Here are links to the over-100 posts I’ve written that mention Sowell. But for now I’ll just repeat the substance of this one from four years ago:

And yet most people probably have no idea who Sowell is.

Sowell was one of the very first thinkers I encountered during the course of my political change experience, and he was probably the most formative one. When I initially read his work – I think it was the book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy – it was with a happy sigh of recognition and relief as well as admiration. Finally, here was someone who was voicing clear, intelligent, common-sense versions of thoughts, some of which were new to me but some of which I’d already had in extremely inchoate and amorphous form but had never been able to articulate or order. He made perfect sense, and I couldn’t imagine why everyone in the world didn’t agree with him.

Unfortunately, they didn’t.

Notice also that subtitle – of a book first published in 1996 – Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. That’s an excellent example of Sowell’s ability to distill – into a short phrase, sentence, or paragraph – a complex and highly insightful as well as illuminating idea. He’s been doing that for about fifty years, and his body of work holds up very well.

So Happy Happy Birthday, Thomas Sowell. Long may you live and grace us with your clear-headed wisdom.

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It’s only gotten worse – much worse – in the ensuing years. At this point, I read every article with an eye to scoping out the biases of the author[s].

I have my biases, too, and I’m upfront about them. But I really truly do try to be fair, knowing that I won’t achieve absolute objectivity but nevertheless striving for it. Wouldn’t most “journalists” and “experts” (and even hard scientists at times, but I’m talking more about economists and psychologists and people in the “soft” sciences) say the same? And yet there are unconscious and/or conscious biases all over the place.

My reluctance to trust predictions has come to the fore on the subject of Trump’s tariffs, as I’ve said in several posts about that topic. Trump is an outside-the-box thinker, and his approaches in particular are hard to analyze and make predictions about, whether the person making the prediction is a Trump hater or Trump supporter.

I have noticed in the past that most of the horror stories about what will happen as a result of some action of Trump’s have not materialized. And some things have – so far at least – worked out very well, such as the reduction in illegal aliens pouring over the border. Tariffs make me especially nervous and I don’t have a good feeling about them. But as with so many things Trumpian, I know it’s best to take a “wait and see” attitude.

How do experts become experts? Isn’t it through the opinion of other experts, and the academy? How do expects get discredited? How about that guy who had a formula that had correctly predicted the last umpteen gazillion elections and then fell flat on his face in 2024 when he said Kamala would absolutely win? He’s not an expert anymore. But there are plenty of other experts who have been wrong over and over and yet continue in their lucrative gigs.

One expert I generally respect is Thomas Sowell, but he generally describes the past and present rather than predicting the future. He’s written about the failures of experts, especially in universities – “intellectuals” – in a number of books in which he states that a lot of knowledge in a narrow field, and success in a chosen profession, often give intellectuals the idea that they know a lot about a great many things of which they are ignorant (see this book of Sowell’s about the phenomenon).

I also happened upon a YouTube video that featured Sowell opining on Trump’s tariffs. Before I watched it, I assumed it was either from Trump’s first term (or even earlier about tariffs in general). But no; it featured the 94-year-old Sowell in what looks like a recent interview. He seems sharp as ever, although he finally has started to look somewhat old and his words don’t come quite as quickly and crisply as when he was younger. Here’s the video:

It’s easy to find those who say this will undoubtedly be a terrible disaster, and a little less easy but still possible to find those who say the opposite. I find Sowell’s statements convincing compared to most of them. He doesn’t try to read Trump’s mind, but offers various scenarios for what Trump is thinking and considers that the outcome will be based on how Trump uses the tariffs and decisions he makes around them.

And here’s Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s explanation for the policy, plus his prediction:

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Solzhenitsyn:

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

And then there’s Robert Frost (in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional sense rather than in the leftist “social justice” sense). That link I just gave is now dead, but I used the quote and the link in this post from 2016:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed. Frost drew out for Ferner Nuhn the logical consequences of a system of socialistic mercy:

“The question of the moment in politics will always be one of proportion between mercy and justice. You have to remember the people who accept mercy have to pay for it. Mercy means protection. And there is no protection without direction. A person completely protected would have to be completely directed. And he would be a slave. That’s where socialism pure brings you out.”

