The Ideas of Thomas Sowell

[music]

0:00:07.3 Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.4 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.4 Aaron Ross Powell: Our guest today is Jason Riley. He’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His new book is Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell. This episode was recorded as a live Cato Institute event. Thank you for joining us today, Jason.

0:00:26.4 Jason Riley: Thank you for having me. Good to be here.

0:00:29.1 Aaron Ross Powell: Can you give us a sense of what Sowell’s early life was like?

0:00:33.0 Jason Riley: Sure. He’s gonna be 91 years old later this month. He was born in North Carolina, outside of Charlotte in 1930. So this is the Depression era, it’s the Jim Crow South, it was extreme poverty. He was orphaned as a toddler, never knew his father who died before he was born, and his mother died in childbirth to a younger sibling, so he didn’t know his parents. He was taken in by a great aunt who had two adult children and she moved the family when Tom was nine, up to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, that’s where he was raised.

0:01:12.5 Jason Riley: He was a bright kid, but he had a rather tumultuous home life, ended up dropping out of high school and then leaving home at the age of 17 and working a bunch of menial jobs for a while until he was drafted into the Marines during the Korean War. And that’s when he started to turn his life around.

0:01:34.8 Jason Riley: He was able to go to college on the GI Bill. He started at Howard University, the Black school in DC, and then he transferred to Harvard where he completed his undergraduate degree at the age of 28 years old. It’s quite remarkable, how late a start he got. He didn’t write his first book until he was 40, and you think of how prolific he’s been, given that late start, you can only imagine how much more prolific he would have been had he had a more traditional route, of a scholar and then an intellectual.

0:02:07.4 Jason Riley: For most of the ’60s and ’70s, he taught. After earning his graduate degree under Milton Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago, he taught for most of the ’60s and ’70s, and then moved over to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 1980, and that’s where he’s been as a senior fellow ever since.

0:02:33.9 Trevor Burrus: Obviously, everyone’s background influences their intellectual beliefs to some extent, but I think for Thomas Sowell, it’s pretty profound how his background, you just sort of laid out, like how did that… Can you kind of say like, when he views the nature of economic well-​being and how someone makes it in the world, it seems very influenced by the way that he did it, in his own particular way?

0:03:01.1 Jason Riley: Yes. Personal experience plays an important role in Sowell’s intellectual development and how he approaches economics and other areas. He’s written in education, history, the role of intellectuals in society, culture, racial controversies and so forth. Yes, he’s often drawing from personal experience.

0:03:25.3 Jason Riley: He said that these are things he experienced first-​hand, he didn’t simply read about them in a book or hear about them third-​hand. And yes, that has had a tremendous impact on his scholarship, he’s been quite upfront about that. He started out on the left, which in and of itself is not all that unusual for someone who later goes on to become a conservative. Milton Friedman started out on the left. Ronald Reagan started out on the left.

0:03:56.6 Jason Riley: And it’s particularly true for a lot of Black conservatives, who not only start out slightly left of center, but Tom was a Marxist, Clarence Thomas was a Black Panther. Walter Williams, another libertarian economist, was far more sympathetic to the views of Malcolm X than he was the views of Martin Luther King. Shelby Steele was a Black radical leftist in the 1960s.

0:04:25.9 Jason Riley: So I find that… I find that interesting, how far to the left some of these guys start out, particularly along the Black conservatives. But yes, Tom started out on the left. And even after studying at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, under George Stigler, who were his mentors, Tom remained a Marxist throughout his 20s.

0:04:48.9 Jason Riley: And again, getting back to your point about personal experience, it wasn’t sitting in front of Milton Friedman hearing his lectures that changed Tom’s mind about socialism. It was a job working in the government in the early 1960s in the Department of Labor, and studying minimum wage laws and their impacts on employment, particularly employment of disadvantaged groups, minority groups, and Tom realized they were having a harmful employment effects. There were trade-​offs involved here.

0:05:15.8 Jason Riley: Moreover, that the government didn’t quite… Didn’t really care. It had its own agenda. And the actual effects of these policies mattered less than the intentions of these policies, and that sort of set off alarm bells for Tom about socialism, and just this idea that government was everywhere and always a benevolent influence on the lives, particularly the lives of the disadvantaged, it caused him to rethink that. That is what began his journey towards free markets as a better way, a better approach, than big government.

0:05:54.9 Aaron Ross Powell: Stay on the Marxism for a moment, because I think it’s a really interesting part of his intellectual history, I suppose. Tom Sowell is not the kind of person who just stumbles into beliefs or accepts them willy-​nilly, and so there must have been something about Marxism at like a deep level that really drew him, if he stuck to it for as long as he did, and he stuck to it in the face of studying with people like Milton Friedman.

0:06:22.4 Aaron Ross Powell: So what was that? And do… Are there still… He ultimately rejected Marxism, sure, but are there aspects of that that have influenced his ongoing thinking or scholarship?

0:06:31.6 Jason Riley: Well, the reason he found Marx appealing, he says, is because Marx explained the world around him at the time. He stumbled onto Marx in his late teens, picked up a second-​hand copy of encyclopedias and noticed an entry on Marx. He was self-​taught, he studied this on his own in his late teens.

