Thomas Sowell interview
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
> “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech.”
Sowell is unique in this respect. He's book, "Basic Economics" is full of extremely relatable examples of economics in practice. It's one of the few books on economics that's a great read regardless of your background or level of academic achievement.
Maybe we're not so different after all!
If you think The Government == The People, you're out of your mind. It's a nice ideal, but it's never been achieved in a modern nation state. Some nation states are less abusive than others, but that's as good as it gets.
The government is careless with spending and can't be trusted with people's money because they didn't earn the money they have. They took it out of people's paychecks, and if they run out, they can levy more taxes or just print more, there's no incentive to be thoughtful, careful, or diligent. At any rate, when the government is reckless with people's money, it's never the government that has to feel any pain.
You will want to manipulate others to get confirmation of your acrobatics and always be on the lookout for disproof. This will lead to you limiting your life severely for fear of actually finding it.
-former smartness showoff who now acts betterer
Very sound advice.
Somewhat a tangent. I used to play a lot of poker. One angle that would work frequently to get information from people is exactly this.
Say something like "Ah you had AJ", even though you don't believe that. Then you might get a response "No I had __" or they might even show you their hand.
It's all tide to the need to prove how smart we are as humans.
It's a weird inversion, since the signals being defended are deeply illiberal: they exclude individualism, weirdness, inclusiveness, systems striving to be built on merit, etc etc.
I'm pretty familiar with this tendency because I come from a family who's pretty steeped in this kind of subculture. Growing up in CA and moving to the Bay as a teen, I absorbed the tech/Burning Man/CA memeplex of humanism and inherent equality and individualism way too deeply not to overwhelm my upbringing, but there are certain class markers I haven't shed, and un-self-conscious use of dense prose is one of them[1]. I actually did try to make my speech more casual when I became aware of these class markers during a period of teen rebellion, but changing how you communicate is a pretty complicated uphill battle, so I ended up with a weird hybrid of big words and idiomatic expressions (and lots of cursing, in verbal communication -_-)
[1] I want to emphasize again that this isn't quite an intelligence thing: my best friend is definitely smarter than me, and he speaks significantly more casually/colloquially than me because of his family's background.
One one hand, it's great. More science/research is being done, but on the other hand it becomes less and less accessible due to the extreme specificity, very narrow scopes and due to simply being on the very edge of human knowledge accumulation.
And of course, theoretically whatever paper one is reading one can "simply" follow the references and look up the introduced technical terms. Occasionally there are great survey papers that take a look at a (sub-sub-sub-)field, and again from time to time there are amazing science communicators that allow laypeople to have some kind of real grasp on these questions and topics.
Yet, I think, it's clear that publishing terse PDFs is not the best way to communicate research and results.
And we know, we - as in DARPA, but anyway, as in civilization - did a trial, and it's very enlightening: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00672-7
And one of the big finding is that being stubbornly terse is bad.
And it's just a step, that this trial did not check, but maybe requiring researchers to spend a few days of their precious time to write a few pages about what they are actually doing, introduce the terms, techniques, methods, wouldn't be that bad, maybe even it would be helpful ... and this is basically pre-registration, and this is basically the grant proposal. And it'd be double-plus-good to link all of these in an open and really accessible manner in those fancy PDFs. (Or better yet, just use a HTML site. LaTeX is nice, but.)
Don't get me wrong, if it was the only thing available, I'd probably go crazy, too. But I believe there is a time and place in my "reading diet" for this kind of long-form journalism.
As your adjectives suggest, New Yorker articles are less bullets of breathlessly-repeated facts, and more illustrations of nuanced scenes and interactions. I think it's natural, because life is messy and meandering, too.
That being said, most of their articles have very well-defined and well-informed points. They don't make them by stating it up front, but by drawing a picture, observing some of its details, and asking you to form your own opinion. We can disagree, but to me it feels more intellectually-honest than other forms of journalism.
Yes, it takes longer to get there. Yes, some of the details (what clothes people are wearing, what the rooms smell like, whatever) could probably be removed without compromising the structural integrity. But the New Yorker is about structural integrity and style. It's like the "literary fiction" of news. I don't read each article in each magazine, but it's still pretty rare that I've regretted finishing one; maybe once every other month.
I'm talking more of the style used by Ben Taub [0] [1], or Sam Knight [2] [3]. More investigative than "think piece", although there are some big ideas in the presentation.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/iraqs-post-isi...
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma...
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/30/theresa-mays-i...
I also think Emily Nussbaum is a wonderful TV critic and more or less deserves credit for elevating TV criticism to equal status with art & movie reviews.
Having said that, I quite take your point and I am always pleased when a researcher takes the time to write clearly. It's a skill that needs to be practiced and developed, but unfortunately, for most academics, investing in that skill isn't obviously a good career choice.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/how-prosperity...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/the-enduring-r...
>Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
When used to explain something, this style is great, because he gets his point across efficiently and provides enough backing so that you can remember it. And if you read enough of his writing, he brings out the nuance in other books and the intellectual detail is clearly there.
But I can see how his straightforward style would be unpersuasive. Any one statement or paragraph or essay can be picked at by someone looking to do so.
As a teacher and thought leader, he's been very successful. As a political commentator, he's preaching to the choir.
Is he genuinely objective and data-driven? How many of his studies have been replicated? How many competing studies - which he fails to mention - disagree with his conclusions?
It's easy to be right when you simply assert your idea of truth. But that's rhetoric, not science. Science is peer review and open debate, and I don't see him engaging in that.
Conservatives tend to paternalism. Marxists are more likely to be oppositional, because Marxism and socialism are underdog discourses, and they don't have the advantage of assuming that general readers will agree - especially in the US, where the default position for most of the population is aggressive hostility towards Socialism and incandescent fury towards Marxism, without really knowing much about either.
His conclusions are not really the most important thing about his writing, anyway. He brings forward a lot of good approaches that are an improvement over other common approaches. For instance, he avoids grouping people by a snapshot in time, and instead analyzes them over their lifetime, or even generations.
And he also just asks a lot of interesting questions and dives into the data and finds interesting results.
He's also less US-centric than many writers. Sometimes that alone is enough to advance the conversation by breaking us our of our bubble.
I don't know about him as a teacher, but as a thought leader, he is successful because he says the things that the right people want to hear.
But if you aren’t even willing to listen to him, it’s moot anyway.
Later I found his videos and was surprised to learn he's a black conservative. That wasn't apparent from the book.
Basic Economics was such a huge eye opener on how things really work. Not just aristocratic theory talk. So much better then college economics class I took.
I think he has interesting things to say, and is certainly a great interview subject, but I would approach his claims with caution.
For instance, it is very common to use income as a proxy for your economic success, and then to group people into quintiles, calling the bottom quintile "the poor". It seems reasonable, but it's wrong enough to lead to very wrong conclusions. A college student living on their own will appear to be a "poor household", even though many are likely to be in the top quintile later on in their life. These scenarios seem like exceptions, but when you add them up (as Dr. Sowell does), they show a very different picture.
Following people (statistically) through their lives, and across generations, is a common theme in his work. It's harder to get good data than the snapshot-in-time approach, but he does the work, and it's so much more informative.
A great example from the other side of the spectrum is house sales: Anyone who needs to move and owns a house typically sells their house and buys a new one. During that year, they'll sometimes show up as having extremely high income. Depending on how often they move, this could have a real impact.
https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-...
> There is one study of progress over time that follows parents and children that is gloomy and that is “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Mobility Since 1940” by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang (Chetty et al) They find that if you were born in 1940, you had a 92% chance of surpassing your parents income. But if you were born in 1984, the number is a depressing 50%. Chetty et al control for age — this is for parents and children when they are both 30. This does suggest that the American dream is dead or at least dying — half of the children do better than their parents but half do worse, suggesting no progress over time.
The author then says that we should measure income differently by using a non-standard measure of inflation. But if we had just used that non-standard measure on the wage data of Piketty et al., we would've arrived at the same conclusion anyway?
From what I've read, most social mobility metrics are from low quintiles to higher quintiles.
So if in 1984, 50% of children do better than their parents, and that 50% is mostly the bottom half (I have no idea if it is), then you're doing pretty good in terms of social mobility, no? People making below the median are doing better.
And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.
They address that in the paper:
> Higher GDP growth rates do not substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents because a large fraction of GDP goes to a small number of high income earners today. To see why absolute mobility is insensitive to the growth rate when growth is distributed unequally, consider the extreme case in which one child obtains all of the increase in GDP. In this case, higher GDP growth rates would have no effect on absolute mobility. More generally, GDP growth has larger effects on absolute mobility when growth is spread more broadly, allowing more children to achieve higher living standards than their parents. Higher GDP growth and a broader distribution of growth have a multiplicative effect on absolute mobility: Absolute mobility is highest when GDP growth rates are high and growth is spread broadly across the distribution.
