[WarMachine]

I am very much a fan of Mr Sowell. One of the pillars of our modern society, especially ones which speak of facts rather than hyperbole/delusion. Totally brilliant guy. Dropped science from day one.

[puckerman]

He was also very articulate in person. Here is a good talk with Tony Brown:

[budoslavic]

Dr. Sowell has a brilliant mind. Hope he will continue to write during his retirement.

[budoslavic]

For those who didn't know, Dr. Thomas Sowell was a Marxist when he was a student of Professor Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. He wrote a post about his mentor and teacher. It was very interesting in how he converted from Marxist to Conservative.

Quote:

Milton Friedman's Centenary
By Dr. Thomas Sowell
July 31, 2012

If Milton Friedman were alive today — and there was never a time when he was more needed — he would be one hundred years old. He was born on July 31, 1912. But Professor Friedman's death at age 94 deprived the nation of one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense.

Most people would not be able to understand the complex economic analysis that won him a Nobel Prize, but people with no knowledge of economics had no trouble understanding his popular books like "Free to Choose" or the TV series of the same name.

In being able to express himself at both the highest level of his profession and also at a level that the average person could readily understand, Milton Friedman was like the economist whose theories and persona were most different from his own — John Maynard Keynes.

Like many, if not most, people who became prominent as opponents of the left, Professor Friedman began on the left. Decades later, looking back at a statement of his own from his early years, he said: "The most striking feature of this statement is how thoroughly Keynesian it is."

No one converted Milton Friedman, either in economics or in his views on social policy. His own research, analysis and experience converted him.

As a professor, he did not attempt to convert students to his political views. I made no secret of the fact that I was a Marxist when I was a student in Professor Friedman's course, but he made no effort to change my views. He once said that anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.

I was still a Marxist after taking Professor Friedman's class. Working as an economist in the government converted me.

What Milton Friedman is best known for as an economist was his opposition to Keynesian economics, which had largely swept the economics profession on both sides of the Atlantic, with the notable exception of the University of Chicago, where Friedman was both trained as a student and later taught.

In the heyday of Keynesian economics, many economists believed that inflationary government policies could reduce unemployment, and early empirical data seemed to support that view. The inference was that the government could make careful trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, and thus "fine tune" the economy.

Milton Friedman challenged this view with both facts and analysis. He showed that the relationship between inflation and unemployment held only in the short run, when the inflation was unexpected. But, after everyone got used to inflation, unemployment could be just as high with high inflation as it had been with low inflation.

When both unemployment and inflation rose at the same time in the 1970s — "stagflation," as it was called — the idea of the government "fine tuning" the economy faded away. There are still some die-hard Keynesians today who keep insisting that the government's "stimulus" spending would have worked, if only it was bigger and lasted longer.

This is one of those heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose arguments. Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.

Although Milton Friedman became someone regarded as a conservative icon, he considered himself a liberal in the original sense of the word — someone who believes in the liberty of the individual, free of government intrusions. Far from trying to conserve things as they are, he wrote a book titled "Tyranny of the Status Quo."

Milton Friedman proposed radical changes in policies and institution ranging from the public schools to the Federal Reserve. It is liberals who want to conserve and expand the welfare state.

As a student of Professor Friedman back in 1960, I was struck by two things — his tough grading standards and the fact that he had a black secretary. This was years before affirmative action. People on the left exhibit blacks as mascots. But I never heard Milton Friedman say that he had a black secretary, though she was with him for decades. Both his grading standards and his refusal to try to be politically correct increased my respect for him.

[Kid Twist]

Culture matters dramatically, no doubt, but I wonder if he would concede that IQ differences matter. My suspicion is that it might be irrelevant because he is not worried about outcomes so much as preserving freedom, and doing the best with what you got, which is all we can ask for.

[TheOllam]

Yeah, He is not done yet. Still a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

And he comments on the Middlebury incident:

"Where have all these shocked people been all these years? What happened at Middlebury College has been happening for decades, all across the country, from Berkeley to Harvard. Moreover, even critics of the Middlebury College rioters betray some of the same irresponsible mindset as that of the young rioters.