0:07:00.3 Jason Riley: He tells the story of working as a messenger for Western Union. So this is the 1940s. The office was located in lower Manhattan, and some days after work, he’d ride the bus home to Harlem, which is basically the whole length of the island of Manhattan. So he’d get on this bus and it would go up through Wall Street, and then it would go through the expense of shopping districts, past Saks Fifth Avenue, and then it would go on down by Carnegie Hall and then up Riverside Drive, and other well-​to-​do residential neighborhoods.

0:07:32.5 Jason Riley: And then he would cross this viaduct and there would be the tenements, there would be the ghetto, and he’d get off. That’s where he lived. He would say to himself, “What just happened? Why does this look like this up here versus what I just saw on my ride home?” And he said Marx explained it.

0:07:56.2 Jason Riley: Marx said, “Here’s what’s happening. You and people like you are being exploited by all the people who live in those communities and shop in those communities you just rode past on the bus.” And it made a certain logical sense to him, and it’s something that he found an attractive perspective. It’s something he clung to.

0:08:18.0 Jason Riley: Until he had convinced himself that it was the wrong way to go, and that involved a combination of study and of personal experience. But that’s what he just doesn’t… It offered a very attractive explanation of what was going on, not just for him personally, but for Black people as a group at that time, this was very attractive ideology, and Tom was taken in by it initially.

0:08:51.8 Trevor Burrus: So you mentioned the University of Chicago, which of course is extremely important when he went there and the kind of ideas that were flowing around the University of Chicago. But can you elaborate a little bit on the kind of people that were there? And what he was learning? We obviously have Milton Friedman and George Stigler, and probably not many Marxists on staff, I would imagine, at the University of Chicago, but what did he… When he left the University of Chicago, what did he take away from that? And where did he go immediately after?

0:09:24.9 Jason Riley: Sure. Yeah, it wasn’t just Friedman and Stigler. Tom studied under Hayek. Hayek was still teaching at Chicago when Tom was there, and Tom took his course in the History of Ideas. So these were giants. He studied under Walter Burns at Columbia where he got his Master’s degree in Economics. And Stigler had been at Columbia. Tom went to Chicago not to study under Friedman, he went there to study under Stigler. And Stigler was initially at Columbia, so Tom had planned to get his PhD there at Colombia under Stigler.

0:10:00.0 Jason Riley: Stigler then moved to Chicago and Tom followed him. But that’s how Tom ended up at Chicago. But yeah, there were a lot of economic giants walking around, walking through Tom’s life. He studied under Gary Becker at Columbia as well, before Becker moved to Chicago. So he was surrounded by these great minds, who also recognized something in Tom, not withstanding his Marxism. Burns is the one who gave him that recommendation to be accepted at the University of Chicago. He got in on Burns’ recommendation.

0:10:39.7 Jason Riley: There was a time during his graduate studies when he was struggling financially, to a point where he was considering dropping out of graduate school and getting a job, and it was Milton Friedman and George Stigler who went to the Earhart Foundation and secured a grant for him that allowed him to finish his studies and go on to become an economist.

0:11:05.2 Jason Riley: So this was this Marxist kid, and they knew he was a Marxist, yet they saw some talent there and took it upon themselves, not only to mentor him intellectually, but to care for his material needs so that he could continue as an economist. There’s a funny story where the head of the Earhart Foundation said, “Stigler and Friedman come to us, say, ‘fund somebody’, that’s good enough for us. We fund them.”

0:11:33.1 Jason Riley: And he says, I remember what they said about Sowell, they said, “He’s a Marxist now, but he’s too smart to stay one.” [chuckle] So they saw something in him, even when he was spouting his Marxism in the ’60s on their watch. So I think it speaks to both… Speaks well of both Stigler and Friedman, that they could see past that, that there was some real raw talent here. And eventually, it would come to dominate his thinking.

0:12:11.7 Jason Riley: What he really also got out of Chicago, two things. That empiricism, Tom would probably argue that he brought that mindset with him to Chicago and there’s… I believe that he sort of… That’s the way he thought, that he thought that way for a long time, in facts, data, evidence, “Show it to me.” And so he brought that to Chicago. They stressed that there. Less interest in theoretical, beautiful theoretical models, and more interest in data and evidence.

0:12:50.5 Jason Riley: And so he certainly… They reiterated that approach to economics, and he would take that approach, that empirical approach with him, whether he was writing about, and apply it, whether he was writing about economics or writing about intellectual history, or writing about cultural issues or racial issues, Tom is an empiricist. And he brings an empirical approach to whatever he’s doing, and that’s certainly something that was stressed at the Chicago school.

0:13:18.4 Jason Riley: The other thing he got from Chicago and from Stigler and particularly Friedman, I think was the proper role of a public intellectual. After Friedman left teaching, after he’d won his Nobel Prize, he then went on to write popular books for, that could be readily understood by people who were not economists.

0:13:44.8 Jason Riley: He felt that the role of a scholar is not simply to talk to your peers in the academy in language only they can understand, but to explain your discipline to the average person, to be a sort of economics proselytizer and popularizer. And Sowell certainly took that to heart.

0:14:00.5 Jason Riley: Most of his books are written for general interest readers, and can be understood by people who are not economists, or not scholars or not intellectuals. After he retired his column back in 2016, I wrote that some people might have lost the best professor they ever had, even if they never went to college, because he is someone who has taken upon himself to write book after book after book in plain English for the average person to understand. And that is by design. I think part of that came from studying under Stigler and Milton Friedman who stressed it.