He could learn a few things concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty from Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman.
A few points...
+ Sowell never truly questions the data that's the foundation of his work. For Sowell, history and historical data as reported by "conquerors" is never to be questioned. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have famously proved how problematic this approach is.
+ Sowell refuses to address human decision-making, judgment and uncertainty. For him, power and violence do not matter. If the black family structure was better and enough for self-improvement post-slavery then why did millions of blacks flee the South before the enactment of massive liberal civil rights policies?
In Sowell's world, America was great from 1863-1930. A time of great uncertainty and white terrorism that resulted in the Great Migration.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_%28African_Ame...
His book Basic Economics taught me more than any economics classes did in school.
Few days later they, and everyone in city got an exviction notice. Mobile home parks all decided to close down and sell the land.
Because of this book, this made perfect sense.
>A mathematics-first approach encourages oversimplified assumptions.
Wrong. It makes the oversimplified assumptions more clearly identifiable, instead of concealing them in prose which is not measurable. This is why they are superior, because we can clearly identify why they are wrong, and by how much. This is how science and the positivist framework improve our knowledge.
In fields like economics it's easier to make a grandiose and "falsifiable" piece of math that is absolutely correct but doesn't actually reflect anything real.
Or more often reflects a tiny part of a first order effect.
Yet people get blinded because the math is right.
If you know of a way to improve upon the existing methodologies, then show it to us, and be precise. Then you will have an argument that deserves to be engaged with. Ambiguous claims that the math "doesn't actually reflect anything real" sound intelligent, but really aren't saying much at all.
Reading through this book you’ll understand that higher taxes often mean less tax revenue, and vice versa.
Many people get stuck on zero sum game.
This isn’t a mathematicians book.
This is a book so people don’t think stare bonds are free money, etc.
The book is a pithy, digestible introduction to a bunch of basic topics in economics. It is also lacking a lot of the detail and mathematical explanation of introductory university courses.
For example, I understood the basic concept of comparative advantage after listening to the book, but when I later revisited the topic using a textbook, the graphs and worked examples gave me a clearer picture and it was better related to adjacent concepts like marginal cost, the production-possibility frontier, etc.
I don't have the impression that academic economics as presented to undergraduates diverges greatly from the book, although it has been years since I heard it and my recollection is fuzzy.
Sure, many people find their confirmation bias reinforced by it ... but otherwise there are more useful books to really learn about economics: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/reading#wiki_general...
Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles [1] is, ironically, a very good starting point in understanding what makes Sowell "conservative" (the Constrained Vision) vs "progressive" (the Unconstrained Vision). I think this is the work that impressed Steven Pinker.
The categories get really messy, for example when he describes Marxism as a hybrid ideology, but the core idea is that people tend to believe either: 1. we are made of crooked timber and are made better by social structure, or 2. our potential is being held back by selfish oppressors/exploiters.
Regardless of which vision drives you, I imagine Thomas Sowell would do very well in Bryan Caplan's Ideological Turing Test [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions
[2] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm...
Actual communists tended to start out living that creed: they'd systematically destroy any existing institution. But then they'd find society didn't work at all without them, so they'd pretty rapidly build new institutions, that all happened to be controlled by them.
Conservatives on the other hand are, by their nature, conservative about changing things. They tend to regard existing social structures as evolved and thus encoding great wisdom, even if it can't be easily articulated. To change those institutions is thus highly risky, even if it may not be immediately apparent why that is. This is the opposite of Marxism, which is a utopian ideology in which changing everything at once is not too much.
The Constrained vision assumes that the best we can do is choose a set of trade-offs that are least bad; the Unconstrained vision assumes that trade-offs are illusions imposed by defective institutions, and so if we improved/reformed/abolished the institutions, we could eliminate the trade-offs.
There's a lot more to it, so you should read the book, but that's the basic thesis.
Krugman overlooks that many conservatives were once liberals, while the reverse is typically not true. That doesn’t mean that those folks were wrong before and are correct now. But in terms of Krugman’s proposed test, they can probably at least articulate the opposite view based on having once held those beliefs.
Speaking for myself: I was a pretty standard agnostic coastal liberal back in high school, while wife was in Iowa reading National Review. We’re the same age and have experienced the same political history over the last 20 years. But I don’t think it was until recently that I could’ve cogently articulated her views on those various events. More importantly, I don’t think I could even have cogently articulated what she viewed as the parameters of what was being debated. (That is to say, I perceived a political debate being about X, while she perceived it being about Y.) She, on the other hand, is pretty good at articulating what I thought back then—like most young people her friends held liberal views.
Is there any data to support that claim? It’s the opposite of my own personal anecdata.
> On average, Americans identify as more politically liberal at age 18 and become increasingly conservative between their 20s and 60s.
See also: https://fee.org/media/14135/chart2_socialism.png?width=100%2...
I agree with some of the criticisms, but in general I think the dichotomy of the two visions is appropriate for explaining why two individuals may irreconcilably disagree on a particular issue at a given point in time.
I can't easily recall the statistics or framework he used, though the disagreement between our frameworks of society (such as methodological individualism) was what stood out to me. I recall Pikkety making a more convincing case on the economic side, and Frederic Lordon making a more convincing case on the philosophical side. I also disagree with Sowell on his position on sweatshops (again, not rejecting the principle on which it is made, which is that the workers would not be employed otherwise, or have lower wages from domestic companies, but rather a disagreement on the reach and justification of that argument).
Excerpt from interview where he talks about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6PDpCnMvvw
Also FWIW I have been upvoting you as you get downvoted.
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
>>with not only capital in general but the state too
Why should capital in general be a problem? Isn't it crony capitalism the actual problem? If you are very rich, that isn't usually a problem to your neighbor. But if you are very rich and can thus get away with tax evasion but your neighbor lands in jail for the same reason, isn't that when it actually becomes a problem?
I see capital as a problem precisely not as a matter of quantity (one person having more than another), but as a matter of quality. While 'crony capitalism' is obviously a problem, I don't think it's the root of the problem, philosophically speaking. I'd still think that a system in which a rich person can't get away with tax evasion has serious problems. This is where I likely diverge from, say, Warren's or even Sanders' platform (speaking as someone not from the US).
I think deep issues (exploitation, domination, and alienation) deserve a look, even if they seem to be an alien perspective from the outset.
Even today, you have a fair amount of Republicans who criticize Trump for various reasons, including Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, and John Kasich. Additionally the new "Lincoln Project" is funded and run by anti-Trump Republicans.
This is actually exactly what I'm talking about, not the proceedings themselves. With the exception of the potential wildcard of the Bolton testimony (which never ended up happening) at that point the party had essentially been whipped and it was just theatre.
Here are the names that were discussed incessantly in conservative media: https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20908684/senate-republicans-t...
Up until Matt Gaetz did his stunt disrupting the private/secret hearings of House witnesses there wasn't very much fire on the Republican side which was why these close-door pre-impeachment vote hearings happened in the first place. Remember that at certain point there was a pseudo-impeachment process occurring prior to any impeachment vote having taken place. Even convincing Republicans that they needed to fight to get an actual vote on the record was not an simple process.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/23/20929023/...
"During an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, McConnell said that "everything" he does "during this, I'm coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this, to the extent that we can."" (https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/mitch-mc...)
"But it evidently has great value to the president and to Mr. McConnell, who had spent nearly a year preparing for it. From the instant that Democrats assumed power in the House last January, denying that they had any intention of impeaching Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell, a six-term Kentuckian and the longest-serving Senate Republican leader, directed his staff to quietly dig into the history of impeachments and consult with outside experts.
"“We thought they would finally work themselves up to doing this on something,” Mr. McConnell said. “It has been threatened endlessly. We needed to come up to speed on what actually happens, and that began in earnest last fall.”
"So when Mr. McConnell fielded a phone call from Mr. Trump days before Christmas, he was ready. Stung by the House vote to impeach him on two charges, the president reached out to the majority leader from his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., throwing out ideas about how to handle his coming Senate trial.
"Mr. McConnell had a reassuring response for the third president ever to face removal by the Senate, urging Mr. Trump to trust him to manage the confrontation." (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/us/trump-impeachment.html)
https://battlepenguin.video/videos/watch/99a2d4b3-cfe6-4a77-...
and few months later I followed it up about the outrage and anger that was being poured out:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-fallout-of-american-a...
We're still in the shadow of that outrage, and it's directed at the puppets and not the Fortune 500 execs that are pulling the strings.
It seems to me that the Republican establishment didn’t support Trump but that he was able to rally his base in order force their support begrudgingly.
