make reasonable decisions. In a village, it might be pretty clear that you have enough farmers but need a fisherman; or that there are enough painters and you need a musician. But in a metropolis, country, or global market it might not be so clear and you need some feedback signals. Price set by the seller is a very effective feedback mechanism because it's so simple, but you could imagine other forms of feedback as well (many of which might be an affront to freedom).
Then there's also the political danger of socialism, which is that you have to give someone (or a group) an awful lot of power to implement it. In theory, democracy will guide politics in a reasonable direction, but in practice democracy is a very imperfect guide. "Implementation details" of socialism are often an affront to freedom.
True, but most Americans seemingly do not know how to make such a distinction. The key, but seemingly too nuanced aspects of European governments in that regard, gets distilled to "liberal/leftist/commie/pinko" states.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. I realize there is a provocation in the title, but resisting provocations is part of the art of avoiding degenerate threads.
What tends to make for better threads is focusing on the specifics of a specific story, and steering clear of the pull of the nearest generic black holes.
Sorry, I can't resist:
- "charlatan": I understand reasonable people can disagree with his analyses and policy recommendations... but how does this add to the discussion?
- "property law that benefits rich folks is magical and natural": this doesn't sound like Sowell? Also, I was under the impression that property law benefits everyone in a society like the U.S., who has more than precisely zero posessions...?
- "...law like taxation law is artificial regulation": is this a fair reading of Sowell? I have to admit I haven't covered all of his material, but from what I have encountered he puts forward points with more nuance
If you want people to accept your point of view, the burden is on you to articulate it. There's a lot of this "people should just see it the way I do" attitude floating around the internet.
I have seen interviews where Sowell discusses how he started out as a Marxist, but when he started looking at evidence that's what changed him. Is it fair to say that he doesn't understand left-wing ideology?
Where does he state that the poor did not earn their wages while the rich did? It seems to me he's saying that it is ok for everyone to keep their earnings across all income brackets.
Why is it not their earnings? That pre tax income gets payed out and taxed, because someone worked for it. If someone did not work for it the company they work for would not pay the tax amount to the government. It exists because of someones work.
Once taxed it then belongs to the government, in a very real sense, the tax-payer no longer have access to it. While it no longer belongs to the tax-payer, it does not therefore follow that they did not earn it.
It doesn't even say that much. It simply ridicules proponents of wealth redistribution for sometimes calling those opposed "greedy", while they themselves are being "greedy" in going after other people's money. Whether taxes are okay isn't discussed.
It's not "other people's money" in the first place, that's the point. Packed into that notion is the idea it rightfully or originally belongs to the rich.
It doesn't. It rightfully belongs to the poor who need food and healthcare.
Again, there is no reference to "rich" vs "poor" in his argument. The argument is just a basic restatement of property rights - people own that which they've purchased through trading goods, services, or money. This applies just as much to any human being, except the truly indigent with no property whatsoever.
Why is it greed for someone to keep what income/wealth/property they've earned while also is not greed to claim that someone else's income/wealth/property is actually owed to another group?
> The argument is just a basic restatement of property rights - people own that which they've purchased through trading goods, services, or money.
Your contention is that some institutions count as property rights (contract law etc), but taxation law doesn't. I'm telling you the line between them that you draw is drawn purely with ideology.
Taxation law isn't some adjustment that takes place after property law, it is part of property law. $X of tax paid by party A that ends up funding $X of social security payments to party B, literally belongs to party B. It is the property of party B. Not party A. It is not "someone else's" in any way.
Well, if you believe that all money one might have control over belongs to the poor (or somebody else) then I guess that's fair. But that's a pretty uncommon belief.
In that way there's nothing special about the quote because most people generally recognize private ownership in everyday speech.
Claiming that something is right because it exists as it is under the current system without further justification is equally, if not more short sighted. It's where "plainspeaking" and begging the question combine into a kind of catnip for people that want reinforcement for their impulse towards the status quo. I'm not familiar with this particular quote, but I've read one of his recent books and it was full of this sort of thing.
