Thomas Sowell

This book is perhaps even more relevant a decade later than when it was written. Little has changed and a lot has gotten worse. Sowell gives a retrospective and (then) current update on the state of race ideas in (US) academia, and a lot of the pushback against him are not based so much in what he says as who he's aligned with, be it right wing politics in the US or Chicago school economics. The actual content of the book has a sprinkling of such ideas, in criticising government programs show more being counterproductive or focusing on the advancement of ethnic groups being tied to their economic liberty - but far more than that widening the US-centric race debate from a (literally) black and white perspective, to include what is probably familiar to anyone outside the US; the far more complex reality of the issue. Slavery is a bigger topic than the transatlantic slave trade, outcast groups have (also in the US) included many that are now integrated into the "white" group or just ignored (as often is the case with asian and SEA in the US that don't fit neatly into any narrative).

While society remains stunlocked and unable to move past the ideas of racial hierarchies and victimhood narratives that seem to have been more counterproductive than accomplishing anything, there is a dearth of voices that offer a different perspective. I eagerly await new ideas from Sowells critics that aren't just doubling down on more and wordier constructs defending the oppression olympics.

The biggest flaw of this book is not offering a concrete alternative, though arguably that is outside the scope it set out to do. You get a general sense of Sowell's biases for what would work and not work in his comparisons of groups that have done better and worse, and his focus on US black culture as a primary problem, but no real action plan for what to do about it. (Changing a culture is a lot more nebulous a problem than throwing more millions into some government program). Sowell has also pointed out a handful of the people behind the current narratives on race but doesn't delve deep into the alternatives. show less

"Basic Economics" is generally smart and engaging, but it's often intellectually dishonest.

Thomas Sowell does a great job of explaining the basic principles of economics with salient examples. There are multiple "aha" moments while reading, because the author captures the dynamics of the field so well. Unfortunately, Sowell manifests a strongly libertarian perspective throughout the book, to the point that some sections read more like propaganda than a textbook.

For example, Sowell show more attributes US gasoline shortages during the 1970s to motorist hoarding—without even mentioning OPEC's oil embargo in 1973—to support his repeated argument that price controls are always bad. The book doesn't seem to evaluate the successes and failures of a free market, but it assumes instead that the market is always more effective than government.

To learn more about basic economics, I have put this book aside. Instead, I will be reading "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan. show less

Thomas Sowell’s The Housing Boom and Bust is a slim but powerful exposition of the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

Tellingly, Sowell actually spends very little of this book’s ~150 pages on the events of those two years. Instead, he looks much farther back to the roots of the crisis. He first critiques the idea that there is – or recently has been – any real shortage of ‘affordable housing’ in the USA. He explains how many local communities have driven up the cost of housing show more by severe restrictions on building, often in the name of environmentalism or ‘preservation’, but always with the aim of keeping out those who are not already in.

He then provides a brilliant chapter on the government’s role in constructing and exacerbating the mortgage crisis itself. The aforementioned ‘shortage’ of housing was posed as a problem only government could step in and solve, especially for ‘the poor’ and racial minorities, with the result a concerted, persistent program of government regulations, threats, and sometimes outright bullying of lenders to force them into extending mortgages to millions of people who would never have qualified for them under traditional lending criteria:

Both the genesis of unaffordable housing in particular local areas and the response with national policies to make buying a home easier were political in origin, and government regulation is what forced lenders to meet arbitrary quotas by eroding traditional mortgage lending safeguards. The facts could not be plainer. Market criteria had long required such things as substantial down payments, as well as income and credit histories that made continuing payments likely. But all that was brushed aside in the political crusade for ‘affordable housing’ and bigger home ownership statistics. p. 44

Once this hothouse environment was in place, disaster was inevitable:

The bedrock question then is: Why did so many monthly mortgage payments stop coming? and the bedrock answer is: Because mortgage loans were made to people whose prospects of repaying them were less than in the past. Nor was this simply a matter of misjudgment by banks and other lenders. The political pressures to meet arbitrary lending quotas, set by officials with the power of economic life and death over banks and over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, led to riskier lending practices than in the past. p. 119

Sowell of course doesn’t let Wall Street off the hook entirely, but his book is an essential counterweight to equally excellent books on the subprime crisis such as Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which focuses exclusively on the perfidies of the big investment banks, and which may mislead the unwary into thinking the subprime crisis can be reduced to a single locus for blame. I read Lewis and Sowell in succession, and recommend doing so to acquire a broad and balanced introduction to this pivotal chapter in American, and indeed global, financial history. show less

When heavy artillery is needed in the fight against collectivist propaganda, then it's time to wheel out Thomas Sowell. Now in his late seventies, this distinguished economist and political philosopher has devoted much of his career to combating the myths of political correctness.