I believe the term that Trump’s base used for those Republicans was RINO, Republicans In Name Only. So the fact that this vocabulary existed among Trump’s base to me indicates that their support for Trump was not automatic.
The [R]'s can read the wind and since their base is tied to the hip to Trump at the moment they'll play ball on day to day things and have his back on most things, but they are all quite aware he is a temporary force that will be spent eventually and the last thing they want to do is give him the permanent keys to the kingdom.
[0]:https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/politics/trump-election-tweet...
I would argue that you should vote someone the press is actually critical of. Now, the press was very critical of H. Clinton too, but that was ignored because people made fun of Trump.
The right wing does it all the time.
53% of all prisoners are black, ergo blacks are criminals.
Homosexuals represent 70% of all HIV infections, ergo homosexuality is inherently risky and should be treated the same way as hard drugs.
Now Thomas Sowell doesn't say any of those things himself. His points are much more interesting ... to people who have been only exposed to the liberal side of the story for their whole lives.
To someone who has read the original red in tooth and claw conservative talking points from the 80s his books are just a rear guard action and a not very interesting one at that.
Which is why the success of Thomas Sowell with people who have gone to university and then exposed to the real world is entirely the fault of the people who cancelled racism/sexism in the 80s/90s and are trying to do it again today.
Most conservatives I know understand that disproportionate black crime has nothing to do with race and everything to do with disproportionately adopted negative value systems in the black community.
Specifically, fatherless homes and lack of appreciation for education. These variables have the same impact on people of all races.
Unfortunately, instead of correcting the problem, movements like BLM think the idea of two parent families needs to be "disrupted".
Have you ever been to a Black public school, like actually attended one as a student? I promise you the #1 problem isn't lack of appreciation for education.
>fatherless homes
Except this actually has a pretty pinpoint time when it began to cultivate and it overlaps with the War on Drugs and the stagnation of Black middle class growth in the 80s. The modern situation is accumulation of these effects, not their cause.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_F...
As a father, if you didn't know who your child was, you protected them all, and had to cede property to the matriarchs.
Engels wrote that this was why "the patriarchy" should be fought and "dismantled" because it led to property ownership, and sensitivity against redistribution. Therefore, this remains a core value of modern Marxists, to move society back to fatherlessness so that establishment of redistribution mechanisms is more palatable.
Seems like a fairly horrific goal to me. Property rights have led to the single greatest increase in standard of living for all of Western civilization. Seems like we would want more people joining the system than tearing it down.
Lining up strawmen and knocking them down, maybe.
One example being his view on systemic racism, which he described as:
“It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels in the age of the Nazis, in which he was supposed to have said that people will believe any lie if it’s repeated long enough and loud enough. And that’s what we’re getting.”
I just can't take this sort of person seriously in regards to social issues. I just can't do it. And he does this all the time, all of his social views are just ultra-reductionist conservatives views that are identical to the things my hardcore mask-refusing conservative relatives post on facebook.
First, everyone here who likes Sowell can put forth specific, concrete examples where he is right, instead of making vague statements about how brilliant he is and then demanding evidence only when someone disagrees.
Why? The positive argument already exists. It's Sowell's writing. What are you asking for a cliff's notes? The disagreement you're talking about must obviously stem from something in the source material we're talking about. So what is it?
If no such evidence exists then all we have is just-so story-telling, which can be discounted.
The fact that a lot of people seem to believe his ideas are convincing is irrelevant to this discussion.
People believe all kinds of things because they sound plausible to them - partly because other people have made careers out of working out how to push people's "This sounds plausible so I shall believe it" buttons.
Which is why reproducible evidence and independent peer review are things. And why it's absolutely reasonable - in fact required - to question assertions that can't be grounded in them.
It's really just worth reading some of that stuff before you decide he's just a Tweeter. He's basically the opposite of that.
Sowell is a classical liberal and right. Sowell is a neoconservative and wrong. Sowell is a traditional conservative and right. Sowell is a neoliberal and wrong. Sowell is a classical liberal and wrong. Sowell is a neoconservative and right. Sowell is a traditional conservative and wrong.
Without some way to separate the true sentences from the false sentences none of them are very helpful, even if one in the pile happens to be true.
With regard to the Fox News-watching American conservative base and bad Nazi analogies, it's useful to keep in mind what you're dealing with. Grover Norquist said in an interview in 2003 that the estate tax is equivalent to the Holocaust. When Terry Gross politely allowed him to walk that statement back, he said that it's just morally equivalent to the Holocaust. [2] Of course all the thinking involved is total bullshit and the man is batshit crazy, but the interview is not without interest.
Such a lunatic must be the object of widespread derision on the right, right? Nope. Almost all Republican lawmakers sign his bizarre loyalty oath upon taking office, pledging they're not going to raise taxes. [3]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/01/06/o...
[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=145298...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-grover-norquist-pledg...
Both the left and right do this, and it's almost never meaningful. More a lazy way to call your opponents poopheads.
Read his books and find out. You'll be supporting a black author if you do.
What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US? That is his point, you can use that stick to beat anyone and anything you want without having to supply a shred of evidence. Just keep repeating it and call everyone who disagrees racist or Uncle Tom.
> What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US?
I don't understand this. Why do you want to measure against other countries, and why phrase it like you just want one number? Is it not enough to claim that certain inequalities appear in certain aspects of our society?
It would be like asking for a measure of our foreign policy. Sure, we could probably make one, but that seems like an entirely inadequate means of actually assessing what's happening in a complex sociological ecosystem. Our assessments have to be more individualized.
> That is his point, you can use that stick to beat anyone and anything you want without having to supply a shred of evidence. Just keep repeating it and call everyone who disagrees racist or Uncle Tom.
You can do that with anything though. I've heard all the same language used in Climate Change discourse: "well, if you don't think humans caused climate change, they'll just label you anti-science and beat you out of the discussion." This is just a blatant rhetorical tactic to shift discussion from about the actual problem—and indeed all the evidence that this problem has—to nebulous Twitter mobs.
[1] https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2852856
For example blacks are much more likely to want to buy multi family homes. The income and other requirements for these are much stricter which is why they are denied loans more often.
Moreover, he points out that if blacks were being subject to stricter requirements then one would expect that they were less likely to default since the requirements are notionally to calculate default risk.
He points out that before the redlining legislation black and white default rates were broadly the same indicating that whatever criteria the banks used it fulfilled its main purpose of estimating default likelihood.
He then shows data that the anti discrimination legislation increased black default rates and questions whether you encouraging minorities to declare bankruptcy and enter financial ruin is really something to be desired.
Before you make blanket statements on the man you should be familiar with his stance on things. Your comment lacks the nuance that one is apt to find in any sowell book.
If Sowell is responding to specific claims made by researchers of systemic racism, then it can't possibly be merely empty rhetoric, it's a subject of active academic inquiry.
He never claimed that systemic racism could not exist. In fact, in his books, he openly admits that he believes that it did indeed once exist. He just questions whether the studies being produced today are done so without pre-existing bias (are they looking for data to back up their belief, or vice versa) and whether the data produced evidentiates the conclusion. If indeed the studies you cite and that he refutes are looking for data to back up their pre-existing conclusion, then propaganda is the correct description.
No one has put forth the argument that Sowell believes systematic racism cannot ever exist. All that has been said is that he questions whether it currently exists today and the conclusions of the studies you cite.
The comment I was responding to literally said "It is immeasurable, undefinable, unchangeable. As a propagandist you must take care to use things that can not be countered. Systemic racism is one of those." A very clear implication that systemic racism doesn't exist.
Now, this may not be Sowell's views, but fortunately for Sowell, I never mentioned him in my initial reply.
> He just questions whether the studies being produced today are done so without pre-existing bias (are they looking for data to back up their belief, or vice versa) and whether the data produced evidentiates the conclusion.
All science is performed with biases. We couldn't possibly form a hypothesis without following our intuitions first. The question is whether our biases conform to the data. Of course, biases may also shape how we interpret data, but this is true for everyone. Sowell may be right, but let's not pretend that he, or anyone for that matter, is the only one approaching this research with a truly neutral, unbiased approach.
I think it's fair to subject research into systemic racism to scrutiny, but that's merely the process of academic review. It should never be touted as cutting through the propaganda, as if Sowell is some kind of crusader against the dogmatic PC police left.
> In fact, in his books, he openly admits that he believes that it did indeed once exist.
Now, call me crazy, but given that he believes it once existed, I find it hard to believe that he also believes that it's just over and done with now. John Lewis just died recently, and I consider it unlikely that we'd ferret out racism from our systems in just that span of time, especially when I hear stories of, for instance, a North Carolina legislature disenfranchising Black people with surgical precision as recent as 2014. If we still have that kind of explicit racism in our public institutions, it's unreasonable to think more subtle forms aren't also causing unequal outcomes.