0:14:36.7 Aaron Ross Powell: He first came to wider attention with his writings on the Civil Rights Movement and race issues in America. Did he set out to have that be an area of study?

0:14:48.4 Jason Riley: No, no, Tom reluctantly started rated writing about racial controversies. Tom is sort of… If you can put a label on him, and he kind of rejects the labels, but he sort of comes out of the classical liberal tradition. Your John Stuart Mill, your Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Malthus. These were Tom’s influences intellectually. He wanted to write about economic history and the history of ideas. Intellectual history, that was his first love. That’s what Stigler was best known for. And that’s why he wanted to study under Stigler.

0:15:27.7 Jason Riley: So that’s what Tom set out to do. Tom wanted to be an economics professor. A teacher, a classroom instructor. He wasn’t really interested in research, he wanted to be a college professor. Economics had helped explain the world around him, and he wanted to convey some of what he’d learned to other people, that’s what he wanted to do. Preferably at a small… A small school where he could have personal relationships with the students.

0:15:54.1 Jason Riley: The problem was that this was the 1960s, and higher education was changing, students were becoming more radical. You had a civil rights movement, you had a women’s rights movement, you had a gay rights movement, you had a anti-​war movement. And college campuses were used as a platform for all of these activists. Administrators didn’t know how to handle it, they lost track of what the purpose of a university should be.

0:16:25.7 Jason Riley: And Tom, Tom wanted to teach the way he had been taught, and that was harder and harder and harder to do beginning in the 1960s. So there were constant run-​ins with fellow faculty members, administrators and so forth, where Tom would say, “No, you cannot be excused from class to go to a protest. No, we’re not gonna spend this entire period talking about current headlines. I’m here to teach economics, you’re here to learn economics, and that’s what we’re gonna discuss.”

0:16:55.6 Jason Riley: That did not go over well with, at the schools where he taught. He taught at Howard University, he taught at Rutgers, Douglas College at Rutgers University. And in the late ’60s, he was teaching at Cornell, where of course you had these armed student protest there in the late ’60s, Tom was there for that.

0:17:18.4 Jason Riley: I think that was a real turning point of his attitude toward a life in academia. He was quite upset and disturbed by how the administrators just capitulated entirely to the students, refused to stand up to them, there were simply no adults anywhere to be found. And this really disturbed Tom. He stuck it out in teaching through the ’70s, but I think he already had one foot out the door, he was doing some think tank work, and take sabbaticals and so forth.

0:17:58.1 Jason Riley: He would go on to teach at Amherst and Brandeis, and he got his tenure at UCLA in the ’70s, but I think that that experience at Cornell was formative and really soured him on the direction in which academia was heading, and how much he could accomplish there. And then it was in the ’70s that he turned his attention to these racial controversies.

0:18:20.1 Jason Riley: For the ’60s, he was writing in his discipline, he was writing about Marx, he was writing about Jean Baptiste and Adam Smith, and writing about economic history. It was only in the ’70s where he really started to turn to writing on race, and he says he did so because of the direction that he saw the civil rights movement headed, he thought that they were barking up the wrong tree in terms of what they were emphasizing and stressing and trying to accomplish.

0:18:49.5 Jason Riley: He said, “My goodness, if these are what the so-​called experts have to say about this stuff, maybe us amateurs should get in on the game.” And that is when he started to turn his attention to writing about racial controversies. But for most of the ’60s, it was economic history. He says that he felt a duty too, to write about these racial controversies, because there were things that needed to be said, and too many other people reluctant to say them.

0:19:19.3 Jason Riley: And if a statement defines Thomas Sowell’s scholarship, that might be it. He is a straight shooter, he is someone, like I said, with this empiricist mindset that he brings to his scholarship no matter the topic, and he will follow the facts to their logical conclusion and report his findings, even if they are unpopular, even if they are politically incorrect.

0:19:45.7 Jason Riley: And when it came to writing about racial controversies that got him… That got him into trouble with a lot of people. I think that’s one reason names like Ta-​Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi and Nikole Hannah-​Jones are much better known than Tomas Sowell. He was cancelled back then in the ’70s when he began saying these politically incorrect things about racial controversies. Academia and intellectual elites decided that they were gonna cancel him. And they’ve been largely effective in doing that.

0:20:20.4 Jason Riley: He has paid a price in terms of popularity and notoriety, which is a shame because his non-​racial writings deserve to be better known as well. But it’s because of weighing in on those racial controversies, I think that has really cost him.

0:20:39.2 Trevor Burrus: In discussing his time in the university and amongst the intellectuals, you kinda highlight this extremely important part of Thomas Sowell’s thought, which is the way he views the intellectual class and how they derive their opinions, and also, I think in particular, how they regard other people. Or maybe disregard would be a better term, but how they think about other people.

0:21:04.0 Trevor Burrus: Can you go more into… You see it in Vision Of The Anointed, for example, which was a hugely influential book on me, but how he kind of… You said he was cancelled, but he also took his cancelling by the intellectual class and incorporated it into his philosophy and wrote about the way these people think, essentially.

0:21:24.0 Jason Riley: His observation is that we need to view the intellectual class like we would do any special interest group with its own agenda. There are agendas, ideas and influence in political realm and academia and so forth, but they are just another special interest group, and they need to be viewed as such. We don’t view them skeptically enough.

