During the holidays, a shopping mall can be more like a shopping
maul. One way to avoid that scene is to give books as
Christmas gifts, since books can be bought online,
painlessly.
One book that fits in with the holiday spirit is No, They
Can’t! by TV show host John Stossel. It is written
with a light touch, but gets across some pretty heavy stuff
about economics. The title is a take-off on Obama’s old
slogan, “Yes, we can!”
It is the first book I have read that asks a question about
electric cars that should have been asked long ago: How much
pollution do they cause?
Electric car enthusiasts may say, “None.” But the
electricity that runs these cars has to be generated
somewhere, and much of that electricity is generated by
burning coal. The fact that no pollution comes out of the car
itself is irrelevant, when the pollution comes out of a
smokestack somewhere else.
Similar common sense analysis punctures many other puffed-up
ideas, on subjects ranging from health care to education to
government bailouts of failing businesses. No, They
Can’t! is a book that makes what used to be called “the
dismal science” of economics more lively, and even humorous,
as it reveals what nonsense so much of the lofty rhetoric
of our time is.
Anyone who wants an honest look at the hard facts about
racial preferences in admissions to colleges and universities
will find it — perhaps for the first time — in a book titled
Mismatch by Richard Sanders and Stuart Taylor,
Jr.
The central concern of Mismatch is how racial
preferences harm blacks and other minorities. Black
students with all the qualifications for success can be turned
into failures by being admitted to institutions geared to
students with even higher qualifications than theirs.
I saw this happen at Cornell, years ago, when black students
with test scores substantially above the national average were
nevertheless in deep academic trouble, at an institution where
the other students were in the top one percent. Those
same black students would have made the dean’s list in most
other colleges. But they were mismatched at Cornell, and many
failed bitterly.
Mismatch thoroughly analyzes the effects of racial
preferences in numerous contexts, showing how what is called
“affirmative action” has very negative consequences for its
supposed beneficiaries. For example, the data strongly suggest
that there are fewer black lawyers when there are racial
preferences in admissions to law schools. Racial
preferences put more minority students on campus, but in ways
that reduce the number who graduate.
Conversely, when racial preferences were banned in the
University of California system, the number of black students
who graduated actually increased substantially, as did their
grade point averages. Instead of failing at Berkeley or UCLA,
these students graduated from other good quality universities
in the system. The careful analysis of documented facts
makes Mismatch a rare and valuable book for people who
want to think.
The time is long overdue to discuss racial issues in general in
plain, honest words. A new book that does that is titled
Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to
Obama by Ann Coulter.
In this book, readers will learn many truths for the first
time, unfiltered by the mainstream media. For example,
they will belatedly learn the truth about how an ex-con and
hoodlum was turned into a sympathetic victim by the clever
editing of the Rodney King videotape.
My own new book this year is an expanded and much revised
edition of Intellectuals and Society. Among its
new features is a debunking of murky catch phrases like
“social justice” and “tax cuts for the rich” that have spread
so much confusion and mischief. Four new chapters have also
been added on intellectuals and race. Among the things they
reveal is how the political left promoted racism on both sides
of the Atlantic during the early decades of the 20th century,
even though today the left has swung to the other end of the
spectrum and now claims to find racism everywhere in other
people.
Merry Christmas — if we are still allowed to say that.
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