Yes, he does believe racism exists within systems. But this is not what is meant by 'systemic racism'. Today, systemic racism is both a description of a problem, as well as an insinuation of its cause -- namely 'white privilege' and white hegemony -- and an insinuation of solutions -- namely progressive legislation. Sowell rejects these insinuated causes and insinuated solutions and instead believes discrimination and poor outcomes for blacks today is driven by progressive policies such as a lack of school choice, laws encouraging loans be made to blacks who cannot afford it, etc. He believes that blacks will be helped by a return to a less regulated market. While this viewpoint could be named under the umbrella of 'systemic racism', let's be honest with ourselves that that's not what the term has come to mean
Also, if you believe that institutions discriminate against Black people, is the direct implication not that Whites are privileged over them in these spaces?
And as for school choice, my understanding was that the research showed that school choice worsened racial education outcomes, like this paper claims [1]. I know I've seen other research to this effect, but this is just one of the first results of google scholar. If nothing else, I would assume that any school choice policy must be coupled with a progressive transportation program, lest that choice become determined by geographic disparities, which because of segregation policies both on the books and within people's historical preferences, just bakes in racial disparities.
Regardless, to act like school choice is some kind of underground counter-culture movement to a progressive-dominated education system, when Betsy DeVoss is Secretary of Education, seems misguided at best. I don't know why you feel the need to dance around terms like "systemic racism" as if it will inadvertently empower a progressive movement when that progressive movement isn't even in power.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.20226?ca...
Sowell talked about the CRA and was proven wrong by multiple studies, like this one, which has a section dedicated to how the CRA wasn't a problem: https://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage-lending/research...
Stop the Sowell worship. Please, internet, for the love of god. He will always talk about how everything that democrats do is bad and everything conservatives do is good. He isn't right on everything all the time.
>Sowell talked about the CRA and was proven wrong by multiple studies, like this one, which has a section dedicated to how the CRA wasn't a problem: https://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage-lending/research....
So you agree the document you linked doesn't disprove what the other poster said? No one has brought up the 2018 housing crisis.
No he didn't, what are you talking about? Just because he mentioned foreclosures means he meant the CRA caused the 2008 housing crisis? No one was talking about it, you just brought it up out of no where.
His statement had NOTHING to do with the housing crisis, the only link between them seems to be "both involve foreclosures, so if I prove CRA did not cause the crisis I will prove his other statement is also incorrect... Because they both have the word 'foreclose' in them"
The OP brought up that Sowell said that anti discrimination legislation increased defaulting and bankruptcy. Thomas Sowell literally wrote an entire article blaming CRA about 10 years ago. I brought up how Sowell is wrong because studies show that he is wrong.
He was wrong and/or misleading about everything he said in this article. Maybe you should apply the same suspicion to someone like Sowell instead.
Stop the bad-faith discussion. I never 'worshipped' Sowell. The commenter above claimed that Sowell has not grappled with various studies that show various racial disparities. I've read his works, and Sowell indeed does directly confront these studies, so to say he is ignoring evidence is wrong.
Whether or not Sowell is right is not really up for discussion. What was being discussed is whether Sowell acknowledges studies on topics he is interested in. Indeed he does, and he finds issues in many studies as well as other studies that have remained mostly unacknowledged by academia.
> He isn't right on everything all the time.
This is a ridiculous standard to judge anyone by. No one is right all the time. Stop changing the goalposts.
By the same standard, do you agree that there is systemic sexism against men?
I'm not sure where you learned feminist theory, but it's fairly resolute about the fact that Patriarchy is deleterious to both men and women.
If men get sentenced more harshly because they are "stronger" and "more rational", or even just perceived that way, then there's no problem with them dominating roles that benefit from a lot of strength or rationality, roles like CEO of a company. But feminists have a big problem with that notion. They're all about how women are just as good as men at everything, equal in all respects and thus deserving of equal outcomes, right until there's an outcome that's better for women than men. Then suddenly there's an intellectual sounding but illogical explanation.
"Using rich data linking federal cases from arrest through to sentencing, we find that initial case and defendant characteristics, including arrest offense and criminal history, can explain most of the large raw racial disparity in federal sentences, but significant gaps remain. Across the distribution, blacks receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. Most of this disparity can be explained by prosecutors’ initial charging decisions, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Ceteris paribus, the odds of black arrestees facing such a charge are 1.75 times higher than those of white arrestees."
It should also be noted that the vast majority of people talking about the sentencing disparity ascribe 100% of the sentencing difference to racism, when this paper states that it's actually a 10% delta, and the other 90% is due to previous criminal record, etc. It's not like activists ever cared about nuance.
The issue I have with the term "systemic racism" is that it is typically used in a purposefully nebulous fashion to capture and group a collection of specific, actionable issues that can be measured.
Of course, you seem to be implying that people aren't actually trying to address these issues individually, and you couldn't be more wrong. Academics and policymakers alike are forming and implementing solutions all the time. You might just be looking too closely at Twitter.
It's frankly insulting that, despite the ongoing tragedy of racial inequality and the abundance of experts actively working to resolve it, that you and others are so caught up in such meaningless semantic games.
> It should also be noted that the vast majority of people talking about the sentencing disparity ascribe 100% of the sentencing difference to racism
I'm not sure how you can substantiate that claim.
> it's actually a 10% delta
You say that like a 10% delta because the color of your skin isn't tragic.
> It's not like activists ever cared about nuance.
Are they supposed to? We have a representative democracy for a reason: average people and activists push for change, and experts and representatives try to enact that push a reasonably as possible. I wouldn't expect the average person to approach policy failures with moderation. Most don't have years of higher education or a heterogeneous voter base to appease to moderate them. That goes for all sides. Don't act like the constituency who decry systemic racism approach it with the same nuance as Sowell.
And I never said the 10% delta wasn't awful. That is of course a horrific thing that must be addressed. It's also a specific issue that can be measured and solved.
Systemic racism is used just like God was when I, growing up in the south, had to defend my belief in evolution. The favorite weapon of the biblical creationists is termed "God of the gaps". They would look for some biological feature (their favorite was the human eye) that wasn't fully explained by evolutionary science, and then claim that gap in science had to be filled by God's existence.
Systemic racism is "racism of the gaps". Every discrepancy between two arbitrarily separated groups is termed evidence of some non-specific, internal bigotry that absolutely must exist. The fact that various cultural groups behave and raise children differently is ignored. Southern whites are much poorer than norther whites. Must be bigotry. It couldn't be cultural differences.....
Women are radically underrepresented as victims of police violence. There must be systemic bigotry towards men by police. Asians are underrepresented in police killings. Police must systemically favor them.
We know that this isn't true, and that women are underrepresented in police killings because they are dramatically less likely to be in confrontations with police. But this logic is willfully ignored in place of the "systemic racism" canard when looking at black male overrepresentation in police killings. It's exactly what you would expect when people who seek power instead of truth are dominating the conversation.
And since you are defending activists willfully misrepresenting data to feed emotional narratives, let's talk about the fact that BLM's hyperbolic language around police killings of black men has caused a large percentage of the population to think that police are a statistically significant threat to the lives of black men in America. The other impression left on the minds of the public is that black men are exclusively the victims of police violence, when the data says otherwise.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends
Here, you see that 76% of the people killed by police are non-black in the US. And yes, black men are overrepresented, and so are latinos. Asians are underrepresented. Activists have SUCCEEDED in manipulating the public on this, and have created social pressure that academics are yielding to.
Ask yourself why you have to use Google to find the name of a Latino who was unjustly killed by police in the last 5 years, but you (if you are like me) can list the names of multiple black men unjustly killed by police in the same time frame? Do you think that discrepancy in knowledge is natural, fair, or just?
The ethno-centric activists have taken the very real issue of police violence, and turned it into a race specific one, needlessly. Racial issues are easy to weaponize, and that's probably the motivation, but it comes at the cost of actual truth. Police kill citizens of all colors with impunity. George Floyd's murderers were arrested a day later. The killer of Daniel Shaver (the second most egregious police killing video I've seen after George Floyd) was given early retirement with a full pension.
Has systemic racism not been researched?
I feel like you're just grasping at semantic straws here. Systemic racism is a theory, like any other scientific theory. Believe it or not, it's a framework that informs research.
> Systemic racism is used just like God was when I, growing up in the south
God is a theory too, just an increasingly tenuous one. Systemic racism seems to bear out in studies.
I don't know why scientifically minded people seem to act like science is just a done deal, and that any theory they instinctively don't like is somehow newfangled. This is just not how science has ever been conducted. Every theory starts out new and strange, and we just have to see how it comports to the data.
