Introduction:
Jason Riley’s biography of Thomas Sowell is more of an intellectual biography. Much of what could be found here is material one does not find in Sowell’s own autobiography, A Personal Odyssey (2000). The book covers his main intellectual achievements in the fields of the sociology of knowledge, his analysis of political dispositions and the directions members of political parties take (a theory of why they make their choices, analyzed through their axioms and beliefs), his legal, economic, and ethical analyses of civil rights, and in his cultural anthropological studies. It is an interesting volume to have along with Sowell’s autobiography, and it is written in such a neat and inviting way, in a passion that advertises Sowell’s great books.
Chapters:
The first two chapters, and the last one, are all concerned with the author’s personal life and education. The last chapter focuses on his life as a whole. In these three chapters, we see the man, Sowell, instead of his works, even though Sowell can mostly be defined by his works as his personality leans towards a shy disposition, and he’s certainly an introverted man. Very little is known about the person, Sowell, which Sowell has not supplied by himself.
Chapters three and four speak also of Sowell’s character as a teacher, both inspiring and difficult, a friend and a foe to students. Much of the teacher’s life was tiresome, as he ultimately chose to forgo teaching in favor of dedicating his full time to his main area of research: Economics and sociology. In a sense, these chapters show us this transformation of the person from a devout teacher to a renegade, a vagabond, a deserter: And a researcher. Upon reading these chapters, one cannot help but pity the man for how much he tried fixing the corrupted status quo, and how much he had underestimated how broken the institutions of education were. His attempts to increase the quality of higher education were met with fire and brimstone.
Chapter five covers the most important work the author has worked on, not eclipsing his economic analysis of Say’s Law, but eclipsing its importance and influence. In fact, most people remember Sowell for his sociology, political philosophy, and criticism of academia and the modern scholarly directions, but in the academic world, his most important contribution is an analysis of Hayek’s theory of social knowledge in his essay [1], The Use of Knowledge in Society, one of the most highly cited papers in the field of economics. In fact, Hayek has reviewed Sowell’s volume, Knowledge and Decisions, in an issue of Reason magazine, stating how much he has adored the work not only because it is a continuation of what Hayek provided forty years prior, but also due to the original insights that would even help Hayek in analyzing his own thoughts [2]:
“This is what one hopes to find in the writing of an acute younger mind who continues what one has commenced. The rare surprise is that in a wholly original manner he has 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.”
Chapters six, seven, and eight discuss Sowell’s contributions to, respectively, political theory, political philosophy and ethics, and cultural anthropology. The analysis presented in chapter six is concerned with the dispositions of political party members through his invented construct, the visions adopted by party members, and the ideas those inducted into a party used to analyze all political problems. More accurately, a vision circumscribes the beliefs of the members on the nature of humans in a society (more on that in the next section). Chapter seven addresses the problems of civil rights squarely, going over the details of not only the slogans raised by those seeking change, but also the fundamental support they get from legal scholars, philosophers, intellectuals, and the like. He analyzes deeply the ideas presented in defense of civil rights, showing not only that they would naturally lead to the opposite results [3], but that the arguments themselves amount to fallacies or a play on words. They are empty. Sowell’s book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (1984), tackles some of the absurd, yet widely held and accepted, arguments of the civil rights movements in the case of the racial equality movement, the modern feminist (most specifically the radical feminist) movements, the prison reform movements, the education and school movements, and so on. The eighth chapter covers his Cultures trilogy: Race and Culture (1995), Migrations and Culture (1996), and Conquests and Culture (1998).
Ideas:
An intellectual biography relies mostly on explaining the ideas to the common reader (or the scholar), often while incorporating elements of the author’s life. A good intellectual biography has more of the former and less of the latter. In literature, it is considered fallacious by many schools of criticism to interpret the text based on what the author intended of it. This is termed the intentional fallacy. With an author as clear in writing as Sowell, this becomes less of an issue. Moreover, what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about Plato could equally be echoed about Sowell [4]:
“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato especially has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual performances.”
