By Capt. Brent Ramsey, US Navy ret
STARRS Board of Advisors
Dr. Thomas Sowell is a national treasure. The reason most people don’t know of him and his extraordinary brilliance is that he is universally ignored by the institutions controlled by progressives especially academia and the media.
His remarkable career spans 5+ decades and he continues to work and publish at age 93. His name should be widely known as he is an eminent economist, a magna cum laude graduate from Harvard in 1958, a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.
Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 2003, Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. He has been at the Hoover Institution for decades as the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy. He has taught at Cornell, Amherst, UCLA and Brandeis.
He has written over 45 books. His latest book is Social Justice Fallacies.
This book refutes many of the popular myths of liberals and race hustlers about social justice. The left perpetrates the fiction that the primary problem of minorities in America today, decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination, is racism, white privilege, and the oppression of minorities.
Sowell explains how flawed these views are. No one in the nation has studied the data or written upon this subject more than Sowell.
Of course, one major factor ignored by those who attribute every circumstance of minorities to racism is that discrimination is illegal and has been for decades with severe penalties for those who are guilty of discrimination.
As the EEOC’s records show, discrimination complaints have been going down for decades and are at all time lows. Dr. Sowell takes on the social justice fallacies of today with irrefutable facts that explain the outcomes that create different results for some segments of minority populations.
The fallacies fall into three categories….equal chance fallacies, chess pieces fallacies, and knowledge fallacies.
Equal chance fallacy. Feminists complain women are “under-represented in Silicon Valley where the technical work done is largely based on application of engineering skills. Not considered is the fact that women by choice earn less than 30% of the engineering degrees in college so it is not surprising that fewer are qualified to work in Silicon Valley.
Similarly, men are extremely under-represented in education but not surprisingly as men only earn 20% of the undergraduate degrees in education.
Race has nothing to do with these rates of employment yet social justice warriors assert that women are discriminated with regard to jobs in engineering. The fact is men and women and different races and cultures a lot of the time choose to do different things and have different cultures and things that they value. This sometimes leads to disparities in career fields that has zero to do with discrimination.
Racial fallacies are related to whether there are outcomes that are different for races, namely black and whites, that are unusual or are of a larger magnitude than differences among other groups. The answer is that there are.
Dr. Sowell reports that the median per capita income of Asian ethnic groups (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) is more than twice as high as the median per capita income of Mexican Americans. Asian Indians have per capita income 3 times than that of Mexican Americans and more than $15,000 more a year than of White Americans. He asks, “Is this the “white supremacy” we are warned about?
The data shows that income patterns are driven by factors other than race. He reports that in 2020 data, more than 9 million black Americans had higher income than the median incomes of White Americans. A particular factor in incomes is the differences in marital rates. The fact is that single parent households of any race have poverty rates much higher than that of married households, white or black.
Amazingly, marital status is not factored in by our government when depicting poverty statistics. Imagine that? The decline of the black family is a major reason for the poverty so many experience, a fact not highlighted by the social justice warriors. Single white, female headed families have a poverty rate more than double that of black married-couple families in every year from 1994-2020, the latest year for which there is data. He asks, “If ‘white supremacists’ were so powerful, how could this happen?”
The next fallacy Dr. Sowell addresses are “chess pieces” fallacies. Government passes laws to enact outcomes that they desire with the presumption that government policy will drive people’s actions….treating people economically as if they were chess pieces on a giant chess board.
The minimum wage law which is very popular on the political left and which they use to get themselves elected is just such a chess piece fallacy. Minimum wage laws are designed to help the poor (among which blacks are predominant). The fact is they don’t work. They actually hurt the poor. But, despite decades of data that show that they hurt the poor, the left persists in supporting ever higher minimum wages.
The marketplace does not care what the law is. A business only has so much money. If government mandates a higher wage, and income is relatively fixed cost, the only possible result of mandated higher wages is fewer employees.
Those hurt most by minimum wages are the young minority job seekers which businesses now cannot afford to hire. Since black and Hispanic youth lag white and Asian youth in educational achievement, these are the first left without jobs. This is how the marketplace works. So, minimum wage laws harm young blacks. Yet, liberals ignore this data and pass ever more higher wage laws.
Sowell points out in example after example failed government policy to control the “chess pieces” that are the autonomous actions of citizens when faced with the consequences of dumb laws. They are not inert. They act to protect themselves and what the government tried to influence fails.
The last fallacies are knowledge fallacies involving what he calls, “consequential knowledge.”
The example he cites to explain this concept are the officers in charge of the Titanic. They were certainly expert in their knowledge of the intricacies of their ship and how to operate it, but they were lacking in the knowledge of the location of an iceberg that put their ship in danger. The lack of consequential knowledge of the location of that iceberg doomed the safety of that ship.
He goes on to explain in examples how today’s social justice theorists are just like the officers of the Titanic. They have a lot of expertise but really lack consequential knowledge of the true causes of the inequities that we see in today’s society.
He gives concrete examples of public policy failures put in place by “experts” that are tremendous failures such as in unemployment, the war on payday loans which exclusively harms those it claims to help, government housing programs which universally turn into disasters, and the impact on children from decades of failed government programs.
His conclusion is that government is a poor substitute for people being able to make decisions on their own using their consequential knowledge to decide on what is best for them.
This brief summary cannot do justice to the depth of thought and insight provided by Sowell’s book. Thus, to get the full import, I strongly recommend dear reader for you to get this book and read it for yourself. You won’t regret it.
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Capt. Brent Ramsey is VP for Collaborations and PAO for the Calvert Task Group. His career in the Navy spanned almost 40 years, including command twice and as Executive Director, CBC Gulfport. He is currently on the Board of Advisors for STARRS and the Center for Military Readiness, and Member and Secretary for the Military Advisory Group for Congressman Chuck Edwards (NC-11). His writing has been in the Washington Examiner, Real Clear Defense, CD Media, Armed Forces Press, Patriot Post, and Real Clear Policy. He is a co-author of Don’t Give Up the Ship.
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