> Every discrepancy between two arbitrarily separated groups is termed evidence of some non-specific, internal bigotry that absolutely must exist.
Except the term "systemic racism" literally means that this bigotry is externalized—it exists within the systems of rules we created.
It also seems weird to use "absolutely must exist" sarcastically when you agreed to that 10% statistic earlier. That's just one stat. No, not everything is systemic racism, but as we established earlier, that's not what anyone's saying. Research suggests that the problem is pervasive enough to validate the phenomenon of "systemic racism" is quite real.
> The fact that various cultural groups behave and raise children differently is ignored.
It isn't? Culture, much like individual action, is determined heavily by institutions. People can complain about rap music glorifying a distrust of the law, but when there are actual stats showing a 10% disparity in sentencing, I can't really be too harsh on the rapper here.
Frankly, I never understand this vector of attack. Like, let's assume that all this was actually 100% culture. How do we fix anything? How do you change culture? You can't just tell Black people "be better, and stop that rap music." It seems to me that the answer is still institutional change.
> There must be systemic bigotry towards men by police.
This is actually true. The justice system is disproportionately harsher on men, but that's because we perceive men as being stronger and more in control of their actions. Indeed, we do need to have a cultural shift towards the perception of men, but that shift starts by making our institutions more willing to consider men as vulnerable so we can address it.
> women are underrepresented in police killings because they are dramatically less likely to be in confrontations with police.
But why is that the case. It's not random.
> And since you are defending activists willfully misrepresenting data to feed emotional narratives
You can be dismissive of activists, just make sure it's universal. No side has ownership of "calm rational discourse." I just see a lot of people focus on the temperament of activists rather than the actual policy being considered. It's just a pointless ad hominem. Everyone can point to some group of the unwashed masses and say "look at all those dumb people supporting you, don't you look silly now!"
> The other impression left on the minds of the public is that black men are exclusively the victims of police violence, when the data says otherwise.
Sure, I also think "defund the police" is a misguided slogan. Fortunately, laws aren't written by slogans, they're written by experts.
> Ask yourself why you have to use Google to find the name of a Latino who was unjustly killed by police in the last 5 years, but you (if you are like me) can list the names of multiple black men unjustly killed by police in the same time frame? Do you think that discrepancy in knowledge is natural, fair, or just?
No, but the reforms that BLM protesters are asking for would also help Latino people. I agree that it would be great that the discourse could be on all police violence, because it certainly is pervasive, but I'm not really going to blame Black people, who have an incredibly unique history in this country to focus on their own community's strife.
I also wouldn't expect an organization called Black Lives Matter to be advocating for Latinos (though, I think the work that they do conveniently does). No one is suppressing a Latino Lives Matter movement, it's just that the Latino experience in this country doesn't seem to coalesce in that way. I'm sure there's a very interesting investigation one could perform to figure out why.
> The ethno-centric activists have taken the very real issue of police violence, and turned it into a race specific one, needlessly.
I don't see why that's a problem when the goal is the same. Proposed police reforms aren't race-specific.
It's a problem because making it race specific undermines the goals of police reform. BLM the slogan isn't the same as the organization. The organization conflates the goals of police reforms with a lot of the typical ultra-left wing ivory tower identity ideas like claims that the nuclear family is internalized white supremacy. These ideas are unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans on all parts of the political spectrum, and weaken the goal of police reform.
I grew up in a mostly black county, and the first time I walked into a classroom that wasn't mostly black was freshman year in college. I've noticed a pattern among whites who grew up in segregated suburbs of holding black people to a lower moral and intellectual standard than they hold themselves to. Words like "its understandable that they would" are used to justify BLM willfully, actively, and purposefully misinforming the public on police violence. A consistent minority of people of all racial categories are inherently wired for bigotry. White people need to get more comfortable calling out these hard-wired bigots when they DON'T share their own skin color. Stop celebrating this behavior. It's bad, and needlessly divisive. I got my ass kicked several times by the minority of black kids in my school who were bigots. Most of the non-bigoted black kids stood by and watched. A minority would intervene on my behalf. This is pretty identical to historical acts of white racism. The conformists are what worry me the most. You know, people who suddenly, because the New York Times said so, start capitalizing Black when they've never done so in their entire lives. NYT did so because they think the tiny ivory tower academic community that told them to capitalize black was representative of the black community. As if white academics are remotely similar to the typical white American.
What do you mean by "reductionist"?
Still, if you're willing to remain cool headed and entertain the most reasonable interpretation of what's being said, you'll have to admit that claims about 21st-century sociopolitical rhetoric having features in common with Nazi propaganda does not need to imply any kind of moral equivalence between the relevant 21st century activists and the Nazis.
The rhetoric of the third reich is probably the most famous example of a particular strategy, in which particular bugs of human psychology are exploited using scapegoating and the cultivation of a sense of victimhood. One could very reasonably believe that either (or both) of Donald Trump and lefty-social-justice-warrior types have been using such strategies to garner support WITHOUT thinking even with a few brain cells that either is morally comparable to the Nazis.
I have to think that this is how Mr. Sowell expects you to interpret what he's saying. It would be nice if he had an example other than the Nazis to use, since the holocaust carries so much emotional baggage, but there's just no other historical example of this rhetorical strategy that is so well known or so universally recognized as being in the wrong.
Oddly enough, what you’re doing now—if it were done to dismiss the thoughts of a “progressive” black person—would probably be characterized as “tone policing”, and to whatever extent that’s a legitimate concept I think it applies to someone who makes his fair share of curmudgeonly remarks in the context of many decades of otherwise thoughtful and reasoned argument.
(When discussing "systemic racism", let's set aside specific racism, which can (and should) be specifically called out and changed.)
To explore systemic racism in more detail, we'd want to look at some measure (not necessarily a single number) of systemic racism. Once we have a way of measuring it (even crudely), we could compare across various races, countries, states, and regions. Importantly, we could compare it within a given race -- if systemic racism varies within a race, then clearly we need to revisit the definition because there are other factors at work. We could also look for other signs that something is awry, like areas that are "systemically racist" against the most politically powerful group.
Dr. Sowell has been performing this kind of research and analysis for decades, and documents it extensively in his many books.
From the quotation above, it seems that he believes that he believes that the term "systemic racism" has no useful definition remaining after this analysis, and that it's being used as propaganda to undermine institutions that stand in the way of political goals.
If you believe that systemic racism is a useful construct that leads to solutions for a better world, then by all means follow where it leads. But please focus on offering alternative policies that lead to good results, and adapt (or revert) those policies if they lead to bad results. Don't just turn it into a never-ending "discussion" that divides people with no solution.
Unfortunate, but it’s your loss. I definitely understand where you’re coming from, as I thought the same a few years ago. Challenge yourself to objectively listen to people who you think you disagree with. You might find that things you were certain about have serious flaws.
There are many reasons why terms like “systemic racism” are not constructive, and frankly, he’s not at all wrong on that point.
It's definitely _why_ he was so prolific at that time because back then papers published hardly any Black views in editorials, much less left/liberal Black ones. Concepts that are common now (slavery's legacy is still with us; criminal justice is a huge problem for minorities; etc) would get you banned from pretty much anywhere then. But cheerily offering views like "Stop helping Black people" and "people are poor because they're lazy" with a Black writer was positively applauded.
There was kind of a moment around then, you had Ward Connerly on the UC board of directors busily dismantling affirmative action, Clarence Thomas' appointment, and Sowell blowing up the op-ed pages. There was no question that if you were a conservative Black you would be amplified and supported all over the place.
Needless to say, this led me to dismiss him intellectually then, as his political arguments are threadbare paleoconservativism. I haven't looked at his economic work, but given the appaling history of arch-conservative economics from "giants" like Friedman, I can't imagine I'd find anything very persuasive.
And they will continue to stand, objectively, for a long time to come.
But his life and character are inspirational examples of self-determination and leadership that we need far more of. It is a shame he is not more often cited as an example that others can learn from in their personal lives.
Thomas Sowell, ladies and gentlemen. (https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2015/12/1...)
On this particular topic, we in Europe are increasingly frequently getting a painful refresher.
Thanks for the link.
His debates are also great to watch highly recommended.
More important than the specific facts and arguments in his books is that he checks up on the results of theories and policies. That's not common enough among social scientists and certainly not among politicians.
Does "the peace process" produce peace? Do anti-poverty programs raise people out of poverty? Surely some do, and surely some don't. Figuring out which is which is critical to success -- preferably by learning from others' mistakes, but if not, at least learning from your own mistakes.
It's too easy to get a sense of moral superiority just by supporting a policy with a noble intent, and then move on before the consequences arrive.
