Thomas Sowell and Dave Rubin, two conservatives that have argued that leftism has a monopoly on academia. But, physical wealth is a product of human capital â the knowledge, skills, talents and other qualities that exist inside the heads of people â where it cannot be confiscated. And that’s one of the deadly costs of all this stuff. You may have temporary surpluses or shortages, but those things tend to self-correct. Check out his YouTube Channel, Thomas Sowell Talks About Discrimination, Race, And Social Justice. Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. But that is the whole point. But that’s true of the left in general. Sowell discontinued his school education in order to join the US Marine Corps at the time of the Korean War. This is a huge disconnect from the U.S. population breakdown of 30 percent white men, 30 percent white women, 20 percent men of color, and 20 percent women of color. At one time, 50 years ago or earlier, exposing students to a different viewpoint was considered to be a valuable part of their education. His writing is also devoid of the sort of sanctimonious "asides" one is apt to come across in some other authors. There were declines in homicide rates until 1960, and then in the 1960s homicide rates did a U-turn. Hogberg: And what makes it even worse is that Smollett got off with a slap on the wrist, apparently because he is connected to someone close to former President Obama. Sowell: Huge. Feel Trapped? Introducing, The Wedge Party. But there are other children who talked late and grew up to be intelligent and in some cases geniuses like Albert Einstein. We could play the same game with basketball and get even greater skewed representation. For example, wealth redistribution. by Thomas Sowell When you try to condense a book representing years of thought and research into a half-hour talk, a certain amount of over-simplification is inevitable. Today, the idea that difference between races is due solely to genetics is pretty much limited to the political fringes in the U.S. Recently, Thomas Sowell appeared on the Fox Business Network. They have delegitimized moral principles, they have delegitimized law and order, and the consequences can be seen almost daily. Andrew Carnegie once went down to Birmingham and saw iron ore and coal located very close to each other. And unless you have someone there who can generate some more, you are worse off than before. Thomas Sowell is considered by many to be one of the most influential and brilliant minds of the past half-century. Those on the political left have no question in their minds that they can determine which rich people are unworthy and thus it is justifiable to confiscate wealth from them, and which poor people are worthy and should be given that wealth. Hogberg: Related to discrimination, you have a section where you note that Harlem, which was predominately white in the early 20th century, was less hostile toward blacks when it came to providing housing that blacks could afford than San Francisco is today. And so, therefore, the relevant comparisons are the number of black homicide victims as compared to white victims and the number of blacks arrested for homicide as compared to whites. One example wholly away from economics or politics is that some children are years late, later than most children, in beginning to talk. A well-known Harvard professor, for example, recently referred to Justice Clarence Thomas by remarking: "He'll say he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Sowell: Even in South Africa. Now the academics who study the history of that era aren’t likely to see it since they are often too busy celebrating the 1960s. Hogberg: What changed in the 1960s that caused all of that? In any case, they are assuming that there is this natural tendency among nations that has somehow been thwarted in Egypt and therefore we must do something about that. Just one that I mention in the first chapter of the book is being the first-born child in a family. That industry can prosper only as long as it can nurture a sense of grievance. Because there are many reasons that some children begin talking late does not mean that we can say that mental retardation has nothing to do with it. And yet in South Africa, there were occupations where the black workers outnumbered the white workers even though it was illegal to hire any black workers in that occupation. The Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University), Dr. Sowell recently celebrated his 90th birthday. Thomas Sowell is an American economist and a social theorist. All rights reserved. Indeed, there were many such “coincidences” of trends that were getting better and then suddenly turned around and started getting worse in the 1960s. You lowered the cost of discrimination. Like so many things that should theoretically be equal, they’re not, and they never have been. But 100 years ago it was huge among the intelligentsia, correct? “In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called “social justice” might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.” ― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice Sowell: I think back to a time when my books were reviewed not only by The New York Times but also the New York Review of Books. Sowell: Politicians using race as their ticket to whatever racket they're running. And there is no cost—people who already own houses or apartment buildings can easily vote to restrict the building