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Thomas Sowell biography

#1
C C Offline
On Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, by Jason L. Riley

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/6/t...mas-sowell

EXCERPTS: . . . Sowell’s life did not get off to an easy start, to put it mildly. In 1930, the year he was born into a black family in Gastonia, North Carolina, the Great Depression was gathering strength. And Jim Crow was in full force, so he seldom encountered white people in his early years. As Riley explains, “He’d been turned away from restaurants and housing because of his skin color. He’d felt the pain and humiliation of racism firsthand throughout his life. He needed no lectures from anyone on the evils of Jim Crow.”

[...] He was the first member of his family to get beyond the seventh grade ... professors noted his remarkable intellect and capacity for hard work and helped him transfer to Harvard the next year ... Sowell noted that he “resented attempts by some thoughtless Harvardians to assimilate me, based on the assumption that the supreme honor they could bestow was to allow me to become like them.”

[...] when Stigler (who won a Nobel Prize in 1982) moved to the University of Chicago, Sowell followed him there. ... Although Chicago has long been the center of the study of free-market economics, Sowell was a Marxist in his twenties. ... Even after a year at the University of Chicago, including a course under Milton Friedman, Sowell had “remained as much a Marxist as I had been before arriving.”

He spent the summer analyzing the sugar industry in Puerto Rico, where a minimum wage was set by the U.S. Government. It wasn’t long before he noticed that as the minimum wage had risen, the number of sugar workers fell. He had always supported minimum wages, assuming they helped the poor earn a decent living. But now he realized that minimum-wage laws cost jobs and were a net detriment to the poor.

“From there on,” Sowell wrote, “as I learned more and more from both experience and research, my adherence to the visions and doctrines of the left began to erode rapidly.”

Soon, Sowell was “rethinking the whole notion of government as a potentially benevolent force in the economy and society.” He also couldn’t help noticing that his fellow bureaucrats did not care if the minimum wage helped workers. Their job was to enforce the laws. It was not to see if the laws did any good.

“It forced me to realize, Sowell wrote, “that government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of those for whom a program has been set up.” Marxist theory ignores the powerful force of self-interest in the working of economies, and Sowell came to realize the centrality of self-interest to the human universe.

At Chicago, Sowell studied the history of ideas under the great Friedrich Hayek, but it was Hayek’s own ideas that had lasting consequences for him. Hayek’s essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” dealt with how the information used to make economic decisions spreads through an economy. Its central insight is that knowledge is highly dispersed and no one person or group can possess all the knowledge needed to make good economic decisions. Therefore, he argued, the decision-making process should also be decentralized, the opposite of what Marx argued for.

Later, when Sowell was asked to teach a course on the Soviet economy, the significance of Hayek’s essay hit home: I could see what the factors were that led the Soviets to do what they were doing, and why it wasn’t working. There was a knowledge problem that was inherent in that system. In a nutshell, those with the power didn’t have the knowledge, and those with the knowledge didn’t have the power.

Out of this came one of Sowell’s most important books, Knowledge and Decisions (1980), which extended Hayek’s work and, as Riley says, “would do so in ways that even Hayek had never contemplated.”

[...] while an economist by training, Sowell’s mastery of subjects is far wider. Gerald Early, of Washington University, noted that his expertise extends to sociology and history as well. “He had some kind of mastery of other fields to do the kind of comprehensive stuff he was doing. Whether you agree totally with his ideas or not, it was impressive what he was doing. Who knew an economist could write that stuff?”

Indeed, far too many economists can’t write, period. Sowell most certainly can. Early, who is black himself, noted that “I knew lots of black people who were not academics and who had heard about him and were reading his stuff because it was accessible.”

Another thing that distinguishes Sowell from all too many other economists is his insistence that theory be tested in the real world. Gunnar Myrdal, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, for instance, argued that third-world countries could not develop without extensive foreign aid and much central planning, despite the fact that post-war Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore did exactly that in the late twentieth century.

[...] Myrdal and his type are essentially theoretical in their approach to economics. Sowell, like Stiller, Hayek, and Friedman, is empirical, demanding real-world proof, not just elegant ideas. “The market can be ruthless in devaluing degrees that do not mean what they say.”

Sowell has always regarded himself as fortunate that his higher education came before the era of affirmative action, which he regards as an unmitigated disaster for blacks. [...] “The double standard of grades and degrees is an open secret on many college campuses, and it is only a matter of time before it is an open secret among employers as well,” he predicted in 1970. “The market can be ruthless in devaluing degrees that do not mean what they say. It should be apparent to anyone not blinded by his own nobility that it also devalues the student in his own eyes.”

One of Sowell’s most important contributions has been to notice how wide the gap often is between ordinary black Americans and black intellectuals and civil rights leaders. In a pair of op-eds in The WashingtonPost in 1981, Sowell wrote that: "Historically, the black elite has been preoccupied with symbolism rather than pragmatism. Like other human beings, they have been able to rationalize their special perspective and self-interest as a general good. Much of their demand for removing racial barriers was a demand that they be allowed to join the white elite and escape the black masses."

In other words, they have been all too anxious to do what Sowell had spurned doing many years before at Harvard. In fact, Sowell doesn’t have much use for the pretensions of intellectuals of whatever color... (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Syne Offline
Sowell is one of the intellectual giants, following in the legacy of Booker T. Washington in trying to tell the black community how to actually succeed, rather than accept the ready-made excuses for failure proffered by the left.
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#3
confused2 Offline
To a casual observer..

Martin Luther King:

Quote:I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Makes sense to me - perhaps because as a child of the 60's it is what I grew with.

The 60's were also a time of the Jim Crow Laws

Quote:Separate [but equal]

Both black and white people born in the America of the 1930's would have dreams coloured by their experience of Jim Crow laws. On the one hand deep resentment and on the other (perhaps) a feeling that a problen suppressed is a problem solved.

Quote:When in Rome do as the Romans do.

There is an easy jibe about Uncle Tom who became so like the white folks you couldn't tell him apart from them. In reality the Uncle Tom jibe satisfies both the deep resentment and the dream of 'separate' paths where wealth and power remain concentrated in the hands of the 'old' white families and those who aspire to such a position.

It would seem that by mutual consent, for those with power regardless of skin colour, Jim Crow lives on and Dr. King's dream is dead in the water.
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#4
Syne Offline
(May 31, 2021 03:13 PM)confused2 Wrote: There is an easy jibe about Uncle Tom who became so like the white folks you couldn't tell him apart from them. In reality the Uncle Tom jibe satisfies both the deep resentment and the dream of 'separate' paths where wealth and power remain concentrated in the hands of the 'old' white families and those who aspire to such a position.

It would seem that by mutual consent, for those with power regardless of skin colour, Jim Crow lives on and Dr. King's dream is dead in the water.

Nowadays "Uncle Tom" is just a racist cudgel used against any blacks who dare to think for themselves, as if the common assumption is that blacks have no individual agency. But it's also a projection of the decidedly leftist W.E.B. Du Bois scheme of getting blacks to give up their agency in favor of their "talented tenth," who would be the ones to get educated and seek aid for their community from the white. IOW, they're both slamming black conservatives as "Uncle Tom" while actively pursuing Uncle Tom strategies. But that "talented tenth" is only enriching themselves. Just look at Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, that BLM leader that just bough a fourth, million dollar home, mothers of the victims BLM purport to support not seeing any of that money, etc..

Jim Crow was started by the left and continues to be promulgated by the left. But as long as they can weave tales of the conservative, white boogeyman, they can keep the blacks "in their place."
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