I am not, and nor do I see the quote in question claiming that because something exists it must be right. In fact, I'm arguing against that since it is the same as saying that something being a law does not make it just.
What he does not point out is exploitation of the working class by the wealthy. However, do not expect to see that in his books. You can always claim that there are too many people looking for work so it is natural that wages are pushed down blah blah. But think for a second does it really have to be that way? Can Bezos afford to pay more to his employees?
"Corruption" is the wrong word, but from a Marxist frame, owners of business (which is what's actually talked about in Marx) profit by collecting more labor (and therefore value) from their workers than they pay them. It's usually called "exploitation" and it's pretty central to Marxist theory.
If you work for me for $15/hr and produce value v where $v <= $15, I won't keep you on.
>> Here's a typical Sowell quote: "I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."
>> Why did the rich man "earn" it but not the poor man? Why is it "somebody else's" when it's the poor man's money but not when it's the rich man's money?
>> The answer is ideology.
> His comment holds true if you don't assume that every single 'rich' person did not 'earn' their wealth, and only gained due to corruption.
No it doesn't. His comment holds true only if you assume the current economic system that created the rich and poor men is right and just. For instance: the rich man is rich typically because he owns the capital (which can be owned at massive scale) and "earns" its profits. The laborers that operate that capital for him are much poorer than he is, because all they "earn" are wages for their time (which cannot scale). Sure a particular rich man theoretically can loose his shirt (but so can laborers, for different reasons), but the general relationship will remain the same between those groups under the current system.
It's a deeply ideological assumption that the labor that enables profit is entitled to none of it (as such), and the owner (who may have enabled none of it) is entitled to all of it. Admittedly, it's an ideological assumption so fundamental to current society that it can be as hard to see as a mountain you're standing on.
> Not sure how 'ideology' is constructing any sort of counter argument to any of Sowell's arguments that I'm aware of.
I think the point is it's not much of an argument if it's little more than the output of certain ideological assumptions (e.g. assume P therefore P).
Agreed, it's a purely reductionist take on taxes while showing complete ignorance on who decides how much people earn in society. I wish people would stop listening to Sowell like he was the Jesus of economics. Outside of theory, he fumbles all the time.
I'm not trying to be obtuse... but isn't "who decides how much people earn" always the two people that enter into free association with one another, either by an employment contract or a sales contract?
For the higher income classes it’s that class themselves who decides how much they are earn. They sit on each others’ boards, run investment funds and so on. They mingle with politicians who then create favorable laws.
There is is no input from people with lower income. It’s an insider group that negotiates and deals with itself.
It completely ignores political corruption 100%. It completely ignores union stomping over the past 60 years, among other things. This is what I mean by his ultra reductionist views, he refuses to consider external factors when he talks about social issues, which is weird for a top economist to do.
I think some people in this thread are recalling interviews or talk shows with Sowell, while others are referring to his books. In video I have seen of him, I can agree he can be flippant on some topics... maybe the format of the television interview or "debate" or "round-table" would leave the impression that he hasn't thought carefully about these things. I'd recommend his books and essays.
The notes on political corruption and union stomping over the past 60 years are intriguing, do you have any good references to solid academic sources on these or related topics?
Anarcho-capitalist, libertarian, and individuals that hold high-amounts of those related beliefs have very few basic laws that govern their world views (1-3, depending on who you ask). If you believe that the fruits of your labor are yours and yours alone with no exception, then no amount of talk of "union stomping", "historic injustice" and "external factors" will change the interpretation of the fact that taxation is violating that principle.
So I fully understand how you think his views are utra-reductionist.
The corruption issue is well-known, but not relevant. Corruption has been demonstrably worse in non-capitalist societies. Likewise, the biggest issue with capitalism is actually the lack of perfect information (and manipulation of information), but once again, non-capitalist systems have at least as big of an issue here (usually far worse).
The partial solution for information involves requiring more disclosures, having a smaller government with higher transparence, and (historically impossible) making that information easily available and publicly searchable on the internet. This also tends to help reduce the corruption issue.
A complete solution for either corruption or information transfer seems out of reach at the moment.
