NOTE:
This article is by a great writer, and Wall Street Journal columnist, Jason Riley, who recently wrote a Thomas Sowell biography: "Maverick". I present a short version of the original six page newsletter. Sowell, in my opinion, is the best economist since Milton Friedman. Sowell communicated simply on economic and social policies, using plain English. And was especially accurate on on racial issues. Sowell, an author of at least 45 books, and a Harvard graduate, never said what people wanted to hear, just to be popular, which I admire. Of the Sowell books I read, I recommend: "The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy"
Imprimis is the free speech digest of libertarian Hillsdale College, in Michigan, with 6.2 million subscribers. Salon.com described it as "the most influential conservative publication you've never heard of." Its name is Latin, meaning both 'in the first place' and the second person singular of the verb to print.
I have been reading the Imprimis since 1973, its second year. That was the year I became a libertarian, after supporting Democrats when McGovern ran for President in 1972. I was always for more personal freedom, and less government. For a year I was tricked by Democrats, who seemed to be anti-government. But it turned out they were only anti-Vietnam War policy, like I was, but NOT for small government when they were in charge. Which I finally realized in 1973.
I encourage all readers to get a free Imprimus delivered by mail 10 times a year, or to read it online at: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/
Ye Editor
FULL ARTICLE HERE:
... "When I was researching my biography of economist Thomas Sowell, I kept coming across Sowell’s own descriptions of scholars he admired, and I was often struck by how well those descriptions applied to Sowell himself. ... here is Sowell describing another of his professors at Chicago, Milton Friedman:
[He] was one of the very few intellectuals with both genius and common sense. He could express himself at the highest analytical levels to his fellow economists in academic publications and still write popular books . . . that could be understood by people who knew nothing about economics.
I’m hard-pressed to come up with better ways than those to describe Thomas Sowell. When I think about his scholarship, that’s what comes to mind: intellectual integrity, analytical rigor, respect for evidence, skepticism toward the kind of fashionable thinking that comes and goes. And then there’s the clarity. Column after column, book after book, written in plain English for general public consumption.
In 2020, at the age of 90, Sowell published his 36th book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. I hope he’s not done writing books, but if he is you could hardly find a more suitable swan song for a publishing career that has now spanned six decades.
... In a sense, today’s public charter schools, which often have predominantly low-income black and Hispanic student bodies, are successors to the high-achieving black schools that Sowell researched more than 40 years ago. And as he points out, these charter schools are not simply doing a better job than traditional public schools with the same demographic groups.
In many cases, inner-city charter school students are outperforming their peers in the wealthiest and whitest suburban school districts in the country. In New York City, for example, the Success Academy charter schools have effectively closed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.
Sowell writes: The educational success of these charter schools undermines theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests, assertions that racial “integration” is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity, and presumptions that income differences are among the “root causes” of educational differences. ...
In 2020, at the age of 90, Sowell published his 36th book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. I hope he’s not done writing books, but if he is you could hardly find a more suitable swan song for a publishing career that has now spanned six decades.
... In a sense, today’s public charter schools, which often have predominantly low-income black and Hispanic student bodies, are successors to the high-achieving black schools that Sowell researched more than 40 years ago. And as he points out, these charter schools are not simply doing a better job than traditional public schools with the same demographic groups.
In many cases, inner-city charter school students are outperforming their peers in the wealthiest and whitest suburban school districts in the country. In New York City, for example, the Success Academy charter schools have effectively closed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.
Sowell writes: The educational success of these charter schools undermines theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests, assertions that racial “integration” is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity, and presumptions that income differences are among the “root causes” of educational differences. ...
Schools exist for the education of children. Schools do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for [graduates of] teachers colleges, or a captive audience for indoctrinators."
... I find it depressing that so many people today know names like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones—but not Thomas Sowell. His scholarship runs circles around those individuals. And it’s not just the volume of his writings, it’s also the range and depth and rigor of his analysis. He anticipated and refuted many of their arguments decades ago, in some cases before the people making them today were even born.
The conflicting visions he (Sowell) describes in the book ("Conflict of Visions") are the constrained or tragic view of human nature and the unconstrained or utopian view. People with a more constrained view of the human condition see mankind as hopelessly flawed. They see inherent limits to human betterment. We might want to end war or poverty or racism, they say, but that’s probably not going to happen. Therefore, our focus should be on putting in place institutions and processes that help society deal with problems we’re never going to eradicate.
On the other side you have the unconstrained or utopian view of human nature, which rejects the idea that there are limits to what humans can achieve. This is the belief that nothing is unattainable and no trade-offs are necessary. According to this perspective, by utilizing the proper amount of reason and will power, we can not only manage problems like war, poverty, and racism, but solve them entirely.
Depending on which view they embrace, Sowell explains why two people, similarly well-informed and similarly well-meaning, will reach opposite conclusions on a whole range of issues including taxes, rent control, school choice, military spending, and judicial activism.
... Many of today’s activists go about their business with the assumption that the only real problem facing the black underclass is white racism. A good example of this is the recent focus on policing in black communities. Do racist cops exist? Absolutely. Do some cops abuse their authority? Of course.
