Thomas Sowell: the early years

The New Neo Posted on by

Thomas Sowell is a real favorite here for his penetrating mind, superior ability to articulate his point of view, and his sharp wit. If you’ve ever seen videos of him debating (for example, here’s an epic moment) you’ll know he doesn’t pull his verbal punches, nor does he suffer fools gladly.

It turns out these characteristics of his were in evidence almost from the start of his life. How do I know? I’ve been reading a memoir he published in 2000 entitled A Personal Odyssey. It’s quite a document, filled with anecdotes from Sowell that demonstrate that he always thought for himself and wasn’t the least bit afraid to express it. He seemed to have been born independent, and rather ornery at that, in a firm albeit sometimes witty way. Once you’ve read the book you understand how mentally tough Sowell is, and although he’s basically likeable—and I very deeply respect him—no one would ever call him easy, accommodating, or warm and fuzzy. When you mess with Sowell, you better be ready.

Here are some passages from his book that struck me as especially interesting, either in the personal sense or the political one. Some background for those of you who may not be familiar with Sowell: he’s an 83-year-old (looks great, though) economist, author, and political columnist who is another political changer, having been a Marxist in his early days. Although in the book he makes it crystal clear that he has not been a member of any political party in many decades, most people would consider him conservative.

Here are the excerpts:

…[W]hite people were almost hypothetical to me as a small child. They were one of the things that grown-ups talked about, but they had almost no significant role in my daily life. That remained largely true until after we left Charlotte, when I was almost nine years old, and moved to New York. Then it came as a shock to me that most of the people in the United States were white.

Sowell’s family (he was raised by a great-aunt) moved to New York, and when it was time for junior high he asked his family to petition that he be allowed to attend a school out of his district but relatively nearby, because it was a better school than the one he was supposed to go to:

I prevailed upon Mom [his great-aunt] to go to the school, which she hated to do, and sign for me to get a transfer. We waited for hours for the bureaucratic process to move on, but in the end, I had my transfer. Without it, the last door might have been slammed shut on me.

The rest of the family saw a very different symbolism in my going to junior high school. They informed me, very gravely, that none of them had ever reached seventh grade.

“You are going on further than any of us,” I was told.

Very early in his career as an economist, Sowell worked for various government agencies. One of them was the U.S. Department of Labor, as a GS-9 management intern, a group being groomed for future leadership roles. The following is quite characteristic of Sowell’s no-nonsense behavior:

Someone had the bright idea of giving management interns an extensive battery of psychological questions to answer and turn in. It was the usual intrusive kind of thing, including questions about what kind of woman I wanted to marry. I paid no attention to it. In due course, one of the busy-bodies phoned me.

“We haven’t gotten your questionnaire back,” I was told.

“I know.”

“When are you going to send it in?”

“I’m not going to send it in.”

“Why not?”

“It asked questions that were nobody’s business.”

“Will you at least return the blank questionnaire? Those things cost a lot of money.”

“I can’t. I threw it out with the trash.”

“Threw it out! What would happen if everyone had your attitude?”

“You would have to stop asking nosy questions.”

On a more serious note, one of the many places where Sowell taught was Howard, one of the premier black universities in the country. As usual, Sowell was unafraid to challenge the status quo and, as usual, he ruffled feathers:

My tightening up on [academic] standards and on cheating initially meant massive failing grades on exams. This in turn meant massive complaints—to me, to the committee chairman, and to the dean…[who] jumped in with both feet.

“For God’s sake, Sowell,” he said. “You’re not teaching at Harvard.”

“I never thought that I was,” I said. “But how are we supposed to meet those higher standards you’re always talking about if everyone who comes here is expected to conform to existing standards?

“We need higher standards, but we have to be reasonable. Kids from these backgrounds can’t handle a lot of abstractions, graphs and things like that.”

“Yes, they can—but they will not do it as long as they have sympathetic administrators to intervene in their behalf.”

“It’s my job to intervene when a teacher isn’t doing his job.”