0:21:58.8 Jason Riley: And this is something he gets out of knowledge and decisions, where he’s building on Hayek’s skepticism of intellectuals, and how they can’t know more than the collective body of a society, no matter how smart they are. So Tom has built on on that Hayekian view, that we need to be skeptical of intellectuals.

0:22:29.6 Jason Riley: In terms of being canceled, one of the patterns I discovered in researching the book, watching a lot of interviews that Tom had done over the decades, is that he would often be asked by the interviewer, “How does it feel to go against the grain of so many Blacks?” And Tom would say, he’d correct the premise, he’d say, “I don’t go against the grain of most Blacks. I go against the grain of Black elites, Black intellectuals.”

0:23:01.2 Jason Riley: He said, “Black intellectuals no more represent the average Black person than White intellectuals represented the average White person. You can’t conflate, you can’t complete the two.” So a lot of these Black elites, and you see this today, whether we’re talking about something like a school choice, which is supported by most Blacks, but opposed by Black elites, whether we’re talking about voter ID laws, which are supported by most Blacks, opposed by Black elites.

0:23:32.8 Jason Riley: Racial preferences in college admissions are opposed by most Blacks, supported by most Black elites. So down the line. And Critical Race Theory, which is basically a dressed up argument and fancy language for affirmative action, initial preferences. That’s all really Critical Race Theory is.

0:23:52.5 Jason Riley: And it’s no surprise that a lot of Black elites support it, because affirmative action, to the degree it helps anyone, helps people that are already better off, even though it’s sold in the name of helping the poor and the underclass and so forth. So Black elites have long defended affirmative action, it helps them.

0:24:13.0 Jason Riley: They’ve attacked Thomas Sowell for critiquing affirmative action and calling out the fact that it tends to help people who are already better off. So again, that’s an example that Tom would use of these elites having their own agenda, and that we need to be very skeptical before we swallow what they’re saying whole. And look at their credentials and ask enough questions.

0:24:35.8 Aaron Ross Powell: One of the criticisms in line with that though, that Sowell frequently gets from Black intellectuals and just intellectuals on the left, is that the way that he talks about civil rights and race issues is, if not an apology for racism, but at least kind of dismissal or minimizing of the impact that America’s racial history has had on Black Americans, continues to have on Black Americans.

0:25:07.1 Aaron Ross Powell: Is there anything… Is that a fair critique? Or is it, does it completely miss the base? Does he… Is he kind of just saying, “Racism is not as bad as you say it is.”?

0:25:17.2 Jason Riley: No, I think it’s a willful distortion of what Sowell has been saying. If you’re on the left and refuse… And believe that racism is a blanket explanation for disparities today, anyone who disagrees with you is painted as someone who is apologizing or minimizing the impact of racism. It’s really an all-​or nothing attitude that the left has.

0:25:51.8 Jason Riley: Thomas said, “Racism is one of many factors that can explain disparate outcomes among groups.” And the other side is saying, “No, racism is the factor, and our goal should be to rid society of racism and… But for racism, we would not have these disparities that we see today.” And then that’s when Sowell’s empiricism kicks in, and he says, “Well, let’s put that to the test.”

0:26:31.5 Jason Riley: Let’s look at what was going on among Blacks at a time when there was far more racism than there is today. Let’s look at the Black family formation back then. Let’s look at the rate at which Black incomes were growing, the rate at which Black home ownership was growing. The right at which Blacks were increasing their years of education, both in absolute terms and relative to Whites.

0:26:55.3 Jason Riley: Let’s look at the rate at which Blacks were entering the skilled professions during Jim Crow, when racism was legal and widespread. And then let’s compare that to more recent times when there’s clearly less racism. If nothing else, legal segregation no longer exist. Tom just says, “Let’s weigh the evidence. Let’s look at the evidence.”

0:27:19.4 Jason Riley: And because the other side is wedded to this narrative that everything we see today is a legacy of slavery and a legacy of Jim Crow, they have to ignore this earlier period that Tom would use to compare and contrast the effects of racism per se. And then Tom would even broaden it, he’d say… One of Tom’s, one way he has distinguish himself as a scholar is through his international comparisons, he doesn’t just look at what’s going on here in America and only among Blacks, he’s looking at what’s happened to other groups.

0:27:54.3 Jason Riley: Blacks were not the only groups that have been discriminated against, hated, disparaged in society. What is the track record among other ethnic and minority groups who have been treated similarly, or in similar ways at different periods of time? And what has been their impact, what has been the impact of that treatment on their economic advancement?

0:28:17.2 Jason Riley: And if you look at Japanese experience in the US, the time when they couldn’t own land in certain states, couldn’t work in certain professions, or in turn, during World War II. Today, Japanese Americans out-​earn White Americans and outperform White Americans academically, and have for decades.

0:28:40.5 Jason Riley: You could take the example of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, again a hated group, locked out of certain professions, certain schools, certain programs, yet again, outperform the majority population that discriminates against them to this day, outperforms them both academically and economically.

0:29:03.8 Jason Riley: You could look at the example of course, Jews in any number of countries around the world down through the ages who have done this, and then Tom would say, again, “If racism or discrimination is an all purpose explanation, a satisfactory explanation for the outcomes we see among Blacks today, how do you explain the experiences of these other groups?”