Sowell has breathed new life onto Hayek’s theory of social knowledge. We understand the price system today due to people’s private choices and (subjective) judgments on the goods and services they are willing to trade. Knowledge cannot travel instantaneously, and at any one time, only so little of it can be comprehended and used. We cannot put into mind all the information we have received at once.
Moreover, the technical information dispersed in society is not infinitely communicable. For example, a visit to Amazon (dot) com may give one access (for a price) to so much knowledge of theoretical physics, say. But we all understand that even if this was so, our access to this information does not grant us the information itself, let alone the mastery and integration of such information into our tasks and goals. Moreover, knowledge cannot be so easily collected. Like ripples on the surface of the water, information propagates at a finite velocity, affected by many circumstances: A fact, a piece of information, moreover, can be used to do X and its opposite. Hayek and Sowell have constructed a theoretical framework by which we could use such information, aided by the language of economics, to study social phenomena. The book, Knowledge and Decisions (1980), is fundamentally concerned with how knowledge is created in a society, and how it is dispersed. It describes a unique mechanism, known to philosophers of mind, as expressions[5]. I may know so little about physics, compared with the vast amount of information scattered in the field which no man can fully comprehend. I can express such knowledge, which most of it is not even available to me, by following customs. I may not know why the square root of a negative number is a real number, though I may know that it is not a real number. I have followed a custom that would guide me through a path I know not too much about. I am not fully certain of what is measured by an experience, but I follow a custom of understanding certain aspects of it through a theory (the principle of local realism in the physical sciences, say). By the decisions I make, I express such knowledge regardless of what I may be able to repeat if asked. This type of knowledge which most of us cannot perfectly put into words constitutes a large majority of our actions. (I do not know every detail of what happens when I drink water, nor does any physiologist, but we all agree that drinking water quenches thirst.) To paraphrase Sowell’s example of the many types of decisions, there are also categories of decisions one would do well to distinguish between them: Binary decisions (Go out to dinner or cook at home), and continuously variable decisions (how many cups of flour should I put in my cake). Some decisions are irreversible (suicide), and others are to a wide sense (practically) reversible (turning the lights on or off). Some decisions are collective (take a vacation to Tokyo) and some are individual (take a bottle of water, for example as opposed to a bottle of coconut water, at the convenience store). These decisions are all expressions of some sort of knowledge, acting on dispersed pieces of information in constant flux, always changing, and affecting all of our actions.
Another major idea Sowell keeps returning to is how much some problems we generally think are localized but are in reality, global phenomena. Consider the case of slavery which Sowell keeps returning to in his books. Sowell, himself, is a descendent of African American slaves, and its legacy of poverty. However, that does not concern him as much as he wants to look at how those enslaved in the past have fared, regardless of past woes and injustices — all despicable, but historical artifacts in a time long past. The author considers slavery among Eastern Europeans, ancient Roman and Greek slaves, people of Eastern and Central Asia pressed by discriminatory policies, and so on. This kind of international perspective gives us a view of how people from different cultures dealt with these problems, and how they solved them, helping us understand that, for this particular problem, grievances and reparations might backfire as they did for many societies and cultures, and moreover, economic uncertainty due to rapidly changing preferential policies (or legal discrimination) might ruin a whole society and not simply the targeted groups. (Sowell focuses on the Chinese in Malaysia, the Jews in Europe, the Europeans in Southern America, the Indians and Lebanese in Africa, and the African Americans in the United States.)