“If you think I’m not doing my job, you can have my resignation—anytime…”

“We can talk about that later…How do you justify your teaching methods which have produced all this uproar?”

“I don’t intend to justify them at all,” I said. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Now, you give exams to graduating seniors in their major field. Good. When the students from my courses take their exams in economics, compare their results with those of students from the rest of the department.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“What else is there? We’re here to produce results, not popularity.”…

Later on, it was leaked to me—no doubt deliberately—that the dean had never taken such instant and total dislike to anyone in all his years at Howard University.

Sowell resigned at the end of the year. He explains that, by that time, his spring classes were going exceptionally well. One young student came to Sowell and asked:

“How are we ever going to advance, if people like you come here for one year and then leave?”

The question really hit me. I had no answer for him then—or now.

This incident occurred in 1963-4, fifty years ago. Sadly, the issues remain—and not just at Howard. Academic standards have been sliding nearly everywhere, and those who try to arrest that slide often get burned (or fired) for their pains.

[ADDENDUM: Sowell’s most recent column here.]

The war between the state

The New Neo Posted on by

Northern Colorado wants to become the 51st state. The reasons? The rural north has different politics and economic concerns than the more urban south, and feels the latter is crushing it and ignoring its needs.

I don’t think this will fly, although I think it’s an interesting effort. The most recent previous precedent—West Virginia vs. Virginia—occurred in the context of the Civil War and opposition to slavery, which was the major stated reason for West Virgina’s secession from Virginia and its admission as a separate state in 1863.

Maine is another example with some unique characteristics. Not one of the original thirteen states because it was part of Massachusetts, Maine was nevertheless not contiguous with Massachusetts, with little New Hampshire in-between. In 1819 Massachusetts allowed Maine to secede if Maine voters chose to do so, which occurred shortly thereafter in 1820. Maine (somewhat like West Virginia) was admitted to the US because of concerns connected with slavery, in Maine’s case as part of the 1820 Missouri Compromise. It was a free state balancing out the entry of Missouri, a slave state.

Kentucky left the mother state of Virginia very early on, and was admitted in 1792, and Tennessee(1796) had a very similar history vis a vis North Carolina.

I’m unaware of any other states that have been formed by secession from already-admitted states. It would be highly unusual at this point in time; hasn’t happened in 150 years.

What’s more, the particular beef that northern Colorado has with southern Colorado is similar to the issues that roil many other states today. For example, New York, Maine, and New Hampshire (just to mention a few that I know rather well) have north-south dichotomies where the north is more rural and conservative than the south. California has a coastal/inland split, Illinois a metro-Chicago-versus-everything-else difference. Although I’m not aware of the details (just as, prior to this news about northern Colorado, I knew next to nothing about the differences between Colorado’s north and south), I would imagine there are many other states with similar disagreements between their different areas.

But whatever northern Colorado wants to do , not only does the rest of Colorado have to agree, but Congress has to approve, as well. I just don’t see that happening, because I think the fear would be increased Balkanization of many states that could try to follow suit, resulting in (among other things) more representation for rural, conservative areas as opposed to urban ones.

Conservatives may like that idea, but I don’t see why liberals would. For example, the state of New York is reliably Democratic, but if it became two states (each with its own senators) the senate would probably gain two conservative members, because the urban southern part would continue as before (liberal) but would no longer be able to dominate the north. I can’t quite imagine any liberal or Democrat in Congress voting yes to that sort of arrangement.

Are Congressional Republicans growing a spine?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or maybe at least a notochord?

If so, then good:

Meeting for the first time as a group to hash out their approach to immigration, House Republicans on Wednesday came down overwhelmingly against a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, putting in jeopardy the future of sweeping legislation that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants…

The bottom line was clear: The Republican-controlled House does not plan to take up anything resembling the Senate bill, which many believe is bad policy and smacks of an amnesty strongly opposed by the conservatives who hold sway over much of the rank and file. The House also does not intend to move very quickly, and some Republicans are wary of passing any measure at all that could lead to negotiations with the Senate, talks that could add pressure to the House to consider a broader plan.