0:29:25.2 Jason Riley: And if you don’t like comparisons to other groups, immigrants and think the Black experience is unique, then he says, “Okay, then let’s compare what was going on in Black America in previous generations versus what’s going on today.” So Tom approaches this empirically. I think the other side has not only a personal agenda involved in what they’re saying to cover themselves, but also it’s just simply ideologically wedded to a narrative that gives people emotional release and provides them with scapegoats.

0:30:08.4 Jason Riley: Tom, I think is looking at this more dispassionately, as is his want when it comes to these topics. I frankly prefer that. These are these are topics that need more light than heat, and Tom is about providing light.

0:30:22.4 Trevor Burrus: Some people have argued to me that one of the problems with Sowell’s work in this area is that, for real racists, for people who are actually racists, who would prefer to blame the race for ills, Thomas Sowell provides them kind of cover essentially, that he gives them the ability to, because he himself is an African-​American economist, and so that gives them cover.

0:30:55.9 Trevor Burrus: But racists can use his work to be more, almost more effective racists, but underlying that they are just racists. Is that a critique that’s even meaningful or valid? Or is it just, is it just off-​base?

0:31:08.6 Jason Riley: It’s something he’s experienced for a long time. I think it’s a cop-​out. One of the earliest, one of the first times he experienced this was when he did pioneering research on race and IQ back in the 1970s, and Sowell’s interest at the time was to take on the scholarship of a social scientist named Arthur Jensen, who had written that outcomes today are largely explained through genes, genetic, it’s hereditary, and therefore, Jensen was arguing that programs meant to address the achievement gap in school, say like Head Start, Jenson said these are useless because this is genetic.

0:31:52.1 Jason Riley: And Sowell wanted to take that on. There were other people who just wanted to call Jensen names. Sowell didn’t believe Jensen was correct, but he wanted to test what Jensen was saying. And he did. He collected tens of thousands of IQ scores going back to World War I, and he noticed some things that really undermined Jensen’s genetic explanation for differences in group outcomes.

0:32:23.2 Jason Riley: You had all Black schools outperforming all White schools on standardized tests. You had Black women over-​represented among all people with the highest IQs. You had Black orphans raised by White families with above average IQs. And on and on. They’re just… All of this ran against Jensen’s genetic theory of achievement gaps and intelligence gaps and so forth.

0:32:51.0 Jason Riley: One other thing that he noticed, and this is something that the political scientist James Flynn would pick up later and become famous for the Flynn Effect, Tom noticed that a group’s IQ could rise in a few generations. In fact, it could rise more than the gap between groups. Which again argued that something involving the environment was playing a bigger role than genetics, ’cause genes don’t work that fast within a generation or two. They don’t adapt that fast.

0:33:30.1 Jason Riley: So Tom took this research he had done and presented it to Jensen and Jensen’s supporters, and that’s how he took on Jensen. And by the way, when Murray, Charles Murray did the same thing two decades later, Tom did the same thing to Charles Murray, on the same grounds. He had done all this research decades earlier to address Jensen’s claims.

0:33:58.5 Jason Riley: But Tom’s argument, and I think it’s an important one, is when it comes to things like like intelligence and what racists say about Blacks, Tom says, “You can’t be afraid of what you might find.” He said, “I didn’t know what I was gonna find. I didn’t think Jensen was right, but I wanted to be absolutely sure. And I wasn’t afraid to find out.” He thinks…

0:34:23.6 Jason Riley: There were a number of Black academics that approached him when he was doing his research and urged him to stop, for the reasons you just said. They were afraid of what he might find and how the racists would be able to use it. Tom was not fearful of what he might find, and he said, “You know what though? Even if I do find what they fear the most, what are we supposed to do? Hide it?”

0:34:50.4 Jason Riley: Well, he says, “If you wanna help… If you were to help people, you need to know where they are. Wherever you want them to go, they need to get there from where they are, not where we’re gonna pretend they are.” And if you get rid of tests, and we’re still having this debate with SAT scores. People wanna eliminate the SAT test because of the racial disparate outcomes.

0:35:14.1 Jason Riley: That’s not gonna eliminate the gap. You eliminate the test, you don’t eliminate the gap, you just obscure the gap. And who is that helping? And Tom took the same approach when it came to this race and IQ debate. We need to know where people are if we wanna help them, ’cause they can only get where they wanna go from where they are.

0:35:32.4 Jason Riley: So I think that argument is a cop-​out, it’s a cowardly argument to take. And it’s an anti-​intellectual approach, and it’s a non-​scholarly approach. Present your evidence if you think someone’s wrong. Calling people names, ad hominem attacks, is not scholarship. It’s not brave. It’s cowardly. Take on those arguments, if you think they’re wrong. And that’s what… That’s what Tom did.

0:36:00.5 Aaron Ross Powell: Sowell has written, just say a lot of books over his career. One of them though, the one that I think a lot of people consider to be his masterpiece is, Knowledge And Decisions. Can you tell us what that book is about?

0:36:17.8 Jason Riley: Sure. This is a book that was inspired by an essay by Friedrich Hayek that ran in an academic journal in the 1940s, and Sowell had been assigned the article in Milton Friedman’s class when he was starting for his PhD. The title of it was: The Use Of Knowledge In Society. And Tom had no idea why Friedman would assign this article to students studying price theory, which is the course that he was taking from Friedman.

