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Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality — Transcript

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0:00- It happens to me all the time
0:02and it happened just this week.
0:04A young person I'd never met introduced himself to me
0:07and said that when he saw our guest today,
0:10on an earlier episode of this program,
0:12he felt he was seeing a man who knew how to think.
0:16Dr. Thomas Sowell on Uncommon Knowledge now.
0:20(classical music)
0:30Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.
0:31I'm Peter Robinson.
0:33Thomas Sowell has studied and taught economics,
0:36intellectual history, and social policy in institutions
0:39that include Cornell, Brandeis, UCLA, and Amherst.
0:42Now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
0:45Dr. Sowell has published more than a dozen books,
0:47including the classic a conflict of visions.
0:51Coming soon, a revised edition of his most recent volume,
0:54Discrimination and Disparities.
0:57Tom Sowell, welcome.
0:58- Thank you.
1:00- You grew up in Harlem, dropped out of high school
1:03to join the Marine Corps during the Korean War,
1:07received an undergraduate degree from Harvard,
1:09a masters from Columbia,
1:11and your doctorate from the University of Chicago.
1:15All of which pales by comparison with the fact
1:18that you once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
1:20(laughing)
1:22But during this period from Harlem
1:25to the University of Chicago,
1:28throughout your 20s you've said,
1:30you spent most of the decade of your 20s as a Marxist.
1:33- Yes.
1:35- Why?
1:35What was it...
1:37what was the attraction?
1:39- Well I guess I first was...
1:42very puzzled.
1:44See there's one little correction I would make.
1:46At age 16 I was a dropout, high school dropout,
1:51and I went to work full time as a Western Union messenger.
2:00- Delivering telegrams.
2:02- Delivering telegrams.
2:02- We better say that because there will be a generation
2:04that won't know what Western Union was, but go ahead.
2:06- Yeah that's true too.
2:09And so I were I worked in the area of Manhattan
2:12called Chelsea district,
2:14which is around 23rd Street, ninth Avenue,
2:16and at the end of the day
2:19I had several ways of getting back home.
2:21The easiest and fastest way was with a subway,
2:24which was a nickel in those days.
2:26When I was feeling flushed I might go for a bus for a dime
2:31and then when I was really getting reckless
2:34I would take the fifth Avenue bus,
2:36which was the elite of the buses for 15 cents.
2:40So I would walk over the fifth avenue,
2:42take that bus, and it would take me up
2:44through all the glamorous parts of fifth avenue,
2:48past the Empire State Building,
2:50past the great stores and things of that sort.
2:55And then on 57th Street it would turn
2:58and this is just a the elite part of town.
3:02- Sure, right there what park starts.
3:03- Yes and then...
3:05park starts at 59th.
3:07- Oh, sorry.
3:08- 57th that would turn over,
3:10again, the same kind of scene, pass Carnegie Hall.
3:13Columbus Circle, there was no Trump Tower at that time,
3:17and on up to about 72nd Street
3:20and out to Riverside Drive which is another elite area.
3:24So four miles after that you'd have all these
3:27wonderful luxury apartment buildings and so on.
3:30And finally around 129th, 30th street,
3:34it would go on a long viaduct
3:38and then he would do a right turn
3:40back into the occupied area
3:42and there you'd see the tenements.
3:45And I would wonder why is this?
3:48I mean, why this huge disparity?
3:50And there was nobody else,
3:53there was no other other explanation around.
3:56There was nothing there other than Marxism.
3:59I stumbled across, I had not read Marx,
4:03but I bought a secondhand pair, set of Encyclopedias.
4:09Small set for some ridiculously low price
4:13and there they met I looked up Karl Marx,
4:15I'd heard the name and the stuff that he said
4:18seemed to make sense.
4:21And later on I would get more and more into it.
4:27And the argument was that the rich had gotten rich
4:31by taking from the poor.
4:33And well that was one explanation, but what is interesting,
4:35there was no other explanation out there really.
4:38And that's true largely in our colleges/universities today.
4:42- But so by the time you went to Harvard undergrad,
4:45well so wait, you drop out at the age of 16,
4:48and you start reading Marx in your late teens.
4:52- I start reading Marx, yes, at age 19.
4:57- Age 19 and then you're in the Marine Corps
5:00for a couple years, what was it, two, three years?
5:03- Two years.
5:04It was actually one year, 11 months, and five days,
5:08but who's counting.
5:09(laughing)
5:10- So by the time you went to Harvard
5:13you had already become intellectually engaged with Marxism.
5:17- Yes.
5:18- And remained, and Harvard didn't talk you out of it
5:21and the study of economics at Harvard
5:23didn't talk you out of it,
5:24nor did getting a master's at Columbia,
5:26nor did getting a doctorate at Chicago
5:30dissuade you from Marxism.
5:31And you studied with Milton Friedman of all people,
5:34how could you have sat in Milton Friedman's classroom
5:36and remained a Marxist?
5:38- Some people are just stubborn.