But are poor black communities as violent as they are because of bad cops? Will reducing police resources improve the situation? According to the Chicago Sun-Times there were 492 homicides in Chicago in 2019, and only three of them involved police. So if police use of lethal force is a problem in Chicago, it’s clearly a secondary problem. Young black men in Chicago or Baltimore or St. Louis may indeed leave the house each morning worried about getting shot—but not by police.
... Sowell would often be asked how it felt to go against the grain of so many other blacks. He would inevitably correct the premise of the question. “You don’t mean I go against the grain of most blacks,” he would respond. “You mean I go against the grain of most black intellectuals, most black elites. But black intellectuals don’t represent most blacks any more than white intellectuals represent most whites.”
This continues to be the case today. Most blacks, for example, support voter ID laws and school choice, while most black elites—academics, the NAACP, Black Lives Matter activists, etc.—oppose those things.
Conversely, most blacks oppose racial preferences in college admissions and, as noted, oppose defunding the police, while black elites are in favor of those things. Sowell pointed out these disparities decades ago, and they’ve only grown since then. His writings on intellectual history have stressed, time and again, that intellectuals are a special interest group. They have their own self-serving agenda and their own priorities and ought to be understood as such.
Liberal elites control the media, by and large. They control academia. They run the foundations that hand out intellectual awards and prizes. Sowell has refused to play footsie with them, refused to pull his punches. And it has cost him in terms of prestige and notoriety. He’s paid a price. It’s one reason he’s not as well-known as the individuals I mentioned earlier. I often tell people that if you think Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones represent the views of most black people, you need to get to know more black people.
Sowell is now 91 years old. The book he published last year was his 36th, and his fifth since turning 80. That’s not too bad for a black orphan from the Jim Crow South who was born into extreme poverty during the Great Depression, never finished high school, didn’t earn a college degree until he was 28, and didn’t write his first book until he was 40.
But even aside from that impressive personal journey, Sowell is a rare species. He’s an honest intellectual. He’s someone who has consistently sought out the truth, regardless of whether it made him popular. He has been willing to follow the facts and evidence wherever they lead, even when they lead to politically incorrect results. It’s not something that ought to distinguish you as a scholar, but these days it does.
... What makes America unique is not slavery. It’s emancipation. It’s how fast we went from slavery to Martin Luther King to a black president. The economic and social progress of black Americans in only a few generations is something unmatched in recorded history.
The argument that America became prosperous due to slavery is also unsupported by the facts, as Sowell has pointed out. Individual slave owners certainly prospered, but that’s different from saying the country benefited. In fact, the regions of the country that had slavery were the poorest regions, both during slavery and afterward. Similarly, in Brazil, which imported far more slaves than the U.S. did, the regions where slavery was concentrated were the poorest regions, both during slavery and afterward.
Eastern Europe, to look at another example, had slavery far longer than Western Europe—yet Western Europe has always been richer. Millions more African slaves were sent to Northern Africa and the Middle East than came to the West. If slave labor produces economic prosperity, why did those regions remain so poor for so long? And later, when the Middle East did start to become wealthier, it wasn’t due to slavery—it was due to the discovery of oil.
In another 1619 Project essay, the author writes: “For the most part, black Americans fought back alone.” This breathtakingly ignorant assertion simply writes out of history the role of the Quakers and others in the 18th century, the role of the abolitionists and the newly-formed Republican party in the run-up to the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the role of the NAACP, which was co-founded by whites and blacks together in the early 1900s. It also ignores the role of non-blacks in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, which was propelled by alliances with whites, Jews, Catholics, and others who fought against racial discrimination.
(one current) argument is that blacks lag in academic performance because of slavery and Jim Crow. They lag in employment because of slavery and Jim Crow. They lag in incomes and home ownership and all the rest because of this awful history. This is part of an ongoing attempt by the political left to blame the past actions of whites for the current problems of blacks. Ultimately, it’s an attempt to downplay the role of culture and personal responsibility in driving social inequality. Blacks are blameless, whites are evil. Whites who reject this narrative are labeled as racists. Blacks who reject it are dismissed as dupes or opportunists.
... what distinguishes his scholarship: courage. Sowell wasn’t afraid. It’s the sort of thing that ought to be commonplace among scholars and intellectuals—and journalists, for that matter—but clearly it is not. Sowell has spent a career putting truth above popularity. We need a hundred more just like him."
... I find it depressing that so many people today know names like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones—but not Thomas Sowell. His scholarship runs circles around those individuals. And it’s not just the volume of his writings, it’s also the range and depth and rigor of his analysis. He anticipated and refuted many of their arguments decades ago, in some cases before the people making them today were even born.
The conflicting visions he (Sowell) describes in the book ("Conflict of Visions") are the constrained or tragic view of human nature and the unconstrained or utopian view. People with a more constrained view of the human condition see mankind as hopelessly flawed. They see inherent limits to human betterment. We might want to end war or poverty or racism, they say, but that’s probably not going to happen. Therefore, our focus should be on putting in place institutions and processes that help society deal with problems we’re never going to eradicate.