0:37:00.3 Jason Riley: Well, he read it, it didn’t make much of an impression on him, but later on when he was teaching, he had to teach a course on the Soviet economy. Someone thought he should teach this course because he knew a lot about Marx. It wasn’t really related. But he had to crash on the Soviet economy and he starts reading up on what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time, and it made him think back to that Hayek article that he’d been assigned in Friedman’s class.

0:37:30.8 Jason Riley: He said there was a knowledge problem in the Soviet Union, and that was really the root of their problem. The people with the knowledge didn’t have the power, and the people with the power didn’t have the knowledge. What Hayek was doing was really carrying on the work of Von Mises, his mentor, and who was carrying on the work of Adam Smith in return. So Adam Smith is talking about the importance of division of labor in a working economy. Hayek said there’s also a division of knowledge problem that we need to focus on.

0:38:12.6 Jason Riley: And then what Sowell did was to take Hayek’s work in new directions, in that book, Knowledge And Decisions. Hayek was quite impressed by what Tom had done with his work, he said… He wrote a glowing review of the book for Reason Magazine back in 1980. It’s fascinating to read because he starts the review by saying, “When the book came in the mail, I put it aside ’cause I was too busy with my own research,” he says, “and when I finally picked it up, I realized that I should not have put this aside, that I would have made far more rapid progress on my own research, had I read Tom’s book first.”

0:38:56.6 Jason Riley: Now you think about it, this is 1980, Friedrich Hayek is already Friedrich Hayek in 1980. He’s already got his Nobel. He’s already known as one of the foremost political philosophers and economists in the 20th century. And then he goes on to talk about how Tom took this in directions he had never even imagined.

0:39:18.8 Jason Riley: It tells you the high praise that Tom received among people in his discipline, that he is someone worthy of study. Even if he had never written a single word about affirmative action, Thomas Sowell is someone we would still be talking about because of his work in other areas. I think Hayek’s praise of him speaks to that.

0:39:38.0 Jason Riley: But basically the book is about how knowledge develops and how it spreads through society, and how there are these decision-​making units that are essential to the spread of knowledge, and that to the extent that decisions are made further and further away from the person who must live with the consequences of those decisions, society goes astray.

0:40:09.1 Jason Riley: And so like Hayek worried about top-​down command and control economies, Sowell was worried about that as well, and was worried about the trends in society, in terms of these decisions being made by folks who will pay no consequences for being wrong. Whether those are economic decisions, political decisions, decisions being made by the judiciary and so forth. But Tom was worried about the trends away from the person who will suffer the consequences.

0:40:38.6 Jason Riley: The book has been quite prescient in terms of… If you read that book, it holds up very, very well in terms of the trends it was pointing out 47 years ago.

0:40:49.4 Trevor Burrus: I think a lot of people who have the free market, a free market bent, myself, have a story about Thomas Sowell, or some sort of thing that you read from him where you said, “whoa” at some point in your life. And for me, for example, I was probably 12 years old, and I was giving my dad grief about how we weren’t recycling enough. My dad gave me a Thomas Sowell column and…

0:41:17.8 Jason Riley: Wow. [chuckle]

0:41:18.2 Trevor Burrus: There was… Yeah, not necessarily most normal family. But there was a line in this column and it was, “How do you know the difference between trash and a resource?” And that line made me be like, “Whoa. Okay. That’s pretty profound.” And that’s the way the Thomas Sowell does, he ask these questions that make you re-​even conceptualize recycling, right? Do you have one of those? You have one of these moments where you picked up and you’re like, “Whoa.” Do you have one of those?

0:41:49.6 Jason Riley: There are so many. Sowell’s not on Twitter, he’s not on social media. But there’s a fan account, @Thomassowell, and all it does is publish quotes from old Sowell books and columns. He doesn’t indulge them in any way, direct quotes. Obviously, there’s a character limit on Twitter, so this guy has gone around and found these little nuggets, these little gems. He tweets them out. He’s got more than 700,000 followers. [chuckle]

0:42:30.5 Jason Riley: People think it’s Thomas Sowell, and they think it’s stuff he’s writing about what’s going on right now. This is all old Thomas Sowell stuff that is still relevant to what we’re talking about today. Sowell’s… What I found most profound about Sowell, is his outside the box thinking. He’ll say things… I’ll give you a couple of examples.

0:42:58.8 Jason Riley: One interview about poverty, and Saul says, “We spend a lot of time talking about the causes of poverty,” he says, “but poverty is the natural state, most countries are poor. What we need to do is study why a few of them become rich. That’s what we should be interested in. Not why countries are poor.” [chuckle]

0:43:29.1 Jason Riley: Another thing that grabbed me is, so many of our discussions about inequality today rest on the assumption that equal outcomes are in fact the norm, and therefore, where we see inequality, unequal outcomes, disproportionate outcomes, something is amiss, somethin nefarious is going on.

0:43:56.8 Jason Riley: Sowell has pointed out in fact that inequality is the norm, people who have studied societies down through history have never found anything approaching proportionate outcomes among groups, or representative outcomes among groups. So the state of affairs that is held out today as the norm, is something you don’t find anywhere down through history in any society. Not in America, not outside of America. Not today, not yesterday, not a thousand years ago.

0:44:36.6 Jason Riley: It sounds like a simple observation, but in fact, it’s quite profound. Because so many of our discussions are premised on something that has never existed being the norm. So that is an insight that jumped out at me from Tom, that informs a lot of his scholarship.

