Thomas Sowell

"I have a very high likelihood of finding amusement in the things that Thomas Sowell says. It's not what he says so much as the fact that he's saying it. ... Thomas Sowell is very well known for his critique of intellectuals who make claims about society. That's all well and good - he even has some good points in the critique. But I just can't bring myself to take Sowell completely seriously when he puts on his public intellectual hat, precisely because he is so widely identified as an anti-public-intellectual. ... A lot of this is just meant to be in fun - the point of Intellectuals and Society was a good point. Unfortunately, it's often people who complain the loudest about the misbehavior of others that are successful in taking the spotlight off themselves."

"Thomas Sowell, an eighty-seven-year-old African American economist, has written more than thirty mind-expanding books. These include his Culture trilogy which (among other things) anticipated Jared Diamond’s ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel and explains the ubiquity of anti-Semitism; A Conflict of Visions, which identifies the rival theories of the human condition underlying left-wing and right-wing political ideologies; The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which compares this quixotic pursuit with the quest for human justice; Intellectuals and Society, an uncomfortable exposé of the follies of all-star intellectuals; and Late-Talking Children, which anticipated Simon Baron-Cohen’s work on the extreme male brain. Sowell is a libertarian conservative, which makes him taboo in mainstream intellectual circles, but even those who disagree are well advised to grasp his facts and arguments."

"Sowell is misled, I believe, by his own basic strategy of taking familiar controversies about the market as the model for understanding a wide range of fundamental political disagreements. To begin with, the central virtues of competitive markets are not a matter of dispute among most of the theorists whom Sowell discusses. Rawls and Dworkin, for example, make clear their respect for the efficiency of markets as mechanisms for gathering information and allocating resources. What they question is the importance to be given to this kind of efficiency, as compared to other values such as equity and individual autonomy, when we are justifying economic and legal systems. The controversy is thus a moral one that cannot be avoided simply by “leaving it to the process” (i.e., to the market), since to do that would be already to decide the matter. The market is not a neutral means for deciding all social questions, and those who have doubts about its proper role need not claim that they can “do better” than the market in the sense of producing a more efficient outcome. Sowell’s strategy is also misleading in a further way: it overlooks important differences between competitive markets and other processes that he mentions, such as the common law, constitutional government, and the processes through which traditions and languages evolve. Three distinctive features of the market are important here. First, the ideal of the perfectly competitive market is a precise theoretical notion. No actual social institution can be identified with this ideal—since any such institution involves particular legal forms of property and contract, particular imperfections in knowledge, and particular limitations on freedom of entry into the market. But it is frequently quite clear which conditions move a system closer to perfect competition and which ones disrupt it. Second, market institutions (even actual, imperfect ones) produce their outcomes mechanically: prices and employment levels emerge as the result of competition, leaving little need for interpretation. Third, the efficiency of these outcomes is supposed to be a product of the process itself, not something with which any of the participants need be consciously concerned: agents in the perfectly competitive market are assumed to be assiduous pursuers of their own interests, but there is no need for anyone at any stage even to address the question of what would be best from a social point of view."

"As I said in my review, “Sowell maintains that his purpose in A Conflict of Visions is not to argue for one of the visions he describes but rather to understand the nature of enduring differences in political outlook.” On the other hand, as I also said, it is quite clear where his sympathies lie, and I do not think that any careful reader could fail to conclude from this book that Sowell takes a concern with “results” rather than with “process” to be a fault. An adherent of what he calls the unconstrained vision would not describe that vision in the terms Sowell employs."

"Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions is, on the whole, a very stimulating book and it argues a very important point, namely, that the political struggles which will shape our future social and political order are not only, and maybe not even primarily, driven by identifiable interests and by rent-seeking activities that use politics as a pure machinery for the redistribution of material wealth. Sowell rightly reminds us of the genuine power of ideas and visions in the political arena."

"Perhaps Sowell’s joylessness stems from the fact that his main idea is the hatred of ideas. It is one thing to be an intellectual and love ideas: why else spend so much time reading and thinking about them? When I come across a bad idea, I disagree with it and, as I am doing here, I try to expose its silliness. But I value bad ideas well enough to take them seriously. I write about Thomas Sowell because I recognize in him a fellow intellectual. But it is by no means clear that Sowell recognizes himself as one. He does from time to time note the existence of “conservative and neo-conservative intellectuals” who offer “an alternative vision” to the dominant ideology and whose influence “no longer negligible” in the media. But then Sowell goes on to write as if the only talking heads on television belong to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. Safely back to his thesis that intellectuals are always loathsome meddlers who hate capitalism, rationalize evil, and get everything wrong, he is free to quote Eric Hoffer, Paul Johnson, and all like-thinking writers who trod this ground before him."

"I'd say Tom is an empiricist, and by that I mean Tom looks at evidence, and then he makes a diagnosis, and then he offers a therapy for the perceived problem, and then he offers a prognosis, and he's not interested as much, if at all, on how people interpret that or what are the ramifications in contemporary political terms of his argument."