From Milton Friedman:

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

Thomas Sowell says it in his book The Quest For Cosmic Justice:

Not only does cosmic justice differ from traditional justice, and conflict with it, more momentously cosmic justice is irreconcilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law. Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic justice must be hand-made by holders of power who impose their own decisions on how these flesh-and-blood individuals should be categorized into abstractions and how these abstractions should then be forcibly configured to fit the vision of the power-holders. Merely the power to select beneficiaries is an enormous power, for it is also the power to select victims—and to reduce both to the role of supplicants of those who hold this power.

And yet we find ourselves in a society in which the idea of an elite group dispensing “justice” – as in social or cosmic justice – and creating “equality” has been in the ascendance, especially among the young. As Frost also wrote (from that same post of mine in 2016, with its dead link):

In a letter to Bernard De Voto in 1936 Frost wrote: “The great politicians are having their fun with us. They’ve picked up just enough of the New Republic and Nation jargon to seem original to the simple.” In 1939, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost said: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”

The appeal to the young is always present, unless it is strongly countered.

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When I first discovered the writing of Thomas Sowell, about a year into what ultimately became my political change, I experienced a tremendous sense of admiration and relief. Admiration because his writing was so clear and so intelligent, and relief because it made more sense than anything political I’d ever read.

I’ve watched many Sowell interviews over the years, and the guy is similarly clear and intelligent when speaking. He’s also afraid of no one and is never intimidated. I imagine he’s made plenty of enemies over the years, but I doubt any of them can outwit him. I’ve read his autobiography, too, and his life story is as interesting as one might think.

No one lasts forever, and Sowell has reached the venerable age of 93. But guess what? He’s come out with a new book, Social Justice Fallacies. I haven’t read it but I think I can recommend it without reservation.

And here he is at 93, being interviewed about it. I’ve only watched a couple of minutes, but he looks and sounds fantastic:

NOTE: Although Sowell’s been on the right for a long long time, he’s actually a political changer himself, having been a Marxist in his early years.

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Cosmic justice is not about the rules of the game. It is about putting particular segments of society in the position that they would have been in but for some undeserved misfortune. This conception of fairness requires that third parties must wield the power to control outcomes, over-riding rules, standards, or the preferences of other people…

In short, all are not to be judged by the same rules or standards within the given process; pre-existing inequalities are to be counter-balanced. Note also that…the quest for cosmic justice focuses on one segment of the population and disregards the interests of others…

Implicit in much discussion of a need to rectify social inequities is the notion that some segments of society, through no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as windfall gains, through no virtue of their own. True as this may be, the knowledge required to sort this out intellectually, much less rectify it politically, is staggering and superhuman. Far from society being divided into those with a more or less standard package of benefits and others lacking those benefits, each individual may have both windfall advantages and windfall disadvantages, and the particular combination of windfall gains and losses varies enormously from individual to individual. Some are blessed with beauty but lacking in brains, some are wealthy but from an emotionally impoverished family, some have athletic prowess but little ability to get along with other human beings…and so on and on. Add to this the changing circumstances of each individual over a lifetime – with relative advantages and disadvantages changing with the passing years – and the difficulties of merely determining the net advantages increase exponentially.

There’s much much more, but the point is that assessing advantages and disadvantages and portioning out rewards based on balancing the two is a literally impossible task, and will lead to miscarriages of actual justice in the quest for justice of the cosmic kind. Human beings are incapable of dispensing cosmic justice.

But that doesn’t stop them from trying – oh, how we try, especially the left, who plug in various kneejerk formulas such as race in order to reward their constituents and cloak themselves in supposed virtue, while castigating the right for being both mean and unfair and racist into the bargain.