The Senate immigration bill may have been very popular in the Senate, but it’s not popular with the American people. Someone may be clamoring for this bill, but it’s not the general public. Obama, the Senate, the gang-of-however-many-it-is-now, the left, and probably quite a few businesses, as well as parts (certainly not all) of the Hispanic population of the country may want such a bill, but not the majority of the people and certainly not the Republican base or even Independents. What they are clamoring for is a bill that controls and limits illegal immigration.

But they’ve been clamoring for that for years and Congress has managed to resist the call, or to pass immigration bills that are either unenforceable or merely are not enforced. There’s obviously been no special urgency about that.

Plus, since President Obama has made it clear he won’t enforce parts of laws he doesn’t like, why trust him to enforce anything he doesn’t like in this one or any other one? No, the fierce urgency of the Senate immigration bill came from the same source as the fierce urgency of the Obamacare bill—meaning, from the need for the left to push through their pet and long-planned transformative legislation while they are in power, in order to perpetuate that power. It’s pretty much as simple as that. But why should Republicans be their enablers?

Republicans were spooked by the 2012 election. Many have bought the line that if they could court the Hispanic vote they would reverse the slide, and they think that supporting this bill or something of the sort (rather than stopping this bill or something of the sort) is a way to do it. But it won’t work—although Democrats would prefer that Republicans continue to think it will—and it’s a good way to alienate Republicans’ own base and even other voters in the middle as well.

So I’m happy to see pieces like this appearing. In it, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama writes:

In pushing for this bill, the Left has abandoned and taken for granted the struggling worker. By doing the right thing on immigration, the GOP can distance our party from the corporate titans who believe the immigration policy for our entire country should be modeled to pad their bottom line…

The White House has made its central legislative priority a bill that would result in decades of stagnant wages, stubborn unemployment, and increasing poverty. Instead of joining in that destructive effort, the GOP should reject it and demand reforms that encourage self-sufficiency and promote rising wages.

Both as a matter of economic policy and social policy, the best course for America is one that helps more of our residents move off of welfare, off of unemployment, and into good-paying jobs. We can’t simply ignore the large number of chronically underemployed Americans. Immigration policy should promote ”” not inhibit ”” individual opportunity and community confidence.

The Senate immigration bill is Obamacare’s 1,200-page legislative cousin. It is a disaster on every level. Republicans should make no effort to salvage it or to offer even the slightest hope of revival. Instead, we should draw sharp and bold contrasts that earn the loyalty of our faithful supporters and the newfound respect of the millions of working Americans who have turned away.

Some of Sessions’ fellow Republican senators get it. But way too many of them still don’t. The House is more amenable to his message than the Senate, though, and there’s no reason on earth that Republicans there should support any bill that the Senate majority can then take, twist, make into what they want it to be, and pass in some shady manner, like what happened with Obamacare. Until now, I have assumed the House would do just that, and they may disappoint me once again and commit party suicide in just such a manner. But I have a tiny little bit of hope that this current verbal defiance won’t prove to be just empty bluster, as so many brave words have proven before.

[ADDENCUM: A tangential issue of interest.]

US drops to second…

The New Neo Posted on by

…in the list of the world’s fattest developed nations.

Quick—without reading the article, what are the others?

I would not have had a clue. I’m not even sure what I would have guessed—maybe Samoa (or is that considered a “developed” nation)? But if so, I would have guessed wrong.

The new #1 nation is actually Mexico, which come to think of it should not have been a surprise to me. I’ve eaten enough Mexican food to understand exactly and precisely how that could happen.

But what really, really surprises me are the other fattest countries. Number three is—get ready for it—Syria. Syria??? With Venezuela and Libya tied for fourth? Excuse me but—what??

The “what” is possibly explained in this rather mysterious statement:

“The same people who are malnourished are the ones who are becoming obese…

It’s true that things like pasta and sweets are less expensive than meat and vegetables and fruit, but this still seems rather odd. We’re obviously not talking about starvation here, but about less-than-optimal nourishment.