The moral dry rot in academia — and beyond — goes far deeper than student storm troopers at one college."

https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sow...ry-college

[Fortis]

I know I already posted, but this guy is so great to watch speak. Reminds me of that uncle who sits down at dinner and wrecks everyone casually without even arguing. Just dropping fact bombs.

[amity]

(01-07-2017 10:44 PM)budoslavic Wrote:  

Dr. Sowell has a brilliant mind. Hope he will continue to write during his retirement.

Slight tangent here, but it's disappointing to see that in recent years, Putnam has rolled back significantly on what his studies showed re Multiculturalism.
My guess is he wasn't man enough to swallow the red pill and face down the progressives and opted instead to cosy up to his fellow academics and massively play down the negative outcomes associated with Multiculturalism (particularly the kind of low IQ, relatively uneducated, Islamic immigration we're seeing so much of in recent years).
From now on, he will be known as Robert Cucknam.

[Kid Twist]

Along with the bow tie theory (don't trust a man who wears one), I'm adding the beard with shaved mustache

turns out, both are ugly too

mostly the latter is you know who so that's an easy theory to have confirmed (-:

[Wutang]

Wall Street Journal had a short but sweet interview with Sowell. Studying his works more in depth has been on my to do list for a while and this interview is motivating me more to do so. In the interview he talks about his support for Betsy Devos and charter schools and how he believes the failures of the black community to succeed has been chiefly due to it's own culture holding it back as opposed to "the man" holding them back. He's a big believer that charter schools can do much to help the black community in the US turn itself around.

Quote:

But the good that can be done is obvious to Mr. Sowell. “The most successful schools for educating black kids have been a few charter schools,” he says. “There are literally tens of thousands of kids on waiting lists for charter schools in New York alone. You needed somebody who was going to fight to break through these caps that have been put on the number of charter schools.”

Mr. Sowell has stopped swiveling in my chair, and he looks straight at me to make his next point. “You see, in order to get these reforms, you would have to go against the dogmas not only of educators, but of the American intelligentsia in general,” he says. “The teachers unions complain that charter schools really have skimmed off the cream. Of course that’s nonsense, because people are chosen by lottery. In another sense, there’s a point there, because these are the parents who care about what’s going to happen to their kids. These people are just desperate to get into the charter schools. They don’t want to be raising a bunch of little thugs.”

He believes the election of Trump is going to provide a good chance to bring enough blacks aboard the Republican party to cripple the Democratic basis:

Quote:

If a Republican could manage to enact school choice, Mr. Sowell says, “he would have some hope of beginning the process of peeling away black votes from the Democrats. It doesn’t have to be a majority of the black vote. If there’s a narrow race for Congress, and you can reduce the black support for the Democrats from 90% to 80%, that could be the difference.”

He also criticizes entitlement/grievance culture

Quote:

An idea has taken root “that you’re entitled to certain things, that you don’t necessarily have to earn them,” he says. “There’s a belief that something’s wrong if you don’t have what other people have—that it’s because you’re ‘disadvantaged.’ A teenage dropout mother is told she has a disadvantage. But if you’re going to call the negative consequences of chosen behavior ‘disadvantage,’ the word is corrupt beyond repair and useful only for propaganda purposes.”

Pretty much anything Sowell said in that article is quotable. I had to be selective about what I was going to highlight since there's just so much great material.

[PapayaTapper]

Bumping this thread

Sowell's position statements and logical fact based statements (and arguments) on economics discrimination, gender pay-gap myths etc. similar to those of Jordan Peterson's...only nearly 40 years earlier

[Fortis]

What I wonder is what happened to guys like him? We don't really have many trenchant, clear-thinking, intelligent and incisive intellects out there at this juncture. I also wonder how a guy like him ever made it mainstream? Black privilege?