of more housing. What would you say to people who say it is immoral to book a room at Trump International Hotel? Hogberg: You write that our society has a taboo “against discussing anything that might be considered negative in the individual behavior or social culture of lagging groups” and that is “counterproductive.” Why is that taboo counter-productive? And so you create a chronic surplus of labor. Now you’re probably thinking right now that … doesn’t represent the country I live in. For example, the homicide rate among black males fell by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. The realtors and building owners were assuring the white tenants that they were not going to let any blacks move into Harlem and, thus, there was no reason for their tenants to leave. It was quite a coincidence. Especially given that these claims are so readily believed and rewarded. Hogberg: Let’s talk about crime. Blacks are the vast majority of basketball players in the NBA. Please explain. Today that seems almost impossible to believe. And it’s not just with my writing but also other writers who challenge the prevailing vision. Sowell explains “undeserved disadvantages” by quoting Thomas Nagle, a professor of philosophy and law, as akin to an “unequal starting point” certain people have through no fault of their own. Hogberg: Related to that, did you follow the controversy surrounding the actor Jussie Smollett? They shot up to levels that hadn’t been seen since the 19th century. These days that doesn’t happen. Just one of the reasons it is important is the enormous difference in the cost of land transport versus water transport. It seeks to produce cosmic justice, going beyond strictly social justice. If I may, just the other day I came across an article about how employers setting up new factories in the United States have been deliberately locating those factories away from concentrations of black populations because they find it costlier to hire blacks than to hire whites with the same qualifications. Hogberg: If you were to make a list of the causes of disparities with the most important causes being at the top of the list and the least important toward the bottom, where would discrimination be? Thomas Sowell is an American economist and social theorist currently a senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Sowell: Yes. I deliberately picked the country where there is no question at all about the racism of the people in control of the country. … If you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will be able to see your movie and review your movie … We need to be conscious of our bias and do our part to make sure that everyone is in the room.”. Hoover Institution senior fellow Thomas Sowell weighs in on Democrats' use of race to push their agenda. Market data provided by Factset. Back then, one of the big preoccupations was with countering the fact that some people had more than other people. Nor is human capital itself easily created by third-party decision-makers. Thomas Sowell: It’s one of the many fallacies. Here we have shared Thomas Sowell quotes on socialism, welfare, equality, education, absurdity, politicians, taxes, the left, social justice, liberalism, inspirational, and motivational. Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions. Senator Wants to Judge your Social Media History Before You Can Buy a Gun; And Now the Gun Regulation Debate Begins…Again, and it’s Wrong. Especially in communist countries where communists came to power to supposedly correct such disparities. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper. He is counted among the most influential purveyors of libertarian conservatism and supply side economics in the world. And that’s true. Rather, the cost to them of not hiring blacks was just too high. They judge their actions by the wonderful things they are trying to do and are often oblivious to the actual harm they visibly doing to society. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, I think back to the Duke-Lacrosse case, where people were just hell-bent on believing that this terrible crime had been committed. The media have this thing where they do not mention the race of people who commit a crime but they do mention the race of people who are punished for committing a crime. Thomas Sowell: Social Justice Philosophy Is a Blank Check for Government Power by Brian Balfour. The Jews are a classic example. That was the classic case. Hogberg: How important is geography in affecting outcomes? The famed economist and social theorist sat down to talk about race, discrimination, crime rates, and cultural attitude shifts. One of the problems of the political left is that they come up with things that they want to do, but pay very little attention to the key question of can you actually do those things? But even racists, who prefer one race to another by definition, tend to prefer themselves most of all. For example, John Maynard Keynes set up the first eugenics society at Cambridge. He wondered why someone hadn’t thought to build a steel mill there. So, by 2005, the number of blacks living in San Francisco was less than half of what it had been in 1970 even though the total population of the city had increased. It’s one of those things that you don’t need one speck of evidence for. ', and 'It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a … Can you talk about that? He has spoken and written extensively on the unfounded presence of the welfare state, that keeps on expanding. Her heroes include John Steinbeck, C. S. Lewis, and Thomas Sowell. or redistributed. And while modern transportation has eased some of that cost, it has by no means eliminated it. THOMAS SOWELL ON CLINTON'S ALABAMA SPEECH: LEFT RUNNING 'POLITICAL RACKET' BASED ON RACE. Millions of people around the world have paid with their lives for overlooking that simple fact.” – Thomas Sowell quotations on the ‘vision of the political left’ Hogberg: So what impact does discrimination have? Sowell began his career in higher education as an assistant professor at Cornell University. