Book review of “Maverick” - about Thomas Sowell

 

Charles Murray reviews Jason L. Riley’s new book Maverick, a biography of Thomas Sowell as well as an overview of Mr. Sowell’s contributions to “race, political philosophy, and economic theory.” Here are a few extracts published in The Claremont Review of Books:

The Immortal Sowell

In a reasonable world, Thomas Sowell’s life would be celebrated in the same way we honor Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Marian Anderson—as a black hero, born into a genuinely systemically racist America, who not only endured but prevailed.

. . .

Jason Riley, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (2014), outlines Sowell’s personal history in his new biography, Maverick, but does not dwell on it. Instead, Riley decided to give readers an overview of Sowell’s thought. It was a formidable task. I counted 36 book titles in his Wikipedia bibliography, and that total doesn’t include collections of essays and revisions of earlier books. His work has touched on virtually every important social and economic policy issue of our era. How does one summarize it without either oversimplifying Sowell’s contributions or losing the reader’s attention? It can be done, Riley demonstrates, with clean prose and a journalistic narrative. Maverick is a pleasure to read.

Diverse as Sowell’s topics have been, most of them may be grouped under three headings: race, political philosophy, and economic theory.

. . .

One measure of Riley’s success is that I finished Maverick inspired to read Sowell’s books that I had missed and to reread some of the ones I thought I already knew. And that, I hope, will be Maverick’s impact on others as well: to get people in the 2020s and beyond to read Sowell. He has so much to teach to a new generation—and most emphatically, to the generation that is redefining the American Right.

. . . When researching Losing Ground in the early 1980s, I was startled to discover that 19th-century thinkers had analyzed the moral hazards of welfare with far greater sophistication than the public intellectuals of my era. In 2021, reminded by Maverick of all that Sowell has accomplished, I had a parallel reaction: Sowell’s analyses of a host of social and political issues are more sophisticated and acute than those of just about everyone who writes on the same topics today. As far as I can tell, every argument that one might make against the positions of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi had already been laid out by Sowell by the mid-1970s, and no one since has described them better. Forty-two years ago, Knowledge and Decisions provided a deeper analysis of the dysfunction of modern welfare states and administrative states than anything in the contemporary debate. Thirty-five years ago, A Conflict of Visions identified the dynamics that drive today’s political polarization. With Maverick, Jason Riley makes the case for what I consider to be the core truth about Thomas Sowell’s legacy. He would be seen as one of a handful of seminal intellectuals of the last half-century—in a reasonable world.

Full book review is here. 

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Thomas Sowell: Biden is America's point of no return

 

The link here is to a composite of recent interviews with the brilliant economist Thomas Sowell.  It’s sobering and provocative.  It’s less than 10 minutes and worth every second.  At age 90, he remains a national treasure.

Video is here.

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Thomas Sowell 1 -- AOC 0

This one is making the rounds...

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A new civil rights agenda

photo credit: therightplanet.com

A couple of days ago, I posted a chart demonstrating the radical agenda of Black Lives Matter as it relates to race riots in Charlotte and elsewhere. It’s an important subject in this election season, especially since candidate Donald J. Trump is going where few GOP candidates have gone: into the inner cities to explore a “new civil rights agenda” with black leaders such as Pastor Darrell Scott and Sheriff David Clarke.

Thomas Sowell, an economist and one of my favorite contributors to various blogsites, had an article yesterday at Town Hall entitled ‘Favors’ to Blacks. His comments are particularly on topic as to why a “new civil rights agenda” is in Trump’s platform. Here are some extracts:

Back in the 1960s, as large numbers of black students were entering a certain Ivy League university for the first time, someone asked a chemistry professor -- off the record -- what his response to them was. He said, "I give them all A's and B's. To hell with them."

Since many of those students were admitted with lower academic qualifications than other students, he knew that honest grades in a tough subject like chemistry could lead to lots of failing grades, and that in turn would lead to lots of time-wasting hassles -- not just from the students, but also from the administration.

He was not about to waste time that he wanted to invest in his professional work in chemistry and the advancement of his own career. He also knew that his "favor" to black students in grading was going to do them more harm than good in the long run, because they wouldn't know what they were supposed to know.

Such cynical calculations were seldom expressed in so many words. Nor are similar cynical calculations openly expressed today in politics. But many successful political careers have been built on giving blacks "favors" that look good on the surface but do lasting damage in the long run.

One of these "favors" was the welfare state. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.

In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.

A big "favor" the Obama administration is offering blacks today is exemption from school behavior rules that have led to a rate of disciplining of black male students that is greater than the rate of disciplining of other categories of students.

. . .

But Washington politicians are on the case. It strengthens the political vision that blacks are besieged by racist enemies, from which Democrats are their only protection. They give black youngsters exemptions from behavioral standards, just as the Ivy League chemistry professor gave them exemption from academic standards.

In both cases, the consequence -- unspoken today -- is "to hell with them." Kids from homes where they were not given behavioral standards, who are then not held to behavioral standards in schools, are on a path that can lead them as adults straight into prison, or to fatal confrontations with the police.

This is ultimately not a racial thing. Exactly the same welfare state policies and the same non-judgmental exemption from behavioral standards in Britain have led to remarkably similar results among lower-class whites there.

. . .