Can someone recommend me an alternative book, that at least tries to be a little bit more well-balanced? I'll probably finish this book for the conservative perspective anyway but it doesn't seem like a good starting point despite its name.
[1] https://www.amazon.de/gp/customer-reviews/RTG2TIDQB6AJI/ref=...
I wouldn't dismiss the book just because of that, but it did make the lecture rather difficult because it was challenging my assumptions and knowledge quite strongly. I guess that's good :-)
I like Ha-Joon Chang's "Economics: The User's Guide" as an introduction to economics. It's understandable, it has plenty of references and is written in a pleasant tone.
To be precisely, I would say his conclusions and the lack of other perspectives clashes with what I know about economy in European countries because I see how his reasoning makes sense in a vacuum.
> I wouldn't dismiss the book just because of that, but it did make the lecture rather difficult because it was challenging my assumptions and knowledge quite strongly. I guess that's good :-)
Exactly. I want to finish it someday for that exact reason.
> I like Ha-Joon Chang's "Economics: The User's Guide" as an introduction to economics. It's understandable, it has plenty of references and is written in a pleasant tone.
Thanks!
Could it be that you, the person who has almost certainly not had the degree and intensity of experience in this field as Thomas Sowell (as so few have), are the one with the bias in favour of regulations that are not strictly necessary?
2. Why do you think that I rule out that I'm not biased? If you read my other comment [2], I actually want to finish this book someday to challenge my assumptions and because his critique seemed reasonable! Unfortunately this book seems to paint an incomplete picture of my reality. The economy in my country should be totally unstable because of its regulations according to his views in this book but that's not the case. I want to understand the whole picture and this book falls short of doing it.
3. Why do you think that I'm generally in favor of regulations? It's simply not all black and white.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24041550
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Economics-Undressing-Dismal-Sci...
https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2000/04-01/0001_thoma...
Edit: maybe in the two decades that followed he learned that same-sex couples often raise children.
An extremely intelligent man, and an inspiration to many all over the world.
Any other recommendations on how to do well?
We've got a lot more bells and whistles these days, but maybe the absence of reddit, imgur, youtube and the general dopamine hamster-wheel allowed them to have a better understanding of human nature.
Counter-point is that we are more likely to live longer and have to fight fewer threats of disease, famine, predators and war, so maybe we have more time to contemplate higher thoughts.
The points he makes are quite fair. The science isn't perfect, yes. Often, people try to hide that the science isn't perfect, too. But the impact is roughly the product of the magnitude of the impact and the probability of the event. In this case, the magnitude is enormous and the probability is less than 100% but seemingly quite large. Dr. Sowell seems to simply argue that climate reports suggest that the probability is higher than it truly is. But if a report suggest 95%, and Dr. Sowell thinks it's more like 40%, the core issue is still enormous. I would want him to talk about why he thinks the huge effects of anthropogenic climate change are such a vanishingly small probability to the point that we shouldn't do anything about it.
Here's another article by him: https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2002/06-08/0002_thoma...
Sowell has an experience of with sides of the debate and brings that experience to his writing.
I can't recommend him enough
So basically the same formula as variance in probability theory.
On abortion it would be 1 if you're in favor of total ban and 0 if you're in favor of no regulation whatsoever.
On free healthcare it would be 0 if you want no state involvement whatsoever and 1 if you want free tax-payed healthcare for every citizen.
Etc.
It doesn't even matter which way the 0 and 1 are.
Saying that in today's environment with my name attached would get me fired, so I keep my mouth shut. A perfectly reasonable position, and I cannot speak it for fear of losing the ability to care for my family.
First of all, we can omit anything dealing with real sexual harassment, abuse, or obvious discrimination by people in power; although I think the social witch hunt phenomenon of things like #metoo is problematic, I'm not going to defend any of the people caught up in that kind of thing. So I think it's fair to exclude people like Lawrence Krauss, Louis CK, and definitely people like Harvey Weinstein.
That leaves us with people cancelled for ideological reasons because of things they've said or written, because that ideology is felt to have a chilling effect on anyone interacting with them.
James Watson: cancelled
Tim Hunt: cancelled for sexist joke
Lawrence Summers: cancelled
Bret Weinstein: cancelled (from Evergreen, at least)
Erika Christakis: quasi-cancelled (left Yale voluntarily a year after the Halloween incident).
J. K. Rowling: ongoing attempted cancellation[1] due to being a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF), despite the fact that she didn't seem to be exclusionary at all, and definitely nothing at all like Camille Paglia who is more definitively a TERF.
Among numerous others. Including that PR rep who was fired within the span of her plane trip to Africa after making a racial joke about HIV on her personal twitter account.
That's to say nothing of people who would be cancelled if today's culture were transported back in time. Starting with William Shockley, and extending to a large number of notable historical figures.
[1] For some tweets and later elaborated on in a blog post, all detailed here: https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk... . Basically, her crime seems to be an attempt to frame her experience and sexuality around her biological gender.
This idea of personal tolerance is itself a moral position. Republic government reflects the will of the governed with emphasis on the will of the minority as a FUNDAMENTAL moral belief of the majority. "Free speech only applies to the government" is untrue because that is simply an outgrowth of the governed. When the governed majority actually start believing that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from results", you have opened Pandora's Box by shifting that fundamental moral belief.
Once you have decided Cancel Culture is moral, you are simply negotiating the terms.
The majority of the US believes homosexuality is morally wrong, but it's a personal decision/action. What if freedom to come out as gay doesn't mean freedom from consequences? What if the majority of people who believe abortion is immoral decide to lay on the consequences? There's a huge list of moral disagreements where the majority could decide to cancel the minority.
Finally, Cancel Culture ALWAYS leads to violence. If tolerance isn't part of the mix (and Cancel Culture literally means you aren't being tolerant), then either someone must change their fundamental morals or must start a conflict. Saying "I'm tolerant" and then persecuting everyone who doesn't say and do exactly as you think they should might be cognitive dissonance, but it isn't tolerance.
Kaepernick was "fired" because he was poor at his job. Defenses started to understand his 1-dimensional attack and then shut it down. He was cut after the 2016 season, but had been benched in 2015 because the 49ers offense was struggling.[1] This was nine months before he ever took a knee before a game.[2] Did the 49ers look into a crystal ball and decide to bench him in favor of a demonstrably mediocre quarterback because of something that wouldn't happen for nine months? If he didn't show actual improvement on the field, were the 49ers obligated to keep him? Is an employer obligated to keep any employee who says something controversial regardless of performance?
> Be charitable, he could be talking about the Dixie Chicks or anchors that were fired for questioning the Iraq war.
Which anchors lost their jobs for questioning Iraq? Dan Rather stepped down for his role in publishing a hoax memo about George W. Bush's National Guard duty.[3] Brian Williams was quasi-fired for embellishing a story about his time as an embedded journalist in Iraq.[4]
The Dixie Chicks were actually blacklisted by country music radio stations, so we'll give you that one.
Still, .333 isn't great unless you're playing baseball.
[1] https://www.nfl.com/news/niners-bench-colin-kaepernick-blain...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/06/01/colin-kaepe...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/business/media/analysis-p...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/brian-william...
There's a reason that Cam Newton has a job today and Kaepernick doesn't, and it's because Newton didn't get cancelled.
From 2012 to 2016, Newton's Adjusted Net Yards per Play were .04 higher than Kaepernick's, a virtually statistical dead heat. After the 2015 season, Newton got a shiny new $100M contract for those efforts, and Kaepernick was shown the door after 2016.
In Kaepernick's 11 starts during the 2016 season, his team gave up more than 30 points 9 times. He had a new head coach that had just gotten run out of Philly for having no chemistry with his team, and he had one of the worst receiving corps in NFL history. He still managed 16 TDs to just 4 INTs.
So, for having one of the worst defenses in the league, coached by one of the worst coaches in the league, and throwing to easily the worst group of receivers in the league, his team didn't do so hot. But there's no reason why he shouldn't have immediately found another competition elsewhere, because he WAS a starting-caliber QB, and unlike Newton who was a similar player, Kaepernick had no outstanding injury issues. He wasn't coming off of foot surgery and shoulder surgery like Newton is today.
Except that he spoke up.
And that was the end of his career.
Ashleigh Banfield, Phil Donahue (should have called him a host, not anchor).
Here is an academic 'cancellations' tracking document by the National Association of Scholars:
https://www.nas.org/storage/app/media/New%20Documents/academ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Schola...
> The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is an American non-profit politically conservative advocacy group, with a particular interest in education.[2][3] It opposes a perceived political correctness on college campuses and supports a return to mid-20th-century curricular and scholarship norms, and an increase in conservative representation in faculty.
That I wanted to know the orientation of the group, and thought I might save others the trouble of looking it up? I didn't know people would be so sensitive about seeing the first two sentences of a Wikipedia article.