Which brings us to colleges and yesterday’s affirmative action ruling. It will stop the kneejerk use of race as a category that ignores individual differences, but there are plenty of other ways to attempt to allot cosmic justice, and race can easily slip in the backdoor as well. Using race as a category by which to discriminate is forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment, but colleges are allowed to discriminate in other ways as long as they supposedly tailor that discrimination to individuals and don’t overtly base it on racial categories.

The real question is what a college is for: to select the smartest and most able people, and educate them further in order to take their places as leaders in various fields? To create well-rounded individuals? To redistribute wealth? To further cosmic justice, as defined by the left?

The reality is that colleges can select whomever they want as long as they follow the new rules – which allow for plenty of attempts to dispense a cosmic justice that cannot really be just, not on this earth.

The post Colleges, affirmative action, and the quest for cosmic justice appeared first on The New Neo.

An excerpt:

But is there any evidence that colleges that have gone whole hog into multiculturalism have better relations among the various groups on campus? Or is it precisely on such campuses that separatism and hostility are worse than on campuses that have not gone in for the multicultural craze?

You want to see multiculturalism in action? Look at Yugoslavia, at Lebanon, at Sri Lanka, at Northern Ireland, at Azerbaijan, or wherever else group “identity” has been hyped. There is no point in the multiculturalists’ saying that this is not what they have in mind. You might as well open the floodgates and then say that you don’t mean for people to drown. Once you have opened the floodgates, you can’t tell the water where to do.

By the way, it was in the early 1990s that I went back to the university to get my MFT degree, and I noticed that things had changed tremendously since my last foray as a student in the 1970s. Wokeism, post-modernism, the elevation of feelings over thought, and various “critical studies” teaching philosophies were very much in the ascendance, and the pernicious effects were already becoming noticeable, although I did not understand their full ramifications.

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Other than being Black, what exactly is Sowell’s expertise in slavery or history?

Yeah, it’s kind of funny. But it’s also tremendously sad, because millions more young people absorb Hannah-Jones’ utterly mendacious work than will ever become familiar with Sowell’s brilliant oeuvre. And it’s not just young people, either.

Over the years, I’ve asked many friends to read some of Sowell’s books. To date, as far as I know, not one of them has done so. It’s not just their loss; it’s everybody’s loss.

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He said he’s “deeply concerned” about China’s AI program, which is “not constrained by the rule of law.” That’s the take-away from his appearance for much of the MSM.

But he said some other things too, Wray did. Among them:

The sophistication of the private sector is improving, and particularly important, the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government. Especially the FBI has I think made significant strides. We are focused on looking at cyber attacks,” Wray said.

Of course, that’s not all that “collaboration” has been doing, is it?

More from Wray:

The competitive advantage the good guys have,” said Wray, is that “When we’re all working together, then they’re no match. Because the bad guys’ relationships with each other are purely transactional. And they’ll turn on each other in a heartbeat if it suits them. But because they’re not constrained by the rule, because they’re not constrained by international norms, we have to be mindful of the advance that gives them and work together in partnership.”

He thinks he’s the good guy.

In one of yesterday’s threads, commenter “physicsguy” asks:

Random question after seeing some of the news from the Davos WEF conference:

What sort of mental illness causes 80+ year olds to cling to power, and set about destroying everything?? I’m thinking here of John Kerry (80), Dr. Evil himself Klaus Schwab (84), Soros, McConnell, Pelosi, etc etc. I’m 70, and know I’m on my way out a lot sooner than when I was 50. I want to spend my final years being happy, being with my family, generally enjoying life. What causes such monsters in their final years to act they way they do?? I’ve never had any real insight into human behavior…probably why I did physics and not psych.

The question was about 80-year-olds, but I think the answer is the same for the 56-year-old Wray. It’s the one Thomas Sowell kept giving, which is that most of them think they’re the good guys, the ones he called “the Anointed.” Many also think that if only they were completely in charge, unconstrained by the rule of law, the world would be a much better place.