A prime example is his 1984 book, "Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality." In this monument to common sense, Sowell examines the disastrous turn in the American civil rights movement from equality of opportunity to show more equality of results.

Equality of opportunity is represented by the landmark 1954 lawsuit, Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in the public schools. The spirit of equal opportunity also was present in the formulation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sowell brings several examples of Congressional sponsors of the bill (such as Hubert Humphrey) assuring their colleagues and the public that the legislation would not introduce quotas, preferences, or any other results-oriented mandate. The only target was to be intentional discrimination, and the burden of proof would be on the complainant.

It did not take long, however, before the Supreme Court began its crusade to re-introduce racial considerations into education and other spheres of American life. In the 1968 case of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, the Court ruled that a Virginia school district was in violation of the Brown decision because its schools were still either predominantly white or predominantly black--even though families now had the choice of sending their children to any school they desired. In other words, racial barriers had been dismantled, and equal opportunity was in force.

But the results of the school district's new rules were not in keeping with the vision of Brown, said the Court. And thus the decision in Green paved the way for that great social catastrophe, the forced busing of children to achieve racial balance.

Three years later, in 1971, we witness the advent of quotas, as the Department of Labor issued "goals and timetables" to

"'increase materially the utilization of minorities and women'...Employers were required to confess to 'deficiencies in the utilization' of minorities and women whenever statistical parity could not be found in all job classifications, as a first step toward correcting this situation. The burden of proof--and remedy--was on the employer. 'Affirmative action' was now decisively transformed into a numerical concept, whether called 'goals' or 'quotas'."

This approach was soon rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court in the Weber case, in which the Civil Rights Act was stretched and distorted to allow affirmative action as we now know it.

All of this, asserts Sowell, was latent from the outset in the "civil rights vision of the world," which interprets statistical disparity as the work of discrimination and various "root causes." According to this view, the so-called under-representation of blacks (or women or Hispanics or the victim group du jour) in a given domain is ipso facto evidence of discrimination, regardless of the intent of the authority in question. If a department of physics at a major university does not have a single black faculty member, then racism is lurking somewhere, even if no qualified black person ever submitted a resume.

Sowell thoroughly deconstructs the madness behind this obsession with statistical disparity and its endless harvest of victim claims. Aggregate statistics on income prove nothing about underlying causes. An ethnic group can be poor in conditions of complete equality, or well-to-do in conditions of extreme adversity. The émigré Chinese communities are a classic case. Says Sowell:

"Throughout southeast Asia, for several centuries, the Chinese minority has been--and continues to be--the target of explicit, legalized discrimination in various occupations, in admission to institutions of higher learning, and suffers bans and restrictions on land ownership and places of residence...Yet in all these countries, the Chinese minority--about 5 percent of the population in southeast Asia--owns a majority of the nation's total investments in key industries...In Malaysia, where the anti-Chinese discrimination is written into the Constitution, is embodied in preferential quotas for Malays in government and private industry alike, and extends to admissions and scholarships at the universities, the average Chinese continues to earn twice the income of the average Malay."

Sowell also tackles the myth that women are underpaid and targets of discrimination in the workplace. When all the feminist hype is stripped away, we see that women are paid the same wages for the same work. True, women on average earn less then men, but this is due to (a) their greater tendency to work part-time; (b) interruptions in career due to the demands of motherhood; and (c) type of chosen profession.

If we compare apples to apples, that is, men who have never married to women who have never married,

"...an entirely different picture emerges. Women who remain single earn 91 percent of the income of men who remain single, in the age bracket from 25 to 64 years old. Nor can the other 9 percent automatically be attributed to employer discrimination, since women are typically not educated as often in such highly paid fields as mathematics, science, and engineering...This virtual parity in income between men who never marry and women who never marry is not a new phenomenon, attributable to affirmative action. In 1971, women who had remained unmarried into their thirties and who had worked since high school earned slightly higher incomes than men of the very same description. In the academic world, single women who received their Ph.D.'s in the 1930s had by the 1950s become full professors slightly more often than male Ph.D.'s as a whole."

A particularly biting testament against the travesty of affirmative action comes from Sowell's own personal experience. In the book's epilogue, he answers his critics. One of their many attacks is that Sowell (who is black) allegedly benefited in his own career from affirmative action. The fact that a scholar of Sowell's stature must rebut such a demeaning slander is a chilling reminder of the extent to which the apostles of the victim industry--from Supreme Court Justice William Brennan to Senator Barack Obama--have polluted American culture with their intellectual dross.

We can only sigh with Thomas Sowell as he writes:

"If there is an optimistic aspect of preferential doctrines, it is that they may eventually make so many Americans so sick of hearing of group labels and percentages that the idea of judging each individual on his or her own performance may become more attractive than ever." show less