While interpreting it as such goes against the "assume the best" ethos of HN, in an argumentative thread such as this it's an understandable reflex.
We discussed Sowell at length, and my primary take away was that Sowell’s world view was that the individual is much better at improving their own lives than any intervening external factors. All in all, an ardent believer in individual capitalism. That is a high level assessment.
A more nuanced assessment is Sowell (like his mentor, Milton Friedman), is a true to earth anti-Keynesian. Fun fact, he considered himself a Marxist in his 20’s IIRC.
There are lots of anti-Keynesian economists. Though I think what sets Sowell apart is the way he uses widely accessible data to justify every single view on public policy he has, and to make it easy to digest for someone without an economics background (no easy task).
You can find a nice collection of his ideas online [1].
There are so many black Americans that have never heard a perspective on their standing aside from those presented within the context of critical race theory; a set of conclusions which are completely obliterated by people like Sowell, Hughes, Jason Riley, Larry Elder, Carol Swain, Desi-Rae Campbell, Josephine Mathias, Shelby Steele, Kmele Foster, Glenn Loury, Jonathan McWhorter, among many others in this realm, all of whom have largely differing opinions.
1) His perspectives on how the unfairnesses that life throws at you are part of, and incentivize you towards making your life better and not something that you should simply seek to eliminate without knowing what the unintended consequences are. See his essay on "Cosmic Justice": https://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html
2) That if we seek to have a sustainable approach to how society is managed, maybe we need to set up the reasonable rules and structures of how we want outcomes to be guided by, and not change them willy-nilly because of who happens to benefit at the time. There will be winners and losers no matter what. It's tiring to switch your rules every time you don't like who came out ahead.
If you're curious about Sowell, some policy positions worth noting: opposition to marriage equality on the basis of heterosexual marriage protecting women from the impact of their declining physical appearance as they age, full-throated support for the Iraq war, repeated comparisons of Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler, a spicy "Brown v. Board of Education was decided wrongly" take, opposition to criminal justice reform and particularly decarceration, support for Donald Trump in 2016 (and after), and opposition to the building of mosques.
It's not that these positions are beyond the pale (well: the mosque thing is), but rather that they're cut directly out of the coupon book of 1990s conservative think-tankism. Many dozens of public intellectuals held (and still hold) this same revanchist culture war portfolio of positions. Why is Sowell, long retired, so enthusiastically trotted out?
Um no.. Sowell endorsed Ted Cruz in the primaries and wrote quite the scathing critique of Donald Trump:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/02/16/traged...
In Sowell's own words:
> Some seem to think that Donald Trump's lead in the polls and in the New Hampshire primary make him the most electable candidate, even if he often acts like an overgrown spoiled brat.
Secondly:
> opposition to criminal justice reform and particularly decarceration,
is a common position amongst blacks in America. Many civil rights advocates fought for tougher criminal sentencing in the 80s and 90s, including many in Congress, such as Charlie Rangel. In this regard, Sowell's position is more in line with the views of African Americans of a certain age, instead of his conservative beliefs (recall, many libertarians were against the war on drugs: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/praise-imp...)
> a spicy "Brown v. Board of Education was decided wrongly" take
Here is Sowell's opinion: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/5160. As someone who himself went to a segregated school, I feel he is entitled to his opinion on whether or not the children who went there feel inferior, which is the reasoning behind Warren's majority opinion. That being said, Sowell is extremely pro-school-choice and generally against publicly run schools, so in Sowell's America schools would have been naturally desegregated due to market forces.
Supporting Trump isn't some weird mark of shame or anything; it's not my point that he's worth dismissing because he tolerates Donald Trump. Rather: he's worth dismissing because he has practically no interesting perspectives. He's a US-style right wing conservative in the most conventional possible sense. That doesn't make him a bad person, but it does make him a weird topic for an HN discussion.
Later
You expanded your comment (which is fine, so did I!) and I just want to say: I'm not so much interested in debating the merits of Sowell's positions --- which would make for a boring political argument --- so much as just recognizing that he has them, and that they're the standard-issue intellectual uniform of 1990s American conservativism.
If you want to rebut the point I'm making, I think the most effective way to do so would be to spot some position Sowell has taken that is far outside the mainstream of the Hoover Institution. Then we'd be discussing what makes Sowell interesting, rather than relitigating the most boring debate in American politics.
I feel using the final election to say someone 'supports' a particular candidate is not really a good metric in the American voting system. Primaries are better since there is more policy choice.
Obviously, Sowell would support Trump over Hillary even if he didn't like Trump as a candidate, or even if he thought Trump was not the best candidate. Sowell is very conservative, and believes in school choice, free market healthcare, deregulation, etc. Clinton didn't want any of that. Like many people, Sowell's 'support' of Trump (I don't believe he ever even endorsed him specifically) in 2016 (and likely in 2020) is a vote against the other candidate.
> but it does make him a weird topic for an HN discussion.
Why?
That's pretty easy. It's because tech has a vocal arch-conservative contingent.
Why are there so many arch-conservatives in tech? I don't really have an answer to that.
This might be of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
Tech has a lot of libertarians, which vaguely attribute to a couple of things: the appeal of simplistic but clean-seeming free market economic models to kinds of people who are drawn to computers and (to a lesser extent) the influence of startup culture. People in tech are also typically pretty economically secure, which gives them the luxury of a certain amount of aloofness.
If we assume Sowell is correct about that, then my reply is that culture is not fixed. For instance, Western European culture is vastly different than it was 500 years ago.
So the question is why blacks have the particular culture they do at present. Does Sowell address this?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36222735-discrimination-...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3040.Black_Rednecks_and_...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50623786-charter-schools...
Beautifully said.
So rare, and so precious.
Sowell is a free-market fundamentalist, in that he opposes most government intervention in markets, and universally trusts laissez-faire capitalism to provide the optimal social & economic good for practically any situation.
The problem with this position is that there's simply a ton of evidence that targeted government intervention provides far better outcomes in many situations.
Another classic example is environmental pollution, a classic case of tragedy of the commons. On the topic of global warming, Sowell doesn't even try to address the issue. He belives climate change is a hoax perpetuated by Democrats.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/27/sowell-the-catchwords...
Sowell writes in a conversational style, which is great for accessibility for non-economics. However, he is rightly criticized as failing to cite rigorous studies to back up his opinions.
For a more balanced view of basic economics, I'd highly recommend Principles of Economics by Greg Mankiw.
> It reaffirmed the rather right-wing political views that I'd inherited from my parents.
I really did not know HN was this conservative. I am very surprised at all this unanimous approval of Sowell.
Sowell even thinks that racial discrimination in hiring doesn't require government intervention. He constructs an argument in Basic Economics that market forces will rectify this kind of social ill.
In general Sowell does an excellent job of demonstrating through data that the outcomes of economic policies are often directly at odds with their stated objectives, but to really take a principled stand on what the proper objectives are in the first place you need a set of coherent first principles. A Conflict of Visions provides this backdrop, and once you understand that Sowell clearly adheres to the "constrained" vision of humankind then his other works fall into their proper context.
It's a great book, but not above criticism, so in the interest of thoughtful inquiry I'd encourage anyone to read the book as well as this review by Bryan Caplan, economics professor at George Mason University who is also an economic libertarian: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/sowell
What your argument boils down to is an attack on hierarchy qua hierarchy. Very common to see these days as it is a classic revolutionary/Marxist ideal but it's also entirely inconsistent with natural law. Even within the revolutionary ideal, every revolution has its leaders and its strongmen because that's just how people organize themselves and those at the top live better off than those at the bottom (think Lenin and Stalin vs the starving masses).
You're equating your subjective ideas with natural law? Seem a bit over-confident to say the least.
> There are righteous forms of hierarchy
Yes, a parent towards a their child. What other forms of righteous hierarchies are you thinking about?
> think Lenin and Stalin vs the starving masses
That would be the tyrannical form and completely illegitimate.
Head surgeon and other surgeons. CTO and other engineers. VP of sales and sales people, etc.
Other forms of hierarchy would be upper and lower courts.
Whether or not these are righteous is dependent on if, for example, the head surgeon is actually experienced and talented and a good leader. If he's just some shmuck they pulled off the street or if he's only in that position because he's friends with the hospital president then that would be a tyrannical or dysfunctional hierarchy.
>That would be the tyrannical form and completely illegitimate.
That's my point. But hierarchy itself is not illegitimate. That hierarchy itself is legitimate is a reflection of natural law. That was my assertion.
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult the architect or the engineer For such special knowledge I apply to such a "savant." But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the "savant" to impose his authority on me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure."