Some are probably merely drunk on power and some are probably malign in intent. However, I truly think that most of them are simply under the sway of enormous hubris and self-congratulatory pride (another of Sowell’s phrases as the subtitle of his 1996 book: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy).

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I don’t really need to reinvent the wheel and do a blow-by-blow analysis. I’ll just link to this, this, and this.

From the latter:

In its pathetic attempt to meet the Biden administration’s demands while meekly attempting to protect free speech on the platform, Twitter made three significant mistakes: 1) Using bots, 2) Relying on foreign contractors as content moderators, and 3) Allowing biased executives to prune the decision trees to determine the fate of specific tweets.

This meant many essential voices in the covid debate, which turned out to be correct, were silenced at critical times.

Thing is, it was obvious that this was happening. Anyone who looked could see it. I’m not a Twitter user, but there was plenty of discussion on the right side of the blogosphere and in other media on the right of how alternative points of view were being silenced.

I think the only really new evidence in this first batch of Twitter files on COVID is the extent of government involvement in the censorship, but even that could have been assumed. Early on, the government point of view became the only allowed point of view. I noticed it mostly on YouTube because I vist that site far more than I go to Twitter, and huge disclaimers appeared there attached to any video that even dared to tentatively whisper a thought contradicting the official government line, plus YouTube was “suggesting” tons of videos to me that parroted that government line and only that government line.

And yet the problems with the government line were also obvious from the start. It was easy to see, and I wrote about it early on. For example, here’s a post of mine from March 17, 2020, not long after the entire COVID business began. In it, I ask a question that would later have gotten me banned from Twitter had I been active there:

So here’s my question for all you epidemiologists and infectious disease experts out there…

Wouldn’t it be better to have only high-risk people stay home? People over 60 and those with pre-existing conditions? That way, if all those at low risk kept mingling, a lot of them would get a mild flu and herd immunity will be achieved fairly quickly, to the benefit of all, without overwhelming the health care system…

I just don’t see the end game for the current mitigation strategies. Wouldn’t we still get an overwhelmed health care system when everyone emerges?…

I was looking at a spate of recent articles on how Philadelphia and St. Louis handled the flu differently in 1918, with Philadelphia holding a big war bond parade despite the fact that the flu was beginning to make inroads in the city, and St. Louis canceling public gatherings (see this for just one example). The Philadelphia death rate soared and that of St. Louis did not.

However, most of the articles don’t mention this depressing fact:

“According to a 2007 analysis of Spanish flu death records, the peak mortality rate in St. Louis was only one-eighth of Philadelphia’s death rate at its worst. That’s not to say that St. Louis survived the epidemic unharmed. Dehner says the midwestern city was hit particularly hard by the third wave of the Spanish flu which returned in the late winter and spring of 1919.”

So, St. Louis did flatten its curve. But the deaths stretched out longer there.

And this apparently was a common occurrence in many cities…

The lockdown continuation already didn’t make sense, and that was obvious to anyone who had crunched the original COVID numbers from the Diamond Princess (I had) and looked at history from 100 years earlier (I had). I’m not saying this to brag, I’m saying it because it was easy to see rather than difficult. The fact that the authorities didn’t seem to see it – or refused to see it, or pretended not to see it – was obvious as well, and suspect. They were either incompetent (“fools”) or deceiving us (“knaves”) or both.

Why were they doing this? Well, one reason was also obvious pretty early on. Here’s a post of mine from April 27, 2020, entitled “Fear is an opportunity for tyranny”:

One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 response is how easily public officials embrace tyranny, and how many people accept it because of fear…

I didn’t like the initial 2-week shutdown, but I thought I understood the reasons – flatten the curve and keep the health care system from being totally overwhelmed – and I knew it would buy us time to learn more about the illness.

Mission accomplished. It’s been far more than two weeks, and the damage from the shutdown itself has gotten to the point that it becomes crystal clear it needs to be removed. The benefits have been less clear, too. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that shutdowns mattered all that much in the curve of the COVID-19 toll in various states and various countries. We understand more than we did, but although we don’t understand enough, we have to take a few leaps because one thing we do understand (and was clear from the start, actually) is that the shutdown itself is causing tremendous damage. And that damage is not limited to economics; it involves mental and physical health as well.

