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Thomas Sowell is an American author, economist, political commentator and academic who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement and is considered one of the most influential black conservatives. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.
#wisdom #socialjustice #knowledge
Thomas Sowell is an American author, economist, political commentator and academic who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement and is considered one of the most influential black conservatives. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.
#wisdom #socialjustice #knowledge
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00:00 here with Dr. Thomas Sowell. The book is "Social Justice Fallacies." I want to
00:04 encourage you to go to amazon.com and grab a copy. Any major bookstore should
00:09 have a copy, and it is very readable, and it is worth reading, particularly now
00:13 during these times. Dr. Sowell, when we talk about equality, immediately race
00:22 pops into mind. It's always about race, racial discrimination, about the founding
00:28 of the nation, white dominant society, so forth and so on. And you make the case,
00:33 and you've made this case throughout your life, but it's very poignant in your
00:36 book, which is, "Wait a minute. Of course this has some impact, but it's not the
00:43 only thing that has an impact. But why? First of all, what other things have
00:47 an impact?" It's probably an infinite list of things. And secondly, why do they only
00:53 focus on race on the left? I guess it's because that's proven to be a
00:59 politically popular thing to do. But in point of fact, one of the
01:04 things that's mentioned in the book is a study that was done by the New York
01:09 Times of all people, some years ago, where they tried to show the
01:16 ten poorest counties in the United States, and they mentioned which ones
01:21 they were, and so on. And it turns out that six of those ten counties had a
01:29 population that was from 90% to 100% white. Now in the New York
01:35 Times, they didn't mention the race of the people, but once they told me the
01:38 counties, I looked it up. And in fact, I followed the average income in those
01:43 six counties over a span of 50 years. And in all those 50 years, all six of those
01:50 counties had a median income lower than the median income of black Americans.
01:57 And so the people in those counties faced zero racism, because they
02:02 were white and indistinguishable from all other whites. They didn't have a
02:08 legacy of slavery, and yet there they were. And you have to ask then,
02:15 clearly there must be other things that cause poverty. We can't just assume that
02:20 the cost people of a given race have more poverty than some other
02:26 people, that race must be the reason. But this has become the automatic kind of
02:31 thing, and I think most people would be quite surprised. One of the things that
02:36 happens is that behavior matters. And you see that in so many different ways.
02:45 For example, I think most people would be surprised to learn that
02:50 despite the fact that blacks as a whole have a higher poverty rate than whites
02:55 as a whole, black married couple families have for more than a quarter of a
03:02 century, every single year, had a poverty rate under 10%. And in most of those
03:11 years, the national poverty rate was not as low as 10%. So it's not a quite,
03:18 and you say, well this is due to institutional racism. In that case, does
03:23 that mean that the racists make an exception for blacks who are married? I
03:27 mean do racists either know or care whether blacks are married? None of
03:31 these glib explanations stands up to the slightest empirical study. And let's talk
03:38 about this when it comes to minorities generally. You know, an Asian population
03:43 in this country that achieves a lot as a group, intellectually, education-wise,
03:47 and they are discriminated against by these Ivy League colleges, by Harvard, if
03:54 we just had a Supreme Court decision and so forth, the way Jews were a hundred
03:57 years earlier, by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and so forth. So the people who push this
04:02 race issue, is it that they really care about black people or Asian people or
04:09 Jewish people, or is it that it's just another wedge issue to try and destroy
04:13 this culture and destroy this society? There are some people who are both.
04:18 Some really believe it and I feel sorry for them, but there are some
04:23 who really don't care. If it gets them elected, that's what matters. And this is
04:29 one of the tragedies of trying to politicize race. There are so
04:37 many fallacies that it's hard to even know which one to take up. But
04:41 for example, the great narrative is that blacks rose from poverty, got into
04:49 professional occupations as a result of the 1960s social welfare programs.
04:56 And that this has been a big benefit. One of the problems with this way of
05:03 looking at things is that everything depends on when you pick as the start of
05:08 this trend. If you go back to 1940, that is 20 years before these wonderful
05:13 things are supposed to have happened in the 1960s, and you discover that the
05:19 degree to which blacks were in poverty declined from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960.
05:28 So it went down by 40 points in those 20 years. Now you look at the 20
05:35 years following 1960, they went down 18 points. And so the trend did not begin in
05:42 the 1960s. The trend was there before then and the trend did not even
05:46 accelerate after 1960. Many people think that it would all begin with the Civil
05:51 Rights Act of 1964. Well that was a fine act to get rid of the
05:57 segregation laws in the South. But the cold fact is that the percentage of
06:03 blacks who had professional occupations doubled from 1954 to 1964. That is in the
06:10 decade ending at the time that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. If you
06:17 look at the things that are negative, like for example, black children being
06:21 raised in single-parent households. In 1940, just under 17% of black kids were
06:31 raised in one-parent families. But after 1960s, before the end of the
06:37 century, four times that many, 68% of black kids were being raised in
06:43 one-parent families. And that does not depend on racism or any of the other
06:47 things they talk about. It depends upon things that happened due to the
06:51 policies of the 1960s, which are still going forward. Which encouraged the
06:56 dissolution of the family. It's just unbelievable. Dr. Saul, when we return, my big
07:03 question for you is, as a nation, where do we go from here? And how do we start down
07:11 that road? Dr. Saul, I want to read for the audience, obviously you wrote it, so
07:17 you'll know the very end of your book in relation to the question I ended the
07:22 last segment with. And then I'd like you to follow on, if you don't mind. What are
07:26 those of us who are not followers of the social justice vision and its agenda to
07:31 do? At a minimum, we can turn our attention from rhetoric to the realities
07:36 of life. As the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Think
07:41 things instead of words." Today, it is especially important to get facts rather
07:46 than catch words. These include not only current facts, but also the vast array of
07:51 facts about what others have done in the past. Both the successes and the failures.
