The Wisdom of Thomas Sowell

By Tanner Nau

Sunday, October 01, 2023

 

By age 93, most people — if they even make it that far — would be well within their rights to take it easy and to reflect on a life well lived. Well, most people aren’t Thomas Sowell. Last month, Sowell appeared on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge to promote his new book, Social Justice Fallacies. Both the interview and the book show how the intellectual giant has profoundly affected public policy and economics for decades and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

 

Understanding Thomas Sowell’s incredible reach requires first understanding the man himself. A former high-school dropout and United States Marine, Sowell would eventually graduate from Harvard University as a devout Marxist. Having initially enrolled at Columbia University in part to study under economist George Stigler, he followed Stigler to the University of Chicago, where he was taught both by Stigler and by Milton Friedman. A summer internship in the Department of Labor was enough for Sowell to become skeptical of his statist sympathies when he saw firsthand the anatomy of bureaucracy. He recalls in his memoir that “government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of the interests of those for whom a program has been set up.” Appearing on Fox News’ Life, Liberty, & Levin last week, Sowell said that, “when the facts kept going in the wrong way, I realized that this [Marxism] was not going to do what it claimed it was going to do.”

 

Sowell may have started his career in government, but he has done much more during his long period in public life. He has been an economist and an academic (at multiple universities) including UCLA, Amherst, and Cornell. He has written over 50 books on economics, sociology, and political theory. He wrote thousands of columns that appeared in hundreds of outlets, including National Review, until he announced its conclusion in 2016. His numerous appearances on Firing Line, the interview program hosted by National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., showcased debate skills that have left opponents on their heels with his plethora of empirical knowledge and confidence.

 

I can offer testimony from my own life of Sowell’s influence. I first became aware of him in high school through his book The Vision of the Anointed, gifted to me by my grandfather. The book remains one of Sowell’s most scathing repudiations of liberal social policy. In many ways, my grandfather’s gift shows the immense impact Sowell has had on American conservatism. To have a multi-generational following — and live to see it — is a testament to Sowell’s exceptional durability as a writer and thinker. He was my gateway to the rich tradition of conservative thought. His writing galvanized me to dive into the philosophy of conservatism, particularly of the post-war era.

 

What is the source of Thomas Sowell’s enduring appeal? It comes down to his distinct thought process. It is perhaps best captured by his famous observation, made in A Conflict of Visions, that “there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” Consider also his related characterization of the relationship between economics and politics: “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

 

Approaching the world humbly through his lens, aware of the limits of human knowledge and human action, ought to inspire skepticism of government schemes. It should cause us, as I have argued elsewhere, to

 

reject good intentions as a justification for government action and judge policy based on trade-offs, to believe that personal responsibility and individual ambition can produce better outcomes than a far-off bureaucrat, and to possess a devotion to facts and empirical findings no matter what partisan route they take.

 

Social Justice Fallacies ably demonstrates this Sowellian way of thought. It is another instance of his persistent criticism of liberal social engineering and the “anointed” class. In the book, Sowell eviscerates commonly used arguments for ineffective policy to “arrange society,” primarily aiming at the philosophy that undergirds “social justice.” He also criticizes widely held fallacies about immigration policy, as well as the supposed benefits of minimum-wage laws and affirmative action.

 

What undergirds his opposition to liberal social policy is his fierce defense of individual liberty and personal responsibility, in defiance of top-down solutions. Tasking a class of intellectuals and policy-makers — many of whom do not face repercussions of failure — with curing society’s ills is fundamentally wrong and practically ineffective. As Sowell puts it, “it is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” What threat do they face behind the protection of taxpayer-funded armed security and political clout?

 

There is also, Sowell argues, an inherent condescension to this way of thinking. The very essence of “social justice” hinges on the “irrationality” and “mean-spiritedness of the public.” We are to believe that only academic and social elites who are on “vastly different moral and intellectual planes” can fix these defects. In the eyes of the anointed, the individual who commits a crime, for example, is not a human with agency but a mere victim of society’s betrayal. The collective, not the individual, therefore, is at fault. Conveniently, personal responsibility is often cast as cruel and inconsiderate to the less fortunate because it would fundamentally shift the role of influential liberal intellectuals and bureaucrats away from their “anointed” status. By contrast, believing in personal responsibility “would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by ‘society.’” Sowellian thought allows us to see what our self-declared betters really think of us and the perverse effects of their guidance.

 

The anointed believe their expert knowledge can redeem and direct society. But Sowell — and the late F. A. Hayek — shows how knowledge is so vast and complex that no single group can attain it all. Thus, no doctoral program can solve society’s gravest and most persistent problems. “No human being has either the vast range of consequential knowledge or the overwhelming power, required to make the social justice become a reality,” Sowell argues.

 

These observations and the body of his work undoubtedly land him right of center ideologically. But he is distinctly nonpartisan and has been a registered independent since 1972. Perhaps his disinterestedness in partisan politics stems from the fact that he is a black conservative. Often chastised for his views by his liberal counterparts and denigrated as a “traitor” to “his people,” Sowell persists in finding the truth wherever it takes him. That makes him an intellectual loner of sorts whose only allegiance is to the facts. Given the state of the country’s persistent political tribalism, his devotion to finding and following the facts is a worthy principle.

 

Even though Sowell does not self-identify as a partisan, his influence on contemporary conservative politics is undeniable. Examples abound, even as recently as this year. In an interview during the House speaker drama, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) blasted some of his Republican colleagues for delaying Kevin McCarthy’s assumption of the role. “They don’t write bills. They don’t think about policy,” Crenshaw commented. “They don’t even know who Thomas Sowell is.” And South Carolina senator and GOP presidential hopeful Tim Scott cited Sowell in a Senate Banking Committee hearing when pointing out the disastrous effects of rent control. Understanding Thomas Sowell is a prerequisite to understanding proper governance.

 

As a college student inundated with the fallacies and false truths of “the anointed” class on my campus, I consider Sowell an intellectual north star. His concise writing, evident in Social Justice Fallacies as well as his other works, distills the complex matters of economics, sociology, and philosophy, making them accessible. At 93, Sowell continues to secure his legacy with excellent scholarship. May he serve as an inspiration to conservatives and a leading voice for common sense for years to come.