One major idea that is pervasive in Sowell’s books is how many political movements, whether they were on the right or the left, get wrong when they simplistically analyze the important issues at hand. Though it is unethical and immoral to legally (and federally, say) bar women from taking some jobs, offering quotas for women may do much more harm than good for those women we want to help. Often, we commit statistical errors when we compare wages, when, say, we compare two employees both working 30+ hours a week. That piece of information is not sufficient to decide the ideal wages. In fact, that a woman may take leave to give birth and take care of a child seriously affects her prospects as a worker. The market is fully innocent of any wrongdoings when the wages are affected due to these circumstances. Wages are ultimately decided through supply and demand. Competition drives prices (wages) up or down. It is not one bit humane nor inhumane to study people’s wages in this way, just as it is neither humane nor inhumane to model a human being as a rigid body with mass m, and an average surface area Abottom directed towards the earth, with initial speed v0 falling from a high tower. Attempting to address the issue using moral tools might skew the whole economy against women. In fact, it would be harder in many industries, compared to what it would naturally be, Ceteris paribus, to higher women if such policies were put in place, and all manner of schemes would be employed so that the employer might avoid hiring them. Even female employers would try to avoid hiring female employees if such rules were put in place. And yet these rules are put in place because the aim is not to create a laissez-faire system where people freely choose but to dictate from the top down how people should behave. This is a tyrannical method we are used to in Arabic and Islamic countries, and it is sadly being implemented in the free West all the more. (No one is claiming that the West is ethical or free, but that many economic systems in the West are freer than elsewhere.) One such example is mandatory maternal leave. If the decision is not up to the employer and employee, then an external decision has to be made. That makes it harder for the employer to control the environment of the workplace. Sadly, it is not easy to solve these problems, but solving them by force scarcely helps in creating such an environment where these problems can be solved by accumulating capital and easing life through better technological structures and innovations.
Criticism and Discussion
I had one major issue with this book. It is that Sowell is often in conflict with the Austrian School of Economics, toward which I tilt. The book has not written about such a conflict at all. It is important for a biographer to cover all these important issues, and I think that this issue is a needed highlight. This is especially important since in his volume, A Conflict of Visions (1987), Sowell presents several attacks on the modern Austrian school, as well as his exposition of banking and monetary theory in his volume, Basic Economics (2014). The book covers in interesting detail Sowell’s journey from Marxism to capitalism but avoids his conflict with (his Ph.D. advisor) George Stigler’s other academic student, Murray Rothbard at the University of Columbia before moving to the University of Chicago.
I have really enjoyed reading this volume, and would certainly go over some of its details. In fact, I was reading this volume while writing a scientific work, by which I cited this volume. One of my academic advisors told me that he had never seen Sowell quoted in a scientific work like that, which I was happy to hear. Sowell has much to offer to scientists, as I always have thought that economics can inspire physics. That same academic advisor has through other works [6] carried out a similar analysis of physical ideas as Sowell did in his works, which made me all the more appreciate sound reasoning and critical skills in studying one’s subject disciplines.
Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest economists alive today due to his clear analysis of complex economic ideas, his precision tools in considering political, sociological, and anthropological phenomena (carrying on the methods of Gary Becker and George Stigler before him), for his original contributions to all these fields, and finally, to his important ideas that are widely being spread in the scientific culture, in either the departments of philosophy or economics or even the rest of the social sciences. This volume offers a great introduction to the person, and his works and ideas, and I would advise every economist to consider adding it to his library. I hope, and I look forward, to a biography of Sowell’s dear friend, Walter Williams, and I don’t think there is any man who can present the biography better than Jason Riley.
[1] Hayek, F. A., The Use of Knowledge in Society, The American Economic Review, September, 1945: https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/
[2] Hayek, F. A., The Best Book on General Economics in Many a Year, Reason Magazine, December, 1981: https://reason.com/1981/12/01/the-best-book-on-general-econo/
[3] For more on this, the reader may find it useful to check Thomas Sowell’s short volume, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, which I have reviewed here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3685632192
[4] Emerson, R. W., Plato; or, The Philosopher (from Representative Men, 1850).
[5] See, for instance, chapter 9 of Anthony Kenny’s The Metaphysics of Mind.
[6] Milonni, P. W., Fast Light, Slow Light, and Left-Handed Light, 1st ed., CRC Press, 2004.
Rochester, New York,
May, 2022.
Derbeel Q8 