Thomas Sowell is quite content to make his case while he waits for the political tide to turn. The way things are going, this nonagenarian may still be on hand when conservative black politicians are the major American voice of this American minority. If and when that happens, wherever Thomas Sowell is, he will know that he played a crucial role in changing the course of American history much for the better for everyone.
Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (221 pages, Basic Books, 2023)
Two categories of individuals will find this book worth their time. The first category includes anyone who has read one or more of Sowell’s many, many books, while numbered among the second are those who have never glimpsed at a single Sowell sentence. In other words, Social Justice Fallacies is at once a wonderful refresher course for Sowell devotees and a fine starting point for Sowell novices. In a few more “other words,” anyone and everyone could benefit from spending a few evenings with this slim volume, whether it is serving as a summation of—or introduction to—the wisdom of Professor Sowell.
That lengthy list is lengthy enough to include a certain former president of the United States. To narrow that very short list down a bit further, this is not only a fairly recent former president, but he is the only one who happens to draws Sowell’s interest, as well as his ire, in these pages.
Who knows if Barack Obama has ever read any Thomas Sowell? Who knows if Barack Obama knows who Thomas Sowell is? What can be asserted with more than a small measure of confidence is that this country would be in much better shape, both economically speaking and socially speaking, if our first black president had been a Sowell soulmate instead of a Sowell target.
Not that Professor Sowell is preoccupied with ex-president Obama. Not at all. But he uses Obama as a prime, if only occasional, example of the fallacious thinking of those who fall into Sowell’s most suspect category, namely “social justice warriors.” Those would be warriors who fail to consider the potentially negative consequences of their ideas and actions. Those would also be warriors who refuse to acknowledge those consequences when they become all too apparent, even embarrassingly apparent.
Not yet finished, they would also be warriors who misuse or ignore the weapon that Sowell wields so well: accurate and telling facts and figures. For example, the warriors highlight the relatively minimal black economic progress following Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, while ignoring the much greater black economic gains scored between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s.
Thomas Sowell
Under the general heading of facts of life, Sowell also notes that the most damaging of these warriors, mainly politicians, pay no penalty for the negative consequences of their proposals and policies. Worse than that, such warriors are generally praised and rewarded—and elected and re-elected—despite their fallacious thinking. Sowell, it might not need to be added, offers neither praise nor rewards.
Much to Sowell’s dismay, the most praised of these warriors are, of course, those politicians who benefit electorally from enacting policies that do not, in either the immediate or long term, truly benefit the intended beneficiaries of their beneficence. Here one of Sowell’s favorite targets is the minimum wage law that too often keeps young blacks out of the labor market.
And if all of that is not enough, the most successful of these politicians sometimes go on to be recipients of magnificent monetary rewards of their own in their post-political careers—or at least in the post-office-holding phase of their still highly political careers.
If the warrior described in the above paragraph reminds you of a certain former president who is also a former senator from Illinois, you would be correct. But if you then might be tempted to conclude that a certain nonagenarian retired professor, a retiree who is still writing and still actively associated with the Hoover Institution, is consumed with anger and resentment at the unfairness of life, you would be wrong.
True, the young Tom Sowell had a difficult early life in both the American south and in New York City. In fact, he had a much more difficult early life than did another fatherless young black man, who would have the benefit of a private school education in Hawaii. The elder of these two young men also served in the military; the younger did not.
If there is a potentially compelling similarity between the two, it’s that both were youthful leftists. In truth, one was to the left of the other. That would be a youthful Marxist by the name of Thomas Sowell. The difference, of course, is that one left the left, while the other did not.
Still, the grounds are there for the former leftist to be overflowing with resentment at the considerable success of the continuing leftist. Those grounds build higher and deeper when the racial element is added to the mix. And yet Tom Sowell will have none of that.
If Sowell has been preoccupied with anything in his professional life, it is nothing more and nothing less than the facts of life. As such, he has always subscribed to what might be termed the Jack Webb school of economics—or history or sociology, for that matter: Just give me the facts, ma’am. Of course, in Sowell’s case, he is determined to unearth the facts for himself.