Mikhail Bakunin
VP and CTO are actual titles that confer authority. What Bakunin is describing are hierarchies of competence in a particular art (techne) but what would he say about parent-child relationships?
I had never heard of Bakunin until now. I'm not an expert on the schools of anarchist thought by any measure so I won't pretend to really be able to hold a discussion you want to get into analysis of various schools of anarchist thought.
Those are considered illegitimate since they are undemocratic. A top-down vanguard too.
> but what would he say about parent-child relationships?
The same competence argument applies to child rearing.
But these are voluntary structures? That's kind of the beauty of the free market. You have these little monarchal structures that go out and create something in the world. If people want to join they can. If and when these structures become too dysfunctional they go away due to market forces.
They're not. No free person would voluntary accept all kinds of shit jobs that's out there unless indirectly coerced.
Yes, and more.
> and they don't have slaves to grow their food and build their house for them?
Is this the level you sink to as soon as Capitalist dogma is questioned? It's not the poor and workers that have servants in modern society.
You really should read Human Action by Mises. It lays out on a philosophical level why all this stuff is fundamentally irrational and necessarily leads to mass human suffering.
71k people die every year in the US due to lack of healthcare. You need to open both eyes.
I should read a book by the some libertarian god that unsurprisingly dismisses socialism, while your own knowledge about socialism is obviously paperthin? If it's so clear and obvious then you should be able to explain it in a paragraph or two?
Yes I know they do. This is a bad thing. The Founding Fathers were famously skeptical of democracy as were many, many thinkers and societies before them.
And yes it's always democratic in the beginning but democracy is not a panacea (as the Founding Fathers understood) and quickly things devolve into despotism. Just because someone exists doesn't mean they should have a say in how a society is run. Existence is a pretty low bar compared to how developed and complex the structures of a well organized society are.
> 71k people die every year in the US due to lack of healthcare.
Millions are born each year due to abundance and millions more don't die for want of food and other essential services and that is because there's a functioning market clearing mechanism (price).
Again I think you should read Human Action, even so you can just understand your 'enemy'.
It's refreshing to see that this anti-democratic sentiment is said so bluntly, usually it's covered up in weasel words.
> And yes it's always democratic in the beginning
Please let me know which of the communist regimes of the 20th century that started out democratic.
> Millions are born each year due to abundance and millions more don't die for want of food and other essential services and that is because there's a functioning market clearing mechanism (price).
That's a sociopathic response to why on earth 71k people should die every year in a country of abundance simply because they don't have any money.
This sentiment is at the core of America. It's not a secret at all.
Pure democracy is necessarily predicated on a rejection of human rights. We have a Constitution because individuals have human rights that cannot be violated no matter how many people vote on it.
Pure democracy is evil.
> Please let me know which of the communist regimes of the 20th century that started out democratic.
What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy
> That's a sociopathic response to why on earth 71k people should die every year in a country of abundance simply because they don't have any money.
This is a utopian response which is actually indicative of sociopathy.
"There are three questions which will destroy most of the arguments on the left: 1. Compared to what? 2. At what cost? 3. What hard evidence do you have?" – Thomas Sowell
It's not a secret no, but it's certainly not part of the propaganda.
> Pure democracy is necessarily predicated on a rejection of human rights.
Why is that? Maybe you should be blunt here too and just say private-property enforcement instead of human rights?
> What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
Are you really going argue that it was a democracy because of the name? Why are you doubling down on your own ignorance? Even the link you yourself posted contains this:
"After Lenin's party, the Bolsheviks, only got a minority of the votes in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, he disbanded it by force after its first meeting".
The Bolsheviks took power in a coup for themselves and never let go of it.
> This is a utopian response which is actually indicative of sociopathy.
What? There's nothing utopian about universal healthcare and that's firmly established by now. That also sounds like a means to an end argument which is sociopathic if anything is.
Universal healthcare necessarily means rationing of healthcare resources. Universal healthcare does not mean that every person who has an ailment gets treated. A market naturally matches supply (healthcare infrastructure) and demand (sick people). When you remove the market it's up to government to do this matching process which means rationing.
Not every person under a universal healthcare system gets the treatment they want when they want it. Are you disputing that?
It's an irrelevant distraction. What's important is not to deprive people of care to such an extent that 71k people dies every year in a country fully capable of providing universal healthcare. You're using dogma to justify that. What you're calling "get the treatment they want" is just to allow rich people to get priority.
I'm not using dogma at all, let alone using it to "justify" anything. It simply is how it is. There is no panacea. You're totally captured by a utopian vision which is why you can't comprehend that.
Even countries with universal healthcare can't provide healthcare services to everyone who needs it or wants it. Healthcare resources are finite. No amount of arguing on your part will change that.
I haven't argued that healthcare resources aren't finite. But what kind of pointless argument is that? "Housing is finite", "Clothing is finite", "Food is finite". Well, yes? But what kinds of housing are plentiful and what kinds of housing are not? And what need kind of housing is needed to make sure people doesn't die of exposure, even the poor? What's utopian about not having 71k people per year die due to lack of healthcare coverage? Do you think all of these 71k would end up on some brain surgery queue and die anyway?
You're just making pointless statements without any depth. Dilettante.
Certain types of housing are plentiful and some are more scarce depending on what homebuyers want at some price and homebuilders can build at some price.
> And what need kind of housing is needed to make sure people doesn't die of exposure, even the poor?
Again even if you were able to determine that (which you aren't, given that most of these people are severely drug addicted or mentally ill, homelessness is more complicated than just people not having a home), how are you going to convince or force people to build these houses that you (Supreme Decider of America) determine to be necessary?
> You're just making pointless statements without any depth
I'm actually making very pointed arguments that fundamentally invalidate your whole world view. That's why it's upsetting to you.
In Sweden we had a government agency that both identified the need (not rocket science) and government building corporations that actually built the houses.
> I'm actually making very pointed arguments that fundamentally invalidate your whole world view.
It must be handy to be so ignorant and yet so cocksure. That's so arrogant that I'm starting to think you're actually trolling.
Even ignoring that healthcare lacks the factors that approximate the rational choice model’s information requirements well enough for it decisions in that space in a market to even reflect average net utility well, a market matches supply with money; it matches to need only to the extent that willingness to pay is driven only by expected personal utility, which it's not (because money also experiences declining marginal utility) when financial resources of each potential customer vary wildly.
How else would you define need? The alternative involves some third party that determines need aka rationing.
> How else would you define need?
The question seems odd and seems to likely to be driven by a misunderstanding of the quoted material, so I'll try to reexplain what I intended in a way which I hope resolves the question.
Expected net utility given complete information of the consequences of a decision is the only plausible definition of need.
It doesn't, however correspond in any particular way (even ignoring the information problems that are enormous in healthcare) to the number of tokens one is willing to exchange for a thing in the market compared to other participants unless the quantity of tokens available to each participant is the same.
When the tokens are money and the context is a real capitalist society, that's decidedly far from the case.
"How much would you pay for it" clearly is comparable between individuals, but (IMO) declaring that doing so defines the proper outcome is circular and/or verges on the naturalistic fallacy.
This doesn't exist in real life so it's almost laughable to talk about it like it's an actual thing. People don't have "Expected net utility" functions that spit out a number (denominated in what?) when faced with some choice.
> It doesn't, however correspond in any particular way (even ignoring the information problems that are enormous in healthcare) to the number of tokens one is willing to exchange for a thing in the market compared to other participants unless the quantity of tokens available to each participant is the same.
1) Even if everyone had the same amount of tokens at some time t different people have different values and thus would allocate their tokens differently to different things as they saw fit, not to mention there are other circumstances that people have in their life that are beyond cash reserves (having a house, having a car, having a family, having a pet, having a passion for art collection, etc). They would be allocating their tokens in accordance with this hierarchy since they need to reserve their tokens for other priorities in their life.
2) There's no way to even quantify "needs" across people without some market/pricing function unless you have some third party quantifying or ranking the needs of everyone but I already mentioned that. This is what universal healthcare does where some bureaucratic apparatus determines, quantifies, and ranks the needs of patients and allocates healthcare resources.
That's implausible, since sufficient people voting on it can change the Constitution.
> What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
It means “council”. Leninism was vanguardist, not democratic; vanguardism is a top-down paternalistic elite-led structure based on the idea that the masses aren't ready to lead themselves, and would lead to bad outcomes if allowed to do so without guidance from their more sophisticated betters to direct them to observe proper ideological constraints. Basically, the same position your espousing, but differing only in what the right-thought is that it is feared the masses would depart from if not constrained.
For example there was a recent twitter flap because he repeated an old invalidated conservative talking point about reproductive rights and tons of white clconservatives jumped on board saying “see! The black community agrees!”
This is all a strategy to manufacture consent.