Thread by @ReformedTrader

1/ Maverick (Jason Riley)

"Thomas Sowell’s use of data to test theories and examine social phenomena is a distinguishing feature of his scholarship. The intellectual fads that often animate academics and the media carry little weight with him." (p. 7)

amazon.com/Maverick-Biogr…

2/ "Sowell was born in rural North Carolina in 1930 to a family with no electricity or running hot water. His father died before he was born and his mother, a maid, passed away giving birth to his younger brother a few years later.

3/ "The orphaned Sowell was taken in by a great-aunt, who hid from him the fact that he was adopted and had a sister and four brothers. The family relocated, first to Charlotte and later, when Sowell was eight, to New York’s Harlem neighborhood, where he was raised thereafter.

4/ "A bright student with a tumultuous home life, he was admitted to one of NY’s most competitive high schools but dropped out at 16. He left home after a magistrate labeled him a “wayward minor” and moved to a shelter for homeless boys, where he kept a knife under his pillow.

5/ "He took whatever jobs were available at the time—messenger, laborer—for a black high school dropout with few marketable skills. At one point he was so destitute that the foreman at a machine shop where he worked lent him money to buy food.

6/ "He didn’t earn a college degree until he was in his late twenties and had served in the Marines.

"His experiences gave him 'a respect for the common sense of ordinary people, a factor routinely ignored by the intellectuals among whom I would later make my career.' " (p. 3)

7/ "While other scholars ask what factors cause poverty, Sowell wants to know what circumstances lead to wealth creation. While others argue over how to explain economic outcomes among racial & ethnic groups, Sowell wonders why anyone should expect similar outcomes to begin with.

8/ "He has frequently sought answers to questions his academic peers were too skittish to ask.

"He and his colleagues would eventually collect seventy thousand IQ records from twelve ethnic groups going back fifty years.

9/ Sowell: “The pattern that emerged was that those ethnic groups which were in a similar situation to blacks, half a century ago, had very similar (sometimes lower) IQs. As their socioeconomic status rose over the decades, so did their IQs.” (p. 7)

Also:

https://twitter.com/ReformedTrader/status/1385661452866883587

10/ "Sowell has opposed affirmative action on the grounds that they not only haven’t helped the original intended beneficiaries—disadvantaged blacks—but have, in practice, led to slower black progress than we would have seen in the absence of such policies.

11/ "Yet in his estimation, this negative view of racial preferences is rooted in a much broader analysis of the trade-offs between individual liberty and state intervention." (p. 9)

12/ ...
“There is no empirical or logical basis for the assertion that comprehensive planning is necessary for material progress,” wrote Bauer.

Eventually, the conventional thinking in development economics began to bend Bauer’s way.
... (p. 17)

13/ "However plausible a theory may sound, what mattered most to Bauer was the accuracy of its predictions in the real world."

Sowell: “I myself started out on the left. The thing that saved me was that I always thought facts mattered.“ (p. 19)

14/ "Sowell wasn't a big fan of the intellectual atmosphere at Harvard or Columbia. At Harvard, “smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic,” he recalled.

"It would be difficult to exaggerate the severity of the learning curve Sowell in college.

15/ "It’s not just that he hadn’t been a full-time student in almost a decade. He also was unfamiliar with the basics of the academy to a degree that was startling, but perhaps not unusual for someone who was the first in his family to reach seventh grade." (p. 21)

16/ "Graduate economics “is a technical field and not an ideological battleground,” he reasoned. “As I came to understand the Chicago views on economic policy, they seemed less and less like any conservatism that I knew about.”

17/ "Sowell would self-identify as a Marxist throughout his twenties. His senior thesis at Harvard was on Marxian economics, and his master’s thesis at Columbia was on Marxian business cycle theory." (p. 23)

18/ "Other schools didn't follow the Chicago model in stressing the use of microeconomics to investigate problems in the real world. Instead, most graduate schools emphasized mathematical economics with the goal of developing elegant theories, not testing their worth." (p. 29)

19/ "Stigler, who stood out for both his rigorous thinking and his clear writing, urged his students to test and verify even widely accepted beliefs under the assumption that the conventional wisdom was often wrong." (p. 32)

20/ Robert Lucas: “The quality of discussions in Friedman’s classes was unique in my experience.” These discussions often were structured as debates between the professor and the students.

"As a college professor, Sowell would adopt a similar approach toward his own students.

21/ Sowell: “My teaching was directed toward getting the student to think. The reading assignments often contained conflicting analysis of a given economic problem. Some students responded to this, but others found it very disconcerting.” (p. 34)

22/ Sowell: “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.” (p. 39)

23/ "What began his drift to the right was a summer job at the U.S. Dept. of Labor in Washington in the summer of 1960."

Sowell: "After a year at the University of Chicago, including a course from Milton Friedman, I remained as much of a Marxist as I had been before arriving.

24/ "However, the experience of seeing government at work from the inside and at a professional level started me to rethinking the whole notion of government as a potentially benevolent force.

"He started to wonder whether minimum-wage laws were pricing people out of jobs.

25/ "His coworkers, the department’s permanent staff, didn’t seem to care much either way."

Sowell: “It forced me to realize that government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of those for whom a program has been set up.

26/ “Administration of the minimum wage law was a major part of the Labor Department’s budget & employed a significant fraction of all the people who worked there. Whether or not minimum wages benefited workers may have been my overriding question, but it was clearly not theirs.”

27/ "It was this realization, not a lecture at Chicago, that made him “want to re-think the larger question of the role of government. The more government programs I looked into over the years the harder I found it to believe that they were a net benefit to society.” " (p. 41)

28/ "Sowell had been born into an extremely poor family in rural Gastonia, NC, during the Depression and raised in a NYC ghetto in the 1940s. Like other blacks of that time/places, his family was uneducated. Men worked as laborers or in the service sector; women were domestics.

29/ "Racist laws reduced opportunities for black Americans and limited upward mobility. Sowell had attended segregated schools & lived in segregated cities. He’d been turned away from restaurants and housing due to his skin color. He’d felt the humiliation of racism firsthand.

30/ "For Sowell, it was already clear that the pursuit of equal rights involved trade-offs. Time and resources directed at one thing leaves less time and fewer resources to direct at something else.

31/ Sowell: “Given all the urgent needs for better education & for all the things that can be obtained with the fruits of work skills and business experience, how much time & effort could be spared for campaigns to get into every hamburger stand operated by a redneck?” " (p. 48)