5:39(laughs)
5:41But what really changed me
5:44was not the University of Chicago,
5:46it was my first job working in a professional capacity
5:51for the government.
5:52I was a summer intern.
5:53- This is after Chicago or?
5:55- No, no, while I was still a graduate student.
5:57- Got it.
5:58- And so during the summer vacation
6:00I worked in the US Department of Labor
6:03and I began to realize, a number of things,
6:06that the government is not simply the personification
6:10of the general will like Rousseau or others.
6:14The government is an institution,
6:15the government institutions
6:17have their own institutional interests.
6:20One involved in minimum wage law.
6:22I was a big supporter of that,
6:24but I also knew that there was an argument that minimum wage
6:27laws simply price low wage workers out of a job
6:30and my first assignment dealt with minimum wages
6:34in Puerto Rico and as I looked at the numbers,
6:38I would see as they would jack up the minimum wage,
6:40number of jobs would go down and so forth,
6:43but there were two explanations.
6:45One was that of the economists
6:46that you priced the people out of a job
6:49and the other was that were hurricanes
6:53that come through Puerto Rico, you see,
6:55during the sugar harvesting and therefore,
6:59and I was studying the sugar industry,
7:00and therefore it destroyed a lot of the crop,
7:03therefore you wouldn't hire as many workers.
7:05Now in Chicago I'd been taught that
7:06if there are two different theories,
7:08there should be some empirical evidence in principle
7:11that could distinguish what would happen under one theory
7:14from what would happen under the other.
7:16And so I wrestled with that for the most of the summer
7:19and one morning I came in and I said, I got it.
7:22We need a data on the amount of sugarcane
7:25standing in the fields before the hurricane struck
7:29and as I waited for the congratulations
7:31I could see stricken looks around me in the room,
7:34like this guy has stumbled on something
7:35that will ruin us all.
7:37(laughing)
7:40And they said well, we don't have those data.
7:42I said, oh, I'll bet the Department of Agriculture has it.
7:44He said, well, but that doesn't mean we have it.
7:48You'd have to have a request go off the chain of command
7:51to the Secretary of Labor.
7:53He would then confer it with the Secretary of Agriculture.
7:56It would come down the chain of command
7:58and the Department of Agriculture,
7:59whoever has those numbers and so on.
8:01I said, good, well they say a journey of a thousand miles
8:04begins with a single step
8:06so I will now submit my request to the Secretary of Labor,
8:09which I did.
8:10And I am still patiently awaiting this reply.
8:13(laughs)
8:15- And the institutional fear of the number was what?
8:17- Oh, the US Department of Labor
8:19administers the minimum wage law
8:21and the money and the careers of perhaps a third
8:26or some other significant percentage
8:28of the Labor Department's other sources
8:31come from administering the minimum wage law.
8:34One of the real forces of all this is
8:36that the law itself, section 4D I still remember,
8:40requires a Labor Department to study the employment effects
8:43of minimum wages and those studies are absolutely a farce.
8:47In fact some years after I left,
8:49I did an article saying why those studies were a farce
8:54and when I came back later on
8:56to the Labor Department to do some research,
8:57one of the older librarians who remembered me
9:00turn to the younger librarian and she said,
9:02this is the man who wrote that article
9:04that has everybody up in arms.
9:06(laughs)
9:08- So you began to be dissuaded of Marxism.
9:13- And of government in general
9:14because the government is not out there
9:18at the personification of the national interest.
9:21They have their own interests
9:23and the Labor Department's was clearly
9:24an interest in keeping the minimum wage,
9:27because that's their jobs and careers and power.
9:31- In your, which brings us if I may,
9:33to one of my favorite books, your 2000 book,
9:35this is a beat-up old copy.
9:37This book A Conflict of Visions.
9:40- Yes.
9:40- Which you published in 2007 and you layout, I'm sorry.
9:43- 1987.
9:44- I beg your pardon, 1987?
9:45- Reprinted in 2007.
9:47- Well beat up is this book, it turns out this is a reprint.
9:50Sorry, 1987.
9:52And you lay out two competing ways of looking at economics
9:57and policy, really two competing ways of looking at life
10:00that go back at least 200 years.
10:02The constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.
10:06The constrained vision,
10:07I'm quoting from A Conflict of Visions
10:09sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited
10:13and unhappy choices available given the inherent moral
10:17and intellectual limitations of human beings.
10:20Close quote.
10:22So the constrained vision understands itself as constrained
10:27by the limitations of reality itself.
10:29- Yes.
10:30- That's correct?
10:31- Yes.
10:33In other words, they cannot proceed as so many do
10:36that good things happen automatically,
10:38but bad things are somebody's fault.
10:41- Got it, got it, and then to continue here,
10:44the constrained vision,
10:45again quoting from A Conflict Of Visions,
10:48for the amelioration improvement of the human condition,
10:52the constrained vision relies on
10:55certain social processes such as moral traditions,
10:58the marketplace, or families.
11:01Not government.
11:03So explain that.
