The
Thomas Sowell Reader
By
Thomas Sowell
(Basic Books, 449 pages,
$29.99)
As Thomas Sowell says in the preface to Reader, it’s a
challenge to summarize the work of a lifetime.
True enough. Especially so when the work summarized is
such a broad, intellectual triumph as that of Professor Sowell. But
in a little more than 400 pages, this collection from decades of
Sowell’s columns, essays, and books captures some of the best
diagnoses and critiques of our post-everything time from one of our
time’s clearest thinkers. Considering the season soon to be upon
us, Reader would be an excellent stocking-stuffer for the
conservative readers on your list.
Sowell, 81, earned a Ph.D. in economics from the
University of Chicago in 1968 and has contributed some important
work in this discipline. The dismal science is clearer and
distinctly less dismal when Sowell writes about it. He’s one of the
great explicators and defenders of free-markets as the source of
wealth and freedom, as against command and control economies as the
sources of tyranny and poverty.
But Sowell has not limited himself to economics. After
years as a professor, during some of academe’s most disruptive and
downright daffy years, Sowell moved to the more contemplative
atmosphere of think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980
he’s hung his hat at the Hoover Institution in California. In his
writings and in his speaking engagements, Professor Sowell focuses
the light of reason on controversial subjects that are almost
exclusively discussed, ranted about more like, in the most
irrational way — race, class, sex, crime, education, welfare, the
family, et al. He’s even taken on subjects as important as baseball
(like many of our most acute thinkers, Sowell knows a good deal
about The Grand Old Game).
In addition to a widely read syndicated column, Sowell has
written 30 books, all of them readable, some of them truly
important. My favorites include A Conflict of Visions
(1987), perhaps the best analysis of the differences between the
liberal and conservative mind, and The Vision of the
Anointed (1995), a clear but scathing indictment of the
self-appointed political and culture humbugs who presume, because
of their pretentions to great intellect and moral superiority, to
micro-manage all our lives. Other signal titles include
Intellectuals and Society (2009), Affirmative Action
Around the World (2004), and The Quest for Cosmic
Justice (2002).
In addition to being a clear thinker and pitiless
analyzer, Sowell is an eloquent but accessible writer who lasers in
on the relevant and is unafraid of saying things contrary to
received wisdom by the “anointed,” a term we have Professor Sowell
to thank for. His expression is also economical, sometimes tending
to the aphoristic. A few examples:
On minimum wage laws: “Making it illegal to pay less than
a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that
amount — and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be
employed.”
On environmentalists who shout NO! at everything: “The
essence of bigotry is denying others the same rights you claim for
yourself. Green bigots are a classic example.”
On affirmative action and other race hustles: “At the
heart of the affirmative action approach is the notion that
statistical disparities show discrimination. No dogma has taken a
deeper hold with less evidence — or in the face of more massive
evidence to the contrary.”
On objective tests that leftists and race-hustlers claim
are unfair: “The tests are not unfair. Life is unfair — and the
tests just measure the results. The same could be said of the
charge that the tests are ‘culturally biased.’ Life is culturally
biased.”
On professional whiners, indignatos, chronic
demonstrators, and those who file ideological law suits: “This is
the age of the complaining classes, whether they are lawyers,
community activists, radical feminists, race hustlers, or other
squeaking wheels looking for oil.”
On the over-educated non-contributors: “No small part of
our social problems today come from miseducated degree-holders who
have nothing to contribute to the wealth of the society but who are
full of demands and indignation — and resentment of those who are
producing.”
On the various controversies surrounding what intelligence
means: “Few things are discussed as unintelligently as
intelligence.”
On the laughing stock so much of academe has become and
the limited life usefulness of much “advanced” education: “Too
often what are called ‘educated’ people are simply people who have
been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings.
Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings,
insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents into their golden
retirement years.”
On the liberal/progressive sense of entitlement: “It is
amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to
turn their prejudices into law.”
A warning that needs no explanatory note: “If the battle
for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the
barbarians are going to win.”
On the left: “A careful definition of words would destroy
half the agenda of the political left, and scrutinizing evidence
would destroy the other half.”
Just so. And Professor Sowell has brought his considerable
intellectual power to scrutinizing the evidence for a half-century
now. The results of his thought, well-treated in this distillation,
deserve the attention of anyone seeking to understand today’s
world.