If a “new civil rights agenda” honestly confronts such issues and explores real solutions, I am all for it. Some of those real solutions will involve eliminating destructive government interference and shrinking the welfare state. Those are Tea Party values.

Read the entire article here.

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Election issues 101

art credit: blog.press.princeton.edu

Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite columnists, not the least because of his ability to explain economics in ways that anyone can understand. He writes in plain English, marshals his facts, and it’s all but impossible to find a logic lapse in any of his arguments. While I may disagree with him on this or that, I admire him and respect his opinion. Always. So I am extracting his column from a recent Front Page column on “Essential Reads For The 2016 Election:  Books every American should be familiar with before voting this November”:

If you are concerned about issues involved when some people want to expand the welfare state and others want to contract it, then one of the most relevant and insightful books is "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple. It was not written this year and is not even about the United States, much less our current presidential or other candidates.

What makes "Life at the Bottom" especially relevant and valuable is that it is about the actual consequences of the welfare state in England — which are remarkably similar to the consequences in the United States.

Many Americans may find it easier to think straight about what happens, when it is in a country where the welfare recipients are overwhelmingly whites, so that their behavior cannot be explained away by "a legacy of slavery" or "institutional racism," or other such evasions of facts in the United States.

As Dr. Dalrymple says: "It will come as a surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in America — for very similar reasons, of course." That reason is the welfare state, and the attitudes and behavior it promotes and subsidizes.

Another and very different example of the welfare state's actual consequences is "The New Trail of Tears" by Naomi Schaefer Riley. It is a painful but eye-opening account of life on American Indian reservations.

People on those reservations have been taken care of by the federal government for more than a hundred years. They have lived in a welfare state longer than any other minority in America. What have been the consequences?

One consequence is that they have lower incomes than any other minority — including other American Indians, who do not live on reservations, and who are doing far better on their own.

The economic plight of people on the reservations is by no means the worst of it. The social problems are heart-breaking. As just one example, the leading cause of death, among American Indian boys from 10 to 14 years of age, is suicide.

As regards black Americans, there is much talk about the role of police. If you want a book that cuts through the rhetoric and confusion, and deals with hard facts, then "The War on Cops" by Heather Mac Donald does precisely that.

On racial issues in general, the best economic survey is "Race and Economics" by Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University. Just the table on page 35, showing unemployment rates among black and white teenagers, going all the way back to 1948, should demolish all the rhetoric and spin that tries to conceal the deadly effects of minimum wage laws on unemployment among black teenagers.

The rest of Sowell's column is here. The authors cited by Sowell are also regular contributors to print and online sources. So if book-length discussions are too time-consuming for a busy schedule, you can access columns by Dalrymple on welfare and poverty here, Williams on the consequences of minimum wages here, and McDonald on the war on cops here. And here’s a review of McDonald’s book on cops. 

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For or against gun control?

art credit: riversong.wordpress.com

Gun control is not one of the primary planks in the Tea Party platforms (those planks are limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets). However, Tea Party patriots may be interested in the gun control bills defeated yesterday in Congress. CNN reports:

Senators couldn't muster enough bipartisan support to pass a series of gun control measures Monday [yesterday], the latest in a long string of failed attempts at enacting tighter curbs on firearms in the United States.

Spurred by the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, senators from each party introduced the measures they said would have strengthened background checks and prevented suspected terrorists from obtaining weapons.

But tough election year politics, paired with disputes over the effectiveness of each party's ideas, proved too powerful to break the longstanding partisan gridlock that's surrounded gun issues for years.

The result was expected. A fifth option, set to be introduced and voted upon as early as Tuesday by moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins, has generated more optimism, but still faces long odds at passage.

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who sponsored one of the failed measures expanding background checks, reacted angrily after his provision was defeated.

"I'm mortified by today's vote but I'm not surprised by it," Murphy said Monday evening. "The NRA has a vice-like grip on this place."

More of the report is here.

According to Sen. Murphy, the National Rifle Assoc. is once again the villain in the piece. Thomas Sowell published an excellent opinion piece at RealClearPolitics:

Surely murder is a serious subject, which ought to be examined seriously. Instead, it is almost always examined politically in the context of gun control controversies, with stock arguments on both sides that have remained the same for decades. And most of those arguments are irrelevant to the central question: Do tighter gun control laws reduce the murder rate?

That is not an esoteric question, nor one for which no empirical evidence is available. Think about it. We have 50 states, each with its own gun control laws, and many of those laws have gotten either tighter or looser over the years. There must be tons of data that could indicate whether murder rates went up or down when either of these things happened.

But have you ever heard any gun control advocate cite any such data? Tragically, gun control has become one of those fact-free issues that spawn outbursts of emotional rhetoric and mutual recriminations about the National Rifle Association or the Second Amendment.

If restrictions on gun ownership do reduce murders, we can repeal the Second Amendment, as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist to protect people. People do not exist to perpetuate laws.

But if tighter restrictions on gun ownership do not reduce murders, what is the point of tighter gun control laws -- and what is the point of demonizing the National Rifle Association?

There are data not only from our 50 states but also from other countries around the world. Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm's empirical study, "Guns and Violence: The English Experience," should be eye-opening for all those who want their eyes opened, however small that number of people might be.

Professor Malcolm's book also illustrates the difference between isolated, cherry-picked facts and relevant empirical evidence.

The rest of Sowell's article is here.

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