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.
His book Basic Economics taught me more than any economics classes did in school.