0:45:02.8 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, it’s something I sometimes say, like, as a redhead, we can take the percentage of redheads in society, and if that was equally represented in all professions, that would be deeply weird.

[laughter]

0:45:13.9 Trevor Burrus: It would be very weird if that became…

0:45:16.1 Jason Riley: And he says, particularly in a place like America, why would you expect to find these proportional outcomes, given that we’ve taken in people from all of the world, different societies, different geographic locations, people from cultures with different attitudes towards school, schooling and work, and all kinds of… Why would you put them all together in the United States of America and then expect to see similar outcomes given these different cultures they’ve all come from?

0:45:47.8 Jason Riley: One example he’s used, now that I think about it, that I found quite remarkable, is he said, on the lower east side of Manhattan during periods of high immigration, you’d have all these kids in the same school. So you’d have the Italians sitting next to the Jewish kids, sitting next to the Irish kids, and people would say, “Well, same school, same teacher. Why aren’t they getting the same outcomes? Why aren’t they getting the same grades?

0:46:20.1 Jason Riley: And Sowell would say, “Well, you have to realize that the Jewish kid comes from a culture, he’s fleeing Russia, Tsarist Russia, where most of the country is illiterate, most of the population is illiterate, but most Jews have books in their home, even there. And he’s sitting in that class next to an Italian kid who probably came from Southern Italy, or his family did, where, when compulsory school attendance laws were put in place, school houses were burned down because the parents wanted those kids working, that was more important than them getting an education.”

0:47:04.8 Jason Riley: So technically they’re in the same environment, sitting next to each other in that class. But if you realize all the cultural baggage they are bringing with them to this country, they are not really in the same environment, they don’t come out of the same traditions or the same culture. And when they go home and return to that culture, you’re gonna get different outcomes and it really shouldn’t surprise anyone. So there’s an observation that I found from Tom that I thought was quite insightful.

0:47:39.6 Trevor Burrus: So we’re gonna open up for questions here. We can tweet the hashtag of Cato Events, but also Facebook, YouTube. First one here, we’re gonna do from Thomas Grins, I think is the right way of putting it, a professor of economics. “Yes, Thomas Sowell has received little recognition within the economics profession, perhaps because his work is broader than just economics. Has his work gotten any greater recognition in other disciplines such as say, sociology, anthropology? And if not, why not?”

0:48:11.3 Jason Riley: Well, his early work in economic history did, and that’s why I was citing Hayek. That was one of many examples. I mean, James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize winner, sent Sowell a note after reading Knowledge And Decisions that said something like, “I wish I had written this book, and I don’t think I’ve ever said that about another book that I’ve read.”

0:48:40.2 Jason Riley: His work on economics and economic history in particular was widely praised. Tom was published in all the prestigious academic journals. Published… When he was in academia, he worked in economics departments where he was publishing more than anyone in the department, and in some cases, more than all of them combined. He was a first rate scholar and he was recognized as such at the time.

0:49:08.8 Jason Riley: As I was saying earlier, I think it is his weighing in on racial controversies that has cost him in terms of prestige, in terms of notoriety, about his writings in these other areas. He’s essentially been cancelled, to use today’s jargon. He’s not as well known as he should be on his writings on other areas, even though again, I think he’s outperformed people who are better known than him.

0:49:37.1 Jason Riley: I think his scholarship, in terms of not only his breadth of luminous it’s been, but just that his range and his depth. One scholar called him, “One of the great intellectual trespassers that we have.” His ability to move between disciplines, he’s not just an economist, he’s an historian, a social theorist, a political philosopher, a sociologist.

0:50:01.2 Jason Riley: And to watch him move between these fields and these writings, sometimes within the same book, is really just something to behold. But no, he hasn’t received the recognition that I think he deserves, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book.

0:50:16.7 Aaron Ross Powell: Richard Malaby asks, “Did you learn anything surprising about either Thomas Sowell himself or his scholarship as you were doing the research for this book?”

0:50:27.3 Jason Riley: Well, I’ve been following Tom’s writings for a while. I discovered him, not as young as you guys. [chuckle] How old were you, you said 14, 11? I wasn’t quite that young.

0:50:42.5 Trevor Burrus: I was 12. 12 or 13, yeah.

0:50:44.9 Jason Riley: Okay, 12. I waited a little longer. But I discovered him in college, I worked on the school newspaper and was having a conversation about affirmative action with some of my colleagues in the paper one day, and someone said to me, “Jason, you sound like Thomas Sowell.” And I said, “Thomas who?” And he wrote down the name of a book on a sheet of paper, I went to the school library that afternoon, checked it out, read it one setting that evening. And then went back the next day and checked out the rest of my college’s Thomas Sowell collection. And have been hooked ever since.

0:51:23.2 Jason Riley: I first got to meet Sowell in the mid-​90s when I was on the staff of the Wall Street Journal, working on the editorial page, and he would come through New York on book tours and meet with editorial boards. Later on in the mid-​2000s, I went out to Hoover, at Stanford University, to write up a profile of him for the newspaper, and we sort of struck up an acquaintance that has endured.

0:51:47.1 Jason Riley: So I’ve been following him, I’ve been reading him a lot for a long time, and so there wasn’t too much that was really surprising. I think for others, something I mentioned earlier, which is how late a start he got. Might surprise a lot of people, given how prolific he’s been. Last year, he published his, believe it’s his 37th book, and his fifth since turning 80. So he has been just extremely, extremely prolific.