In fact, it was the facts of many aspects of many lives that long ago convinced Sowell to leave the left. Some of those facts are detailed early on in this book: the welfare state encourages single parenthood, which in turn discourages academic success; children of intact families are better prepared for life than children of single parents; black children from two-parent families do better than white children with a single parent. The numbers are there.
One of Sowell’s other non-preoccupations is the entire issue of race. Of course, it cannot be avoided, in part because the American left is all too preoccupied with it. Therefore, Sowell cannot and does not avoid it, but he is not about to emphasize it—or wallow in it—or endorse any policy on its basis.
Perhaps the most witheringly compelling chapter in the book concerns the impact of affirmative action on minority students. Those would be Asian-American students who are denied admission to colleges for which they are well-qualified and black students who too often are mis-matched and then too often either fail or drop out of the institution of higher learning for which they are not a match. Here the consequence is not just that race-based, social-justice policies do not do the good that the warriors intend, but they actually do harm instead.
The facts are there, and, for Thomas Sowell, the facts are always more compelling than any other fact(or). And they are certainly more important than feelings, even in, nay especially in, our feelings-drenched age.
The left hammers away at the unfairness of the mal-distribution of wealth in the United States. Sowell even lets Obama do the hammering: “The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income, it now takes half.” Or so claimed President Obama in 2013.
Then it is Sowell’s turn: Such a result would clearly be a deduction in other people’s income, “if there were a fixed or predestined amount of total income.” Economic life, at least since the death of mercantilism in the 18th century, is not a zero sum game. To clinch his point Sowell adds that since some people actually are creating more wealth than they are receiving in income, “they are not making other people poorer.”
The left may have more than its fair share of very clever people, and a certain former president may well be among the cleverest, but let’s give Tom Sowell the last word here: “Cleverness is not wisdom.”
Perhaps the wisest chapter in the book is titled “Chess Pieces Fallacies.” In it, Sowell’s operating presumption is that the common man in a free country is quite capable of being both wise and clever. In other words, he is quite capable of being something other than a chess piece.
The same goes for the rich as well. In sum, none of us is truly a chess piece. Therefore, public policy, including tax policy, should not be based on the presumption that people are nothing other than such inanimate pieces. Some people will move; other people will move their money.
Therefore, a hike in the income tax rate can result in a lowering of tax revenues. Conversely, and in fact, a reduction in those rates can produce greater revenue. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon demonstrated this simple truth in the 1920s. Arthur Laffer was laughed at for re-demonstrating it in the 1980s. Sowell’s chapter produces some rueful laughter as well. The numbers, after all, on his side.
That same chapter tackles the efforts of social justice intellectuals, John Rawls among them, and their efforts to build what has come to be called the administrative state. The Rawls term that Sowell pounces on is “arrange,” as in politicians and governments should “arrange” things in all sorts of ways.
Sowell is not persuaded: “Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinction.” This is Sowell at his angriest.
The chess piece fallacy also applies to other sorts of movements, especially movements up and down the various quintiles of income distribution. Once again, people are not chess pieces. Those in the bottom quintile in one year are not likely to be the same people in that same quintile the next time the numbers are announced.
Nothing in this review has been “arranged” to demonstrate that Thomas Sowell fails to understand that life can be unfair. He understands that very well. In fact, he details a variety of life’s unfairnesses (if there is such a word) in these pages. The fact of one’s geographic place of birth is an example. So is one’s place in the birth order. Number one is generally number one in a whole lot of things.
Who knows, but Tom Sowell himself may in fact be convinced that life has treated him unfairly. After all, he has never been lionized as a figure of tremendous national importance. And he certainly hasn’t been lionized to the degree that many social justice warriors have been lionized.
But if this book is any hint, Tom Sowell is quite content to quietly, but effectively, make his case, while he waits for the political tide to turn. That wait might not be a short one. But no matter. The way things are going, this nonagenarian may still be on hand when conservative black politicians are the major American voice of this American minority. If and when that happens, wherever Thomas Sowell is, he will know that he played a crucial role in changing the course of American history much for the better for everyone.
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The featured image is courtesy of the Hoover Institution on YouTube.