The short answer is simply that of all the systems we've tried as humans, capitalism (though imperfect) is the least worst and results in the least human suffering.
Or if you read the debunking book first, then you won't have to waste your time with his book, since you'll understand the crux of the argument and why it's wrong.
For this community? Das Kapital. For something less rigorous and more accessible, probably something by Richard Wolff, but I'm not familiar enough w/ his writings to recommend anything specific.
I see you recommended the heavy work, not just the propaganda pamphlet - good. I haven't read Das Kapital and I should. However...
My question: an oft repeated refrain, when Marx is touted as a reasonable alternative, is that any time anyone tried his ideas out, it was a total disaster (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez).
I have watched some Wolff on Youtube, as well as other lectures on Marxism, because I'm interested and relatively agnostic on the economic spectrum. But I never see this point (tens of millions dead due to internal issues, in these societies, in the 20th century) refuted with any scholarly heft - do you have any recommendations?
I think Steven Pinker is dead on about why Marx (and other interpretations of far left economic thought such as Chomsky's flavors of anarchism) are dead in the water - they fundamentally misunderstand human nature. I'm looking for someone who sounds as clear as Pinker, that can counter this take. Any suggestions?
> My question: an oft repeated refrain, when Marx is touted as a reasonable alternative, is that any time anyone tried his ideas out, it was a total disaster (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez).
I've not read Marx, nor am I a Marxist, but my understanding is that most of his work is a diagnosis of a problem, not a plan for a cure. IIRC, Marx's own "plan" was basically more capitalism harder until it collapses and something ill-defined without its problems emerges from the ashes. Those people you cite (assuming they even wanted to improve anything rather than amass personal power), can probably be thought as a doctor who could correctly diagnose cancer but proposed a incorrect theory for a cure (e.g. something based on the four humors). Their failure to cure cancer doesn't mean the patient didn't have cancer or that cancer can't be cured.
That's correct. Most of the implementations of Marx's ideas are heavily derived through Lenin, who wrote more thoroughly about how to actually run a post-capitalist society and what would/wouldn't work.
Just to note, also, Chavez is the only person in that list who wasn't a Marxist-Leninist, and it's not helpful to understanding to include him in that list.
I don't think that analogy works: many people never get cancer which means we have a clear model for what a healthy, cancer-free life form looks like. "Curing cancer" just means returning a body to this healthy, pre-cancerous state.
But we have no model for what a healthy, capitalism-free society would look like. Every attempt at removing capitalism from the system has led to totalitarian results.
This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.
> But we have no model for what a healthy, capitalism-free society would look like. Every attempt at removing capitalism from the system has led to totalitarian results.
That's not quite accurate, since capitalism hasn't always existed and markets haven't haven't always been the primary means of exchange. There's also a fairly broad range of capitalist systems with different trade offs. We also don't know if capitalism won't also ultimately lead to totalitarian results.
In these discussions, we also probably need to make a distinction between capitalism and markets. You could perhaps have a society that keeps markets more-or-less as they are but "removes capitalism" by implementing a different relationship between labor and ownership, for instance.
> This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.
I dispute the latter point. It's kinda like saying the failure of the iAPX 432 and Itanium strongly suggests there's no better alternative to the x86 architecture. In this case, I don't think we have much understanding about what's unknown.
> My question: an oft repeated refrain, when Marx is touted as a reasonable alternative, is that any time anyone tried his ideas out, it was a total disaster (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez).
A couple things. Chavez is of a different category from the other three just on the amount of death under the other regimes. The question of the results of socialism and capitalism is complex. It's worth reading both historical and economically focused works to get a more nuanced view than the one that you've laid out. For a few suggestions:
On historical critiques of the US-centric perspective:
The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins
The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad
A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
Economic works:
Competing Economic Theories, Richard Wolff
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, David Harvey
There are more authors (Kliman, Moseley, Shaikh, etc.), but these two would be a good start.
These are works with particular perspectives and should be read as such. If you want competing ideological works, read a standard history book and Hayek, Mises, Friedman, etc.
As others have already stated, "Das Kapital" itself is a study and criticism of capitalism, and does not present much in terms of alternatives or "solutions".