0:52:26.8 Jason Riley: And again, he’s written some of them for his peers, most of them, he’s written however, for the general public. I think the clarity of his writing, his accessibility, is something that continues to appeal to people.

0:52:42.2 Trevor Burrus: An anonymous questioner asks whether or not, for Sowell’s own, in his own estimation, is there something that he’s more proud of relative to other things that, in terms of a book he’s done or a specific area that he’s pursued, is there something that he’s maybe more proud of than other ones?

0:53:01.3 Jason Riley: His favorite book is, A Conflict Of Visions. If you wanna get inside of Thomas Sowell’s head, it’s the book to read. It’s a book about history of ideas. And frankly, it’s about how many of our disputes about social issues and political issues today, boil down to different concepts of human nature and how the world works. And Sowell sort of breaks this down into two broad visions that people have, and they’re in conflict. He calls them the unconstrained vision, and the constrained vision.

0:53:41.0 Jason Riley: Sometimes the unconstrained vision is called the “utopian vision”, and the constrained vision is called the “tragic vision”. And so someone with this constrained view of human nature believes that there are limits to human betterment, that mankind is flawed. Hopelessly flawed. And so the best thing that we can do in society is to set up institutions and processes that help us deal with problems that we’re never going to solve entirely.

0:54:12.0 Jason Riley: So you may want world peace, you may want to end racism or prejudice, but it’s probably not gonna happen, so you probably do need to build a military defense, you probably do need a court system to adjudicate various disputes in society. It won’t be perfect, but given that you’re not gonna end crime and you’re not gonna end war, we need to put in place institutions that help us deal with certain trade-​offs that need to be made.

0:54:41.0 Jason Riley: And he contrasts that view of the world with this unconstrained view, this view that says, there aren’t a limits. We can not only manage these problems, we can solve them, it’s just a matter of using reason and willpower, but these problems can be vanquished. And Tom says, depending on which vision you hold, it’s gonna explain a lot of what you believe and everything from tax cuts to environmentalism, to anti-​trust law. He finds patterns.

0:55:16.7 Jason Riley: Sometimes I use music lyrics to illustrate the different visions. So when John Lennon is singing about world peace, that is utopia, that is utopian. But when Mick Jagger sings, “You can’t always get what you want,” that is the more constrained view of human nature. Pretty much anything by Stevie Wonder is helplessly unconstrained. Beautiful music, but it’s utopian. But when Meatloaf sings, “Two out of three ain’t bad,” there’s your constrained vision of human nature. So Sometimes that’s how I break it down.

0:55:53.6 Jason Riley: Sowell, these are his favorite books, and if you want to understand where he is coming from, on anything he’s writing it, from economics to history, to race and culture, this is the framework he is operating within, and he lays it out in this book. He says it’s his favorite because it’s all his own, it’s not building on the works of others, to the extent that, say, Knowledge And Decisions book was.

0:56:20.6 Jason Riley: But it’s something that he came up with as a way to frame these debates, and it’s actually part of an informal trilogy of books. The first one is called, A Conflict Of Visions, and then after that, he came out with a book called, The Vision Of The Anointed. And the third one is called, The Quest For Cosmic Justice.

0:56:40.2 Jason Riley: In the second two, he goes into more a critique of the various visions, and those books are a little more polemical as a result. But in the original, A Conflict Of Visions, he’s just laying out the framework. He doesn’t hide the fact that he shares a more tragic view, but he’s more interested in just framing these issues and coming up with a template for analyzing them.

0:57:05.3 Aaron Ross Powell: As Trevor mentioned, Sowell’s had a tremendous influence on a lot of people, like all of us on this in this event right now, and so for our final question, I think this is a good one. Sowell, with Knowledge And Decisions, and some of the books that followed on from it, kind of picked Hayek’s project and ran with it, developed it further.

0:57:25.0 Aaron Ross Powell: And so this question here asks, are there writers out there today who are doing something similar with Sowell? Are there people who have inherited his legacy and are taking it forward?

0:57:42.7 Jason Riley: I have two answers to that. There are, but many of them are academics that don’t have the public profile of Thomas Sowell. They’re sort of toiling in relative obscurity, churning out academic books and so forth. You have people at George Mason who care about this stuff and write about this stuff. And still have people at the University of Chicago that care about this stuff. But no one with Tom’s profile.

0:58:16.8 Jason Riley: So there are people who exist. They’re not well known enough, and I’d argue there aren’t enough of them. That concerns me. Sowell’s… It get’s to one of the critiques of Sowell that I came across while I was researching the book, and that is that there’s a debate among some people on whether Sowell should have stuck it out in academia.

0:58:50.0 Jason Riley: He leaves in 1980 and goes to Hoover, and that’s where he’s been ever since. And we’ve gotten in the books and we’ve gotten the columns, and it’s great. But the trade-​off is that we don’t have hundreds or thousands of graduate students that would have studied under Thomas Sowell, and maybe out there proselytizing in ways that some of us would really appreciate.

0:59:12.4 Jason Riley: So there has been a trade-​off. I don’t know that I would trade all the books and the columns for it, but there is something to that, to that argument, I think.

[music]

0:59:35.7 Aaron Ross Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

[music]