[PapayaTapper]

He went on to write several very successful books, and was a frequent public speaker


Here he was describing "social justice" in 1999

He retired from writing a regular columns in 2016. Heres his final article for National Review that year. Absolutely brilliant

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/12/t...xperience/

Quote:

Avoiding the fatal mistake of disregarding the record of the past
Editor’s Note: Thomas Sowell is retiring from writing his weekly syndicated column. This is his final column.
Any honest man, looking back on a very long life, must admit — even if only to himself — being a relic of a bygone era. Having lived long enough to have seen both “the greatest generation” that fought World War II and the gratingest generation that we see all around us today makes being a relic of the past more of a boast than an admission.




Not everything in the past was admirable. Poet W. H. Auden called the 1930s “a low dishonest decade.” So were the 1960s, which launched many of the trends we are experiencing so painfully today. Some of the fashionable notions of the 1930s reappeared in the 1960s, often using the very same discredited words and producing the same disastrous consequences.
The old are not really smarter than the young, in terms of sheer brainpower. It is just that we have already made the kinds of mistakes that the young are about to make, and we have already suffered the consequences that the young are going to suffer if they disregard the record of the past.
If you want to understand the fatal dangers facing America today, read The Gathering Storm by Winston Churchill. The book is not about America, the Middle East, or nuclear missiles. But it shows Europe’s attitudes and delusions — aimed at peace in the years before the Second World War — which instead ended up bringing on that most terrible war in all of human history.
SLIDESHOW: The Wisdom of Thomas Sowell
Black adults, during the years when I was growing up in Harlem, had far less education than black adults today — but far more common sense. In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools and colleges are producing artificial stupidity, among both blacks and whites.


The first time I traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, as the plane flew into the skies over London I was struck by the thought that, in these skies, a thousand British fighter pilots fought off Hitler’s air force and saved both Britain and Western civilization. But how many students today will have any idea of such things, with history being neglected in favor of politically correct rhetoric?
You cannot live a long life without having been forced to change your mind many times about people and things — including, in some cases, your whole view of the world. Those who glorify the young today do them a great disservice, when this sends inexperienced young people out into the world cocksure about things on which they have barely scratched the surface.


In my first overseas trip, I was struck by blatantly obvious differences in behavior among different groups, such as the Malays and the Chinese in Malaysia — and wondered why scholars who were far more well-traveled than I was seemed not to have noticed such things, and to have resorted to all sorts of esoteric theories to explain why some groups earned higher incomes than others.
RELATED: More Articles by Thomas Sowell
There are words that were once common but that are seldom heard any more. The phrase “none of your business” is one of these. Today, everything seems to be the government’s business or the media’s business. And the word “risqué” would be almost impossible to explain to young people, in a world where gross vulgarity is widespread and widely accepted.


Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: “What were you doing for the last twelve years before you got here?”
Reading about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the widespread retrogressions of Western civilization that followed, was an experience that was sobering, if not crushing. Ancient history in general lets us know how long human beings have been the way they are, and dampens giddy zeal for the latest panaceas, despite how politically correct those panaceas may be.
#related#When I was growing up, we were taught the stories of people whose inventions and scientific discoveries had expanded the lives of millions of other people. Today, students are being taught to admire those who complain, denounce, and demand.

Comments
The first column I ever wrote, 39 years ago, was titled “The Profits of Doom.” This was long before Al Gore made millions of dollars promoting global-warming hysteria. Back in 1970, the prevailing hysteria was the threat of a new ice age — promoted by some of the same environmentalists who are promoting global-warming hysteria today.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His website is tsowell.com. © 2016 Creators Syndicate Inc.

[TooFineAPoint]

Another Sowell-ism, that I have probably posted elsewhere on the forum, but deserves to be in his thread:

For any policy decision or political statement (or any belief, really), he recommended asking 3 questions before accepting it --

1. Compared to what?
2. At what cost?
3. What hard data do you have?

[budoslavic]

Part I

Part II