Further down in the article the mystery about Samoa is solved. I was right, pretty much:

The world’s fattest nation overall is Nauru, a South Pacific island where a staggering 71.1 percent of its 10,000 inhabitants are obese.

The U.N. report does not include data for American Samoa, which has been tabbed in the past as the world’s fattest. According to a 2010 World Health Organization report, nearly all of that Pacific island’s inhabitants (95 percent) are considered overweight.

You can see the entire list at the article.

The first comment after the piece is pretty funny, too. It goes like this:

We will reclaim the title! Twinkies are back so it won’t be long.

The Texas abortion battle

The New Neo Posted on by

As expected, the Texas House has passed legislation banning abortions after 20 weeks and placing other restrictions on the operation of abortion clinics, restrictions that supporters say are intended to protect women’s health and will not close down many or even any clinics, and which opponents say will close almost all the clinics in the state. I know that it would surprise me very much if the latter turned out to be true.

Typically, the left considers those who have been fighting the bill heroes (or heroines, or is that word no longer PC?). Kirsten Powers (who when last I checked, was still a liberal, although one who sometimes goes against the usual liberal stands) disagrees:

In addition to the limit on late-term abortions, the Texas legislature sought to pass regulations on abortion clinics similar to what was passed in Pennsylvania in 2011 after the Gosnell horror. The New York Times warned that the Texas bill “could lead to the closing of most of Texas’s 42 abortion clinics.” That sounds familiar. In 2011, the Pennsylvania ACLU claimed a post-Gosnell bill “would effectively close most and maybe all of the independent abortion clinics in Pennsylvania.” Last month, a Pennsylvania news site reported that “several” abortion clinics have closed, which isn’t quite the Armageddon the abortion-rights movement predicted.

So no, I don’t stand with Wendy [Davis]. Nor do most women, as it turns out. According to a June National Journal poll, 50 percent of women support, and 43 percent oppose, a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, except in cases of rape and incest.

One can assume I am also not the only woman in America who is really tiring of the Wendys of the world claiming to represent “women’s rights” in their quest to mainstream a medical procedure””elective late-term abortion””that most of the civilized world finds barbaric and abhorrent. In many European countries, you can’t get an abortion past 12 weeks, except in narrow circumstances.

When Roe v Wade was handed down, it legalized first trimester abortions. Now, as one might expect, that’s not even remotely good enough for the pro-abortion forces. In the years since Roe the expectation and demands have changed, and any backtracking (such as that in Texas) in which things that have come to be considered rights are taken away is fought tooth and nail by abortion proponents, who want ever-expanding access to the practice.

[NOTE: As it stands now—before it has gone to the Senate, where it is also likely to be passed—the bill’s ban on post-20-week abortions does not contain an exception for rape and incest.]

Should men* be allowed to opt out of child support?

The New Neo Posted on by

For biological reasons, men and women are inherently unequal when it comes to their roles in becoming parents. To be exact, women become pregnant and give birth and men don’t, and those differences are likely to remain into the foreseeable future.

If a child isn’t wanted by both sexual partners, you’d think that—with the advent of reliable and easily available birth control—unwanted or unplanned pregnancies would happen very rarely. Well, we all know how that’s turned out.

Once an unplanned pregnancy occurs, a mother-to-be and father to-be have some decisions to make, about which they might agree or disagree with each other. If unmarried, they can decide to get married if they want, and to have the baby and raise it together, if both want that as well. If neither wants the baby born, and both are in favor of abortion, the woman can decide to abort it and the man would be likely to approve. It neither believes in abortion and in addition neither wants the baby, the woman can give birth and give it up for adoption, and both would agree that’s a good solution. And if both want the baby born and both want to raise it, but they don’t want to get married, they could agree on custody and visitation arrangements, or alternatively there can be a custody hearing that would be somewhat similar to what would occur if they had been married and were now divorcing.

But what about other disagreements? For example, what if the mother wants to have an abortion and the father doesn’t want that? What if she wants to give the baby up for adoption and he wants to raise it himself? And what if he doesn’t want her to keep the baby because he doesn’t want to be forced to pay child support? The law addresses these fact situations and cases differently.