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper. The reason is that not everybody is going to be making up excuses for him. I didn’t write a book that says discrimination has no effect. What the political left sets out to do is one thing; what they’ve actually done is quite another. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Get the recap of top opinion commentary and original content throughout the week. And that’s because more and more blacks were priced out of the housing market and forced economically to leave San Francisco. His books tend to be short and pithy, no waffle is to be found, argument and evidence present only - in abundance. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover association. It’s the one area where segregation still reigns. Sowell: Absolutely. If we could create the universe from scratch, we’d all make sure that no one ever suffered misfortunes or disadvantages. Some people, activists especially, are primed to believe certain things and when they see an opportunity they run with it, facts be damned. That child is going to have some hard time in our society. But you seldom have that in a free market because wages adjust over time. Among blacks and whites, murderers tend to kill people among their own race. Starting with an initial investigation into the idea of justice, Sowell slowly builds a case against the concepts of "social justice" and "equality". Only 2.5 percent of those top critics were women of color. Sowell: It is what I call the “Social Justice” vision. An entire industry has arisen around the propagation of social-justice ideas. And there were many others—Madison Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Harold Laski, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Most people would not. Economist and social theorist Dr. Thomas Sowell talks about his experience as a Black conservative, debunking systemic racism, the importance of common decency In several interviews, Thomas Sowell’s position on American politics and racism shocked Black liberals. One of the key problems for such schemes is that the source of wealth is human capital—the skills and knowledge about how to generate wealth. When the lawbreakers are a small group, the cops can keep that under control. I share some of his quotes that do sum up the … The undeniable fact that life has never been remotely âfairâ â in the sense of presenting equal likelihoods of achieving economic prosperity or other benefits â has led many people to conclude that human biases are the reason. â¦Certainly there have been many examples of times and places where money or other physical wealth has been confiscated by governments or looted by mobs. How many are prepared to give up all that â with all its psychic, political and other rewards â is an open question. Although written nearly 20 years ago, Sowell’s insights are especially relevant today, when you consider the hysterical heights social justice activism has reached – especially on college campuses - in 2018. In the 1960s, it rose by dozens of percentage points—I don’t recall the exact number. Thomas Sowell (/ s oʊ l /; born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.. Born in North Carolina, Sowell grew up in Harlem, New York.He dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War.Upon returning to the United States, Sowell enrolled at Harvard … Sowell: Yes. At that time not only was unemployment as a whole a fraction of what it is today, there was no difference between the unemployment rate of black teenagers and white teenagers. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Thomas Sowell — T homas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author, whose books include Basic Economics. They have set the sexes against each other, the races against each other, the classes against each other. I can’t say definitively, but I think people find that their best strategy is to pretend my books don’t exist if they can’t answer the arguments in them. He also served as a faculty member of several universities and was also part of a […] Adapted excerpt from "Discrimination and Disparities" (Revised and Enlarged Edition) by Thomas Sowell. Sowell: It can have some negative effect. Therefore, you increase the amount of workers available to the industry but you reduce the quantity of workers that employers demand because labor is now more expensive. Hogberg: You have a section on merit versus productivity, and you discuss the difficulties in judging merit in the sense of moral worth. So the whole argument that cops are discriminating against blacks falls apart when you put facts into the equation. Have you ever studied Thomas Sowell? So I doubt there was anywhere near the amount of hostility toward blacks in San Francisco in the late 20th century as there was toward blacks in Harlem one hundred years earlier. All