That’s how soon it was obvious. The rest is just the details.

I’ll close this post with a description of some thoughts of Thomas Sowell’s from his very fine book The Vision of the Anointed:

Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.

–the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.
–it is so necessary to believe in a particular vision that evidence of its incorrectness is ignored, suppressed, or discredited
–empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshalled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence.

The book was written in 1996 and was the very first book of Sowell’s I ever read, probably around 2004. So these trends were already quite clear back then and even far earlier, with the Soviets. And what he describes is even more than a vision – it’s also a relentless drive for power not just to implement that vision but also for power’s sake itself.

The post Reflections on the COVID Twitter files so far appeared first on The New Neo.

I’m not sure what Sowell went on to say after that, but I would add that educated people in the Founders’ day had a solid grounding in ancient history, which contained a great many messages about the dangers of tyrannical governments. They also were quite familiar with the Bible. I doubt the same two things can be said of most of our intellectuals or our “elites” today.

Also, I’ve cued up a short excerpt from this interview:

Maybe this is nitpicking, but I’d like to correct one brief thing that Sowell said at 4:35. Bobby Fischer was not happy to play chess and to stay out of larger pronouncements (although as far as I know, Sowell is correct that Fischer made no larger pronouncements about evolution). In later life, after his retirement from chess, Fischer – always eccentric – became even more so, and more talkative. At that point he opined on a lot of things. For example, shortly after 9/11 Fischer had this to say:

Fischer stated that he was happy that the attacks had happened, while expressing his view on United States and Israeli foreign policy, saying, “I applaud the act. Look, nobody gets … that the US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians … for years.” He also said, “The horrible behavior that the US is committing all over the world … This just shows you, that what goes around, comes around, even for the United States.” Fischer also referenced the movie Seven Days in May and said he hoped for a military coup d’état in the US: “[I hope] the country will be taken over by the military—they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

But these beliefs did not only emerge after 9/11; they were longstanding. Fischer’s mother was ethnically Jewish although not religious, but his father (whom he did not know) was not Jewish and Fischer never considered himself Jewish. He certainly went quite far in the other direction of rabid anti-Semitism:

Fischer made numerous antisemitic statements and professed a general hatred for Jews since at least the early 1960s. Jan Hein Donner wrote that at the time of Bled 1961, “He idolized Hitler and read everything about him that he could lay his hands on. He also championed a brand of anti-semitism that could only be thought up by a mind completely cut off from reality.” Donner took Fischer to a war museum, which “left a great impression, since [Fischer] is not an evil person, and afterwards he was more restrained in his remarks—to me, at least.”

From the 1980s on, Fischer’s comments about Jews were a major theme in his public and private remarks. He openly denied the Holocaust, and called the United States “a farce controlled by dirty, hook-nosed, circumcised Jew bastards”…In 1999, he gave a radio call-in interview to a station in Budapest, Hungary, during which he described himself as the “victim of an international Jewish conspiracy”. In another radio interview, Fischer said that it became clear to him in 1977, after reading The Secret World Government by Count Cherep-Spiridovich, that Jewish agencies were targeting him….Fischer, at a press conference upon his return to Reykjavik, Iceland, lashed out at Jeremy Schaap, the son of the late Dick Schaap, a sportswriter who had been a father figure to Fischer when growing up, calling his father a “Jewish snake” for doubting Fischer’s sanity in his later writings.

Sowell is correct, however, that Fischer was not an intellectual, and that he certainly had a very small area of expertise and that when he stepped outside it he was way out of his depth. I wonder, though; would most people consider a chess player an intellectual? Chess tends to be correlated with a certain type of high intelligence, but chess players don’t trade in ideas as their main concern – their brilliance is spatial and strategic/tactical/analytical/intuitive, is it not?

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