I've never been able
to found a single country in the world where the policies
that have been advocated for blacks in the United States
have lifted any people out of poverty.
I've seen many examples around the world about
people began in poverty and ended in affluence,
not one of them has followed any pattern at all
like what is being advocated for blacks
in the United States.
That's the economist and social critic Thomas Sowell
critiquing affirmative action back in 1981.
In an age in which espousing unpopular ideas
can destroy the careers of journalists and academics.
Sowell's candor and insistence
on following the facts wherever they lead,
are more worthy of appreciation than ever.
Sowell was born in rural North Carolina in 1930
to an uneducated family without electricity
or running water.
He was orphaned and raised by a great aunt.
When he was eight his family moved to Harlem
and at one point he was living in a shelter
for homeless boys keeping a knife under his pillow
for protection.
He didn't finish college until he was 28
and went on to receive his PhD
from the University of Chicago
before he became internationally celebrated
as an intellectual and writer.
His upbringing was more than something to be overcome,
it profoundly shaped his scholarship.
In particular by making him disdainful
of elite intellectuals who impose their ideas on society
through government.
As Sowell wrote in his memoir,
"Growing up he had daily contact with people
who were neither well educated nor particularly genteel,
but who had practical wisdom far beyond what I had."
That gave him,
"A lasting respect for the common sense of ordinary people,
a factor routinely ignored by the intellectuals
among whom I would later make my career.
Sowell provocative body of work on everything
from race to childhood development
to Charter Schools and Their Enemies,
is the subject of a new documentary
and a forthcoming biography titled 'Maverick'.
He is someone who has been something
of an intellectual loner throughout his career.
Jason Riley is a senior fellow
at the Manhattan Institute,
a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author behind
the new documentary and biography of Sowell.
Someone who has bucked convention,
concerned himself with being a truth teller,
being a straight shooter.
Maybe this is a commentary on intellectuals today
as that makes him a Maverick.
Someone who puts truth about popularity,
who doesn't concern himself with being politically correct.
He follows the facts where they lead,
whether or not the conclusion is a popular one.
Riley says that Sowell's genius rests
in his unwavering attention to empirical facts and data
and policy outcomes regardless of intentions.
A tendency that was sharpened by his PhD training
at the University of Chicago
under future Nobel prize winners Milton Friedman,
George Stigler and Friedrich Hayek.
This whole notion,
the black family has always been disintegrating,
that is nonsense.
His studies goes up to 1925,
the great bulk of black families were
intact, two parent families up through 1925
and going all the way back through the era of slavery.
So it is now only within our own time
that we suddenly see this inevitable tragedy
which the welfare system says is gonna rush in to solve.
He was thinking like a Chicago economist.
Essentially it's an adherence to empiricism,
to facts and logic and putting that ahead of theory.
Thomas was much more interested
in how an idea has panned out.
What the evidence is for success or failure
rather than simply what the intent is.
And I think that is what distinguishes him
and much of the Chicago school
from their counterparts at MIT or Harvard or other places,
where there was much more of an emphasis,
at least in the field of economics,
on eloquent theories and mathematics.
When Sowell showed up
at the University of Chicago for doctoral work,
he called himself a Marxist.
A designation he ultimately rejected
not because of Milton Friedman's lectures
but because of his subsequent job experience
in the Federal government.
While I was still a Marxist,
I was taking Milton Friedman's course, but I...
...
But one summer in the government was enough to let me say,
"Now this government is really not the answer."
I mean that is.
Milton Friedman didn't cure you
but the Federal government did.
In fact the Federal government did.
Never say the Federal government doesn't do anything.
One of Sowell's most brilliant works
is 'Knowledge and Decisions' published in 1980.
He elaborated on Austrian economist
Friedrich Hayek's insight that
information and knowledge are disbursed among people
and markets in highly sophisticated yet unarticulated ways.
That's something most intellectuals and planners ignore
as they override the expertise and experience
of the common man through government fiat.