It is worth noting that both Marx and Engels were in favour of democracy, even going as far as saying that the actual means of production should be democratized.
Both would probably be appalled by what became of their theories under Stalin and Mao...
Also, as Marx got older he got less and less political active, there is even a letter where he refused to be seen as a leading figure of the communist movement. Das Kapital is from this later period of his life, and subsequently very scant on noneconomic politics...
I've seen some decent refutations of that kind of thinking by Chomsky himself. I don't have a great recommendation just because my eyes tend to glaze over when people start droning on about how xyz would be nice but iT's NoT hUmAn nAtURe.
Also, I don't know how anybody could say that kind of thing about Marx, specifically Das Kapital, which is what I'm most familiar with. It doesn't delve much into human nature, it's all about modes of production and exchange and labor value.
You mention Pinker, that opens question whether you've met with work of Nicolas Taleb. He is not Marxist per se, one could say he's the opposite, but he is an ardent opponent of Pinker and his kind of reasoning, so his books could've challenged Pinker's opinion on these topics as well.
I'd second the other response's recommendation of Richard Wolff's work. He's a marxist and democratic socialist, so read his work understanding his perspective in relation to your own, whatever that might be. That being said, I found his book Competing Economic Theories on neoliberalism, keynsianism, and marxism to be very fair to all sides.
Richard Wolff's primary argument in favor of socialism is that your employer is stealing from you by making a profit off of your labor. He fundamentally does not understand how markets work.
I am a software engineer. I have a rate of pay that I consider to be more valuable than my labor, for which I will gladly exchange my labor and feel as though I have profited from the transaction. Prospective employers have an amount of labor output that they value more than a rate of pay, for which they will gladly exchange in an attempt to profit from the transaction. We engage in a mutual arrangement, wherein we both walk away having benefitted from the transaction. The fact that the employer has the capacity to profit from my output is not theft. In fact, I would feel absolutely horrible if my employer didn't profit from me at all, because I ALWAYS profit from them.
> He fundamentally does not understand how markets work. I am a software engineer.
I can assure you that the Harvard and Yale educated professor that's written textbooks on the subject knows how markets work. He might be heterodox in his adherence to marxist economics, but he fully understands the orthodox position, almost certainly in more detail than you or I ever will.
It's not just that he's a professor, it's that he has a PhD in economics. The field of economics itself has given the stamp of approval that he both understands the field and has contributed in novel ways to it.
Kurt Wise has a PhD in paleontology from Harvard and is a young earth creationist. Again, just because someone has something on their resume does not therefore mean that they are correct.
The op isn't using the fact Wolff has a PhD in Economics as a argument that he's correct in everything he says, only that the claim that he "doesn't understand how markets work" is absurd on it's face.
Similarly, saying that Kurt Wise doesn't understand geology and paleontology when he has a PhD in the field and has contributed good science is pretty absurd.
> property law benefits everyone in a society like the U.S., who has more than precisely zero possessions...?
That way of thinking is a common mistake. This statement is valid for some property law like, you cannot steal. But a law that eliminates property tax would actually harm land owners with small amounts of land. Here is an analogy, if the price of bread doubles, you are not benefiting because you happen to have a loaf of bread in your cupboard. Owning stocks is another example of this.
Property law is just words in a book. If we called it “property protection”, then we may more easily recognize that this is more of an activity than a natural right. And that costs money. A fee if you like, but we call it a tax so that it can be used for other purposes. And so that any reasonableness may be lent to ‘income tax’, which would sound absolutely inane if it were ‘work fees’, making clear that we must rent our own productive capacity from the government.
He repeats conservative propaganda so that conservatives can quote him and pretend they aren’t racist because they have one black friend.
For example there was a recent twitter flap because he repeated an old invalidated conservative talking point about reproductive rights and tons of white clconservatives jumped on board saying “see! The black community agrees!”
> “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech.”
Sowell is unique in this respect. He's book, "Basic Economics" is full of extremely relatable examples of economics in practice. It's one of the few books on economics that's a great read regardless of your background or level of academic achievement.