The first legal principle is that the mother makes decisions about her body. Let’s say the mother wants an abortion and the father wants to stop her, or the father wants her to have an abortion and she wants to have the baby. Legally he has no say in the matter. Although it’s his baby as well, the baby is developing within her body, and he cannot compel her to have or not to have an abortion against her will. That’s a sad fact of life (and death) for fathers, but there’s no way around it legally because the consequences of a different ruling—that he could force her to carry the baby and have it against her will, or force her to have an abortion against her will—would be terrible. Of course, you might say that with abortion all of it is terrible anyway.

But adoption is different. No, a father can’t compel a pregnant woman to keep the child and raise it after its birth. But if she does decide to bear the child and wants to give it up for adoption, although the law is complex and varies from state-to-state in terms of what he must do to preserve his right to raise the child, much of the time he can do so—providing, of course, he knows there is a child in the first place, and is willing to accept responsiblity for it. Sometimes he is kept in the dark about the existence of a child, especially if he is no longer in contact with the woman during her pregnancy. In certain circumstances, if a mother-to-be wants to keep mum about the identity of the father of the child she can. So in the realm of stopping an adoption, fathers have some rights, because the baby is no longer part of the mother’s body.

But what if she decides to keep the child and raise it, and the father does not wish to be involved in any way? The way the law stands now he is liable for child support no matter what his wishes, and there’s nothing he can do about it. This is true whether he consented to the birth of the child or not, or even if the mother lied to him and said she was using birth control when she was not, or whether he and/or she used birth control that failed for some reason or another. Whether or not he wanted a child or even had reason to believe the act of intercourse in which he engaged was highly unlikely to result in conception, the state has an inherent interest in holding parents responsible for supporting their children financially. The state does not want to have to support those same children itself through welfare.

But what if such a father were willing to relinquish all parental rights, including those of custody and/or visitation, and thus be excused from paying child support? At first glance, that seems to be only fair. After all, it equals the playing field somewhat, since it merely gives a father the right a mother already has (through adoption or abortion) to opt out of parenthood and responsibility for an unwanted and unplanned child.

It’s an especially attractive proposition if in fact the woman lied to him and said she was on birth control pills, for example. Why should he have to spend eighteen or so years supporting the unintended (by him) result of her lie?

A personal word here—I don’t like any of this. I fervently wish people only had children wanted by both parents. I wish birth control were foolproof. I wish people didn’t lie to each other about stuff like whether they are using birth control (something men can do, too; all they have to do is say that they’ve had a vasectomy when they have not). I wish all children were conceived in love and mutual respect. I wish I wish I wish—and what difference does it make what I wish?

Reality is different, and it seems as though it’s getting more different every day. And the law must deal with reality, not wishes. Given the inherently unequal situation in reproduction that I started this post by acknowledging, and the present-day facts of abortion and adoption and unmarried parents and all the rest, doesn’t it behoove us to make things as equal between the sexes as possible?

I think it does. But we must beware, beware the law of unintended consequences. Because if fathers are allowed to relinquish their parental rights in order to get out of paying child support for an unwanted child, it may be that one of the consequences is likely to be that more children will effectively become fatherless, and the state (that is, the taxpayer) may end up having to pay instead of the father.

Of course, we don’t know for sure what would happen. It could be that, instead, such a law would cause potential unwed mothers to think more carefully before they have sex with a guy who’s not marriage material, and who isn’t serious about them and about his future responsibilities, because the potential mother would know she can’t necessarily get him to pay. Hey, maybe the illegitimate birth rate would even drop. Maybe more babies would be given up for adoption and more infertile couples could raise them, loved and wanted by both parents, because the biological mother would know she would face a high probability of having to struggle financially without the father’s legally-mandated help.

Maybe.