In a 1981 review of the book published in 'Reason',
Hayek wrote that Sowell had,
"...not only broadened the application of the ideas
and effectively carried the approach into new fields
that I never considered,
but he also succeeds in translating abstract
and theoretical argument into a highly concrete
and realistic discussion of the central problems
of contemporary economic policy."
To the extent that decision making
is taken out of the hands of ordinary people
and placed in the hands of government bureaucrats
and politicians.
What you are doing is, increasing the distance
between the person who makes the decision
and the person who has to suffer the consequences
of that decision.
And one of the reasons Sowell wrote that book is because
he thought that too much decision making
was being put in the hands of government
and that we were headed down a bad path,
by going in this direction.
And I think obviously he's been borne out by that.
In 'A Conflict of Visions'
which is Sowell's favorite of his own books,
he identified two fundamental modes
of understanding the world.
Thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Marx to John Rawls,
exhibited what's Sowell calls an unconstrained vision
based on the mistaken idea that human beings and society
are perfectible.
In later books Sowell championed a constrained vision
articulated by classical liberals such as Adam Smith,
Edmund Burke and America's founding fathers
who constructed a system of checks and balances
to protect man from his worst tendencies.
The constrained vision rejects utopianism
and instead holds that social progress
comes from acknowledging that
there are no perfect solutions, only trade offs.
As Burke wrote, "We cannot change the Nature of things
and of men-but must act upon them the best we can".
Sowell's good friend and fellow amateur photographer,
Harvard linguist, Steven Pinker,
draws a parallel between how cameras work
and societies work.
Thomas commentated to me that,
to be a photographer, you have to master trade offs.
All of the little adjustments
that you fiddle with in the camera,
never involve making everything better everything worse,
it's a matter of trading one thing off for another.
If you close down the diaphragm,
then you get lots and lots of stuff in focus near to far.
On the other hand you're cutting down the amount of light.
And a theme in Tom's work on society
is that all policies involve trade offs.
And Tom often loses patience at people
with sweeping visions, kere's how we can improve society,
here's a solution to a problem.
And Tom points outs in his political writings,
there are no solutions, there are only trade offs.
Sowell's life experience and ideological commitments
are perhaps most clear in his long held positions
on the centrality of school choice
to improving the life prospects for low income blacks
and other minorities.
One of his first major works was 1972's,
'Black Education Myths and Tragedies'
and his latest book, was 2020's,
'Charter Schools and Their Enemies'
I would allow their parents to have a choice
of where to send them to school,
whether that choice is called a voucher scheme,
open enrollment, tuition tax credit,
any kind of scheme of that sort,
that would put that power in the hands of their parents.
Mainly because that would mean that the schools
would have to be responsive to them.
As it is now the school is a monopoly.
They need not be responsive.
It is hard for me to understand what harm is gonna be done
by allowing parents to have a choice
as compared to having self interested bureaucrats
have a monopoly.
Tom brings this economic empiricism
to anything he's writing about.
That's something that I've greatly appreciated
and then the need for, to be a critical thinker,
in the way that he has.
He wrote about these racial topics
almost out of a sense of duty because there were things
that needed to be said that too few others
were willing to say.
And I'm so glad he did his duty.
I think we are so much better off,
for having this body of work out there to draw on,
that is still so relevant today.
If he had spent his entire career writing about
intellectual history, Jean-Baptiste Say
and the classical liberals,
I'm sure he'd still be remembered as a great scholar
but I am so glad he decided to take the punches he's taken
over this other stuff on race and ethnicity and culture.
Because I think for some of us,
that's equally important.
Despite disavowing utopianism and human perfectibility,
Sowell has never wavered in a belief
that things can and should get better
if we put aside ideological priors,
assess the facts on the ground
and work to give individuals more and better choices.
I grew up in an era when people and particularly blacks,
were a lot poorer than today,
faced a lot more discrimination than today.
And in which the teenage pregnancy rate
was a lot lower than today.
I don't believe there is a predestined amount
of teenage pregnancy,
a predestined amount of husband desertion.
Today Sowell is in his 90s,
and still writing and publishing.
Though his greatest scholarship is almost
certainly behind him,
his body of work will continue to have a profound impact
on our understanding of the world, long after he's gone.