On the other side you have the unconstrained or utopian view of human nature, which rejects the idea that there are limits to what humans can achieve. This is the belief that nothing is unattainable and no trade-offs are necessary. According to this perspective, by utilizing the proper amount of reason and will power, we can not only manage problems like war, poverty, and racism, but solve them entirely.
Depending on which view they embrace, Sowell explains why two people, similarly well-informed and similarly well-meaning, will reach opposite conclusions on a whole range of issues including taxes, rent control, school choice, military spending, and judicial activism.
... Many of today’s activists go about their business with the assumption that the only real problem facing the black underclass is white racism. A good example of this is the recent focus on policing in black communities. Do racist cops exist? Absolutely. Do some cops abuse their authority? Of course.
But are poor black communities as violent as they are because of bad cops? Will reducing police resources improve the situation? According to the Chicago Sun-Times there were 492 homicides in Chicago in 2019, and only three of them involved police. So if police use of lethal force is a problem in Chicago, it’s clearly a secondary problem. Young black men in Chicago or Baltimore or St. Louis may indeed leave the house each morning worried about getting shot—but not by police.
... Sowell would often be asked how it felt to go against the grain of so many other blacks. He would inevitably correct the premise of the question. “You don’t mean I go against the grain of most blacks,” he would respond. “You mean I go against the grain of most black intellectuals, most black elites. But black intellectuals don’t represent most blacks any more than white intellectuals represent most whites.”
This continues to be the case today. Most blacks, for example, support voter ID laws and school choice, while most black elites—academics, the NAACP, Black Lives Matter activists, etc.—oppose those things.
Conversely, most blacks oppose racial preferences in college admissions and, as noted, oppose defunding the police, while black elites are in favor of those things. Sowell pointed out these disparities decades ago, and they’ve only grown since then. His writings on intellectual history have stressed, time and again, that intellectuals are a special interest group. They have their own self-serving agenda and their own priorities and ought to be understood as such.
Liberal elites control the media, by and large. They control academia. They run the foundations that hand out intellectual awards and prizes. Sowell has refused to play footsie with them, refused to pull his punches. And it has cost him in terms of prestige and notoriety. He’s paid a price. It’s one reason he’s not as well-known as the individuals I mentioned earlier. I often tell people that if you think Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones represent the views of most black people, you need to get to know more black people.
Sowell is now 91 years old. The book he published last year was his 36th, and his fifth since turning 80. That’s not too bad for a black orphan from the Jim Crow South who was born into extreme poverty during the Great Depression, never finished high school, didn’t earn a college degree until he was 28, and didn’t write his first book until he was 40.
But even aside from that impressive personal journey, Sowell is a rare species. He’s an honest intellectual. He’s someone who has consistently sought out the truth, regardless of whether it made him popular. He has been willing to follow the facts and evidence wherever they lead, even when they lead to politically incorrect results. It’s not something that ought to distinguish you as a scholar, but these days it does.
... What makes America unique is not slavery. It’s emancipation. It’s how fast we went from slavery to Martin Luther King to a black president. The economic and social progress of black Americans in only a few generations is something unmatched in recorded history.
The argument that America became prosperous due to slavery is also unsupported by the facts, as Sowell has pointed out. Individual slave owners certainly prospered, but that’s different from saying the country benefited. In fact, the regions of the country that had slavery were the poorest regions, both during slavery and afterward. Similarly, in Brazil, which imported far more slaves than the U.S. did, the regions where slavery was concentrated were the poorest regions, both during slavery and afterward.
Eastern Europe, to look at another example, had slavery far longer than Western Europe—yet Western Europe has always been richer. Millions more African slaves were sent to Northern Africa and the Middle East than came to the West. If slave labor produces economic prosperity, why did those regions remain so poor for so long? And later, when the Middle East did start to become wealthier, it wasn’t due to slavery—it was due to the discovery of oil.
In another 1619 Project essay, the author writes: “For the most part, black Americans fought back alone.” This breathtakingly ignorant assertion simply writes out of history the role of the Quakers and others in the 18th century, the role of the abolitionists and the newly-formed Republican party in the run-up to the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the role of the NAACP, which was co-founded by whites and blacks together in the early 1900s. It also ignores the role of non-blacks in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, which was propelled by alliances with whites, Jews, Catholics, and others who fought against racial discrimination.
(one current) argument is that blacks lag in academic performance because of slavery and Jim Crow. They lag in employment because of slavery and Jim Crow. They lag in incomes and home ownership and all the rest because of this awful history. This is part of an ongoing attempt by the political left to blame the past actions of whites for the current problems of blacks. Ultimately, it’s an attempt to downplay the role of culture and personal responsibility in driving social inequality. Blacks are blameless, whites are evil. Whites who reject this narrative are labeled as racists. Blacks who reject it are dismissed as dupes or opportunists.
... what distinguishes his scholarship: courage. Sowell wasn’t afraid. It’s the sort of thing that ought to be commonplace among scholars and intellectuals—and journalists, for that matter—but clearly it is not. Sowell has spent a career putting truth above popularity. We need a hundred more just like him."
From My Conservative Meme Collection
Ye Editor