07:56 I take that to mean, Dr. Saul, you've got to really work hard to cut out all the
08:02 static, all the propaganda, all of what academia, for the most part, is trying to
08:09 indoctrinate you with. And think for yourself. Begin to educate yourself as a
08:14 citizen who loves this country and wants it to remain free. And that's a good
08:19 starting place. Do I have that about right? Absolutely. And above all, you have
08:24 to concentrate on facts, which again, things that are suppressed.
08:32 Rhetoric just rules the roost in too many places. It's really pitiful the
08:38 way that people are sacrificing so much money to send their children to expensive
08:43 schools to get very cheap propaganda. One of the sad things I encountered in doing
08:48 the research for this was how many people on the left do not answer
08:53 arguments with counter arguments, but with ad hominem attributing bad
09:00 things to people who disagree with them, but never answering what they have to
09:04 say. This whole thing about the white supremacy thing, one of the
09:08 things I bring out in the book is that there are any number of Asian groups,
09:12 people from China, India, Japan, whatever, who have higher incomes than the white
09:21 population of the United States. If you get to people, full-time male workers
09:29 from India, in the United States, their income is $39,000
09:37 more than the annual income of whites, so exactly the same prescription. And yet
09:42 people go around talking about the white supremacy. Oh my gosh, apparently people
09:48 from India haven't heard of that yet. So many other things
09:52 that are just blindly attributed to race, you find if you go into it that there
09:57 are other things. It's one thing to be against racists, it's another thing to
10:03 exaggerate what they can do. You might think about what they cannot do. They
10:08 cannot stop 9 million black people from having higher incomes than the
10:13 average income of white people. They cannot stop thousands of black people
10:18 from having assets of a million dollars or more. And in fact they cannot
10:23 stop blacks from becoming billionaires, as Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, and any
10:27 number of other people have been. They can't stop blacks from becoming
10:32 generals in the military, or becoming president of the United States. And
10:37 yet we go on as if we're still living in the world of a hundred years ago. We're
10:42 worried about the races. I think that the races at this point cannot do
10:48 one-half the damage that the teachers unions are doing by making
10:53 the schools places for teachers to have ironclad job security, and for
11:01 turning them into propaganda centers that do not teach the kids math and
11:06 English. A black kid who graduates from high school with a mastery of
11:12 mathematics and the English language, there's practically nothing that can
11:16 stop him, except the propaganda that he's been fed in the schools all these years.
11:23 Again the book is fantastic, Social Justice Fallacies. It comes out Tuesday,
11:28 but you can get your copy on amazon.com. Every major bookstore will have it as
11:32 well. Do we have an incompetent ruling class of elites, Dr. Soule, or an
11:38 ideologically driven ruling class of elites, or both? Both. But primarily
11:46 people enormously impressed with themselves because they have high IQs
11:53 and PhDs after their name. And some of the great tragedies and horrors of
11:58 the 20th century were promoted by those very kinds of people. The Holocaust would
12:06 clearly qualify in that category. The progressive era people
12:12 were promoting genocide, and one of the books that was written by one of them
12:18 was translated into German, and Hitler called it his Bible. But most people
12:24 don't seem to realize this was an idea that was predominant among the
12:29 intellectuals around the time of World War I. In later years, the facts when
12:34 they finally came out completely undermined all the things they had said,
12:38 but by that time it was too late. That entire eugenics movement really grew out
12:42 of the left, as you point out, that whole progressive era. And I guess the thinking
12:46 was, if we're going to perfect society, we have to perfect human beings. And I feel
12:51 in many ways, apart from eugenics, that's still what we're dealing with. People
12:58 don't... it's very messy, democracy. It's very messy, the First Amendment. It's very
13:02 messy to have a competition of ideas, and so they seek to crush it. I'll leave you
13:06 with the final word. Well, I think that is one of many things that caused me to say,
13:12 as I did in the book, that, you know, stupid people can create problems, but it
13:18 often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. And that's the history
13:24 of the 20th century, I think, will bear that out. Well, you're definitely an
13:27 exception to that. Social Justice Fallacies, that's the book. Comes out
13:32 Tuesday, September 19th. You can order your copies on amazon.com. What a
13:37 fantastic pleasure and honor to have you with us, Dr. Asoula. I can't thank you
13:41 enough. God bless you, my friend. And you.
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