But there’s a strange inequality that would probably rear its head if father opt-out were allowed: what about married men? Would anyone argue that a married man should have the same choice regarding a child he conceives within that marriage as an unmarried man would have? (Let’s simplify things a tiny bit by leaving out those special and complex cases in which a married man has been forced to support a child not biologically his, which does unfortunately happen at times). Wouldn’t it be unconscionable if married men could voluntarily relinquish rights (and duties) to their own children and remain married? And even if they wanted to divorce the mother and live apart and relinquish rights and responsibilities to their children, it would seem as a public policy matter that they should not legally be allowed to walk away from supporting their own children by that mechanism, even if the divorce is not their fault. Children would suffer even more than they do now, and it’s bad enough the way it is.

But if married (or previously-married) men couldn’t opt out of child support obligations and unmarried men could opt out, what effect would that differential have on marriage itself? I submit it would have a chilling effect on marriage. Many men are already opting out of marriage (see this), and so what would happen if unmarried men could evade responsibility for the children they father but married men could not? How many men would decide to get married under those unequal circumstances?

I don’t profess to know for sure. But my gut tells me the marriage rates would plummet. Marriage has fewer and fewer obvious benefits now, and a man already stands to lose a great deal in a divorce. A law like this would increase the penalty for marriage, would it not? Since for the most part men can have sex pretty easily outside of marriage these days, and even father children if they want, why wouldn’t they wish to preserve their freedom to decide to be a parent or not by remaining unmarried to the mother?

I can envision a day when only the highly religious get married, and the rest just have various fluid and ever-changing legal arrangements. Stability? What’s that?

Whenever I wade into these topics I find it depressing. There doesn’t seem to be any good solution to the problems of love gone bad and the resulting turf wars over children. And the comments sections of various blogs (including this one) for posts dealing with these questions often devolve into rageful shouting matches. I see many of the problems, but (as in this post) the solutions that come to mind are fraught with other problems, many of them even worse for children and society.

Life isn’t fair, sad and difficult choices must be made, and you can’t always get what you want—and although the law can change, it can’t change that basic fact. Nor can it change the law of unintended consequences.

[* NOTE: I put an asterisk next to “men” in the title of this post because, although men would be the ones most commonly affected by such a law, it is certainly possibly that some women would take advantage of it too. Although there are fewer of them in the situation than men, there are women who also lose custody and have to pay child support, and those women currently are not legally allowed to opt out of that responsibility either (there are those of both sexes who just disappear, of course, and opt out de facto rather than de jure). I would imagine that some of these women would willingly relinquish their parental rights in order to be exempted from paying support if it ever became legal to do so.]

Karsenty explains the verdict in the France2/al-Dura case

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that he has lost the most recent defamation judgment in the long-running saga of his fight against Charles Enderlin, France2, and the famous al-Dura tape, Philippe Karsenty describes why the French “Court” of Appeals (scare quotes mine) decided against him. Their reasoning would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so very very serious:

On June 26, the Paris Court of Appeals found me guilty of defamation against television station France 2 and broadcaster Charles Enderlin.

After waiting one long week following the verdict, I was finally able to get the written arguments of the judges. The arguments state that ”” despite the hoax eventually becoming obvious to all who looked at the case ”” I was found guilty for having said that the al-Dura news report was a hoax ”¦ too early, in November 2004.

Had I published that exact same article today now that the facts are clear, I would not have been found guilty…

This verdict confirmed that France 2 still doesn’t have a single piece of evidence to substantiate their al-Dura report. The judges had to reverse the burden of the evidence ”” using the extremely restrictive French defamation laws ”” to prevent France 2 from having to produce any evidence to confirm the report’s authenticity, and to temporarily block the recognition of the hoax.

French taxpayer money has been used to silence legitimate and necessary criticism of France 2’s disinformation.

The significance of France 2’s report on the tape and the supposed killing of the boy by Israeli soldiers cannot be overestimated, as well as the significance of this case in showing how little free speech or even truth matters in France. The damage goes on.

[NOTE: You can read my many previous posts on earlier aspects of this case and related ones here. I especially refer you to this post, which explains the very large differences between French and US libel laws, and this one, about the facade of French justice.]