rights reserved. There are countries that have gone through that process and I mention some of them in the book. ©2021 FOX News Network, LLC. There are so many reasons for disparities that to single out one reason a priori is almost madness. You could run through a long list of them. Traditionally, justice or injustice is a characteristic of process. It makes no sense from a business standpoint to hire a black worker if a white worker can be hired with the same qualifications who can’t start a lawsuit. It compared the U.S. to Egypt and asked, why has Egypt failed? Despite how persuasive the words of John Rawls and other ‘social justice’ advocates may be in the world of words, demonstrated facts in the world of … It’s the belief that people would be, in the normal course of events, proportionally represented in various endeavors in the way they are represented in the general population. The authors wrote as though what happens in the U.S. is the norm. Unfortunately, there are lots of people who have great incentive to avoid putting facts into the equation. A newly updated version of Thomas Sowell’s book, “Discrimination and Disparities,” came out this spring. So, if you lived 75 miles inland, you had nothing like the prosperity that you had on the coast. They are generally more successful in all sorts of endeavors, they tend to have higher incomes—you can run through the list. So, why does that matter? Why is that? Hogberg: There were even costs to discrimination in South Africa, correct? Hogberg: Toward the end of the book you talk about what we can learn by examining the causes of disparities among different groups, and you write, “We can learn how dangerous it is, to a whole society, to incessantly depict outcome differences as evidence or proof of malevolent actions that need to be counter-attacked or avenged.” Why is that dangerous? But it is a complete non sequitur to say that human biases are the sole, or even primary, causes of unequal prospects, without hard evidence to support that conclusion. She stated that, “USC Annenberg’s Inclusiveness Initiative released findings that 67 percent of the top critics reviewing the 100 highest grossing movies in 2017 were white males. Thomas Sowell is an author, political theorist, intellectual and economist from the U.S. There is a whole history behind these things. Take this quote from an op-ed by Thomas Sowell, who is a conservative economist. And once that process starts, it becomes costlier and costlier for the holdouts among landlords and realtors to continue holding out. People who stay there are certainly lining Donald Trump’s pockets. So if a landlord has a building where he is having trouble finding tenants at the prices he wants to charge, but he can find blacks willing to pay those prices, then he is not going to pass up that money. And this was not due to the white employers having different social views. Less than a quarter were white women and less than 10 percent were unrepresented men. My God! And he could even end up behind bars for a long time because he didn’t realize that people other than his mother wouldn’t make excuses for him. ', 'When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. What’s become so frustrating to me over the years is people who assume that if people or events are not evenly represented, then that’s some deviation from the norm. You've successfully subscribed to this newsletter! However one of many greatest obstacles to this taking place is the ‘social justice’ imaginative and prescient, during which the elemental drawback of the much less lucky just isn’t an absence of ample human capital, however the … That’s an example of the main fallacy that you expose in your book, correct? You write, “Statistics cited in support of claims that the police target blacks usually go no farther than showing that the proportion of black people arrested greatly exceeds the roughly 13 percent of the American population who are black.” Why is that charge misleading? Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions. Nor is this unusual. It sounds so good that many people will easily buy into it. Can’t Vote Democrat? ———————————————— There is so much wisdom in the five decade of writings of Thomas Sowell that it is hard to know where to begin. The author and famed economist sat down with writer David Hogberg to talk about it and his life’s work. But, of course, the people in Alabama were not the same as Andrew Carnegie. Now, if every single realtor in Harlem had stood firm on not letting blacks into Harlem, then Harlem might not be black today. In some cases, they expel that group and in other cases, those people flee to a different country because they are tired of people taking their wealth. That causes the price of existing housing to go up. Now, of course, over 90 percent of blacks in the U.S. came out of the South at some point in history. Human capital is inside people’s heads and it can’t be confiscated. The impact certainly isn’t good. And so it’s not surprising that they bring many of the same cultural attitudes of Southern Whites to the North, East and wherever else they settle. In fact, just recently I was looking back over R.H. Tawney’s 1931 book “Equality.” He’s this great egalitarian who says in passing that there is proof of the genetic inferiority of certain peoples. Thomas Sowell Business News Media Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
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