11:05Why do we rely on on processes rather than
11:10the will of the people instituting changes
11:13to improve our condition?
11:15- Well it doesn't ignore government.
11:18Even for the market the work you have to have a government,
11:22as Europe discovered when the Roman Empire collapsed
11:26and the economy has collapsed also.
11:30But I guess one of the reasons would be
11:34with the government you have surrogate decision makers
11:37and they cannot possibly know as much
11:39as the individuals whose personal decisions
11:42have been preempted.
11:44- I see, I see, all right.
11:46Which brings us to the unconstrained vision.
11:48When again, I'm quoting you,
11:50when Rousseau said that man is born free
11:53but everywhere in chains,
11:55he expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision,
11:58in which the fundamental problem is not nature
12:01or man but institutions.
12:03Would you explain that one?
12:05- Well he has the notion that, again,
12:08that good things happen naturally
12:10and if they're bad things it's because
12:13institutions including civilization itself
12:16have have made these bad things happen.
12:18And I think that that's really the implicit assumption
12:23behind a lot of things that are said on the left today.
12:26And why in my most recent book I go to a lot of trouble
12:30to show that in nature there is nothing
12:34resembling equal opportunity.
12:36That wherever you look around the country,
12:39around the world, you find people
12:42who live up in the mountains poor and backwards,
12:45even in the richest countries.
12:47Including the United States.
12:49I believe the poorest country in the United States,
12:52county rather, was in a mountain community,
12:57which was almost 100% white.
13:00- Somewhere in Appalachia, West Virginia, Southern Ohio.
13:03- Yes and men in that county had a life expectancy
13:0810 years less than men in a county in Virginia.
13:16- And the unconstrained vision says let's fix that.
13:20Surely we can pass a law that would improve that
13:23and the constrained vision says well now wait a moment,
13:25if people who live in isolated pockets in mountains
13:29are poor and backwards all around the world
13:33and we see this pattern over and over and over again,
13:35maybe there's something very deeply rooted in reality
13:38about that that's hard for us to get at.
13:41Correct?
13:42- Yes.
13:43- All right.
13:44So in the book of A Conflict of Visions,
13:48you're very dispassionate and very analytical
13:51and you lay out the unconstrained vision
13:54and you lay out the constrained vision
13:56and you don't really come out blazing
14:00in favor of one or the other.
14:02- That is not a book meant to commit to
14:05show one vision is better than the other.
14:09It's there to show you what what they are
14:11and what you're assuming if you go one direction or another.
14:15It's to encourage people to understand
14:17the implicit assumptions behind all this
14:20without which you're just loose ends.
14:24- All right.
14:25So pondering all this I noticed something,
14:29a column that you wrote, this is a couple years ago,
14:33in which you rebutted Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times
14:36and Kristof had ascribed the gaps
14:39between African-Americans and whites in America,
14:42gaps in wealth, gaps in educational achievement,
14:44the usual gaps and this is a quotation from Kristof,
14:48to the lingering effects of slavery, close quote.
14:51- Oh yeah.
14:52- And here's Tom Sowell, quote,
14:55if we wanted to be serious about evidence,
14:59we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years
15:02after the end of slavery with where they stood
15:04after 30 years of the liberal welfare state.
15:07In other words, we could compare hard evidence
15:10on the legacy of slavery with hard evidence
15:13on the legacy of liberals.
15:15Close quote.
15:16And so there it is, life is hard.
15:18You use the word hard, you use the words serious,
15:22you use evidence.
15:24Tom Sowell is a man of the constrained vision
15:27through and through and through, correct?
15:28- Yes.
15:29- No, no...
15:31- Yes.
15:32Part of a vanishing breed I might add.
15:35- So when you were a Marxist, explain that,
15:41because the Marxism...
15:42- Well but no, no.
15:43- So that's complicated.
15:45- Even when I was a Marxist,
15:46I had the same intellectual standards
15:48and that's what eventually led me away from it.
15:51- Oh, I see.
15:52- In other words I hadn't done all the research,
15:55I hadn't gone around the world--
15:57- Looking for evidence.
15:58- Yes, yes.
15:59- Okay so...
16:01- And so socialism is a great idea.
16:03That does not mean it's a great reality.
16:05One of the things that disturbs me tremendously is about
16:09this enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and socialism
16:13at a time when people are literally starving in Venezuela,
16:16an oil-rich country.
16:19And you know they're breaking into grocery stores
16:23to try to get food and they're fleeing
16:25to neighboring countries,
16:27most of which are not all that prosperous themselves,
16:30but at least you don't starve to death in them.
16:33And none of that makes a bit of difference.
16:35I don't think most of these people who are out there
16:38cheering for Bernie Sanders
16:39have given a thought to Venezuela.
16:42- To the evidence.
16:43- That's right.
16:45- Which brings us to something that you refer to
16:50in a number of columns as the retrogression.
16:53The experience of African-Americans in this country.
16:56Economic progress, I'm quoting you.
16:59Despite the grand myth that black economic progress
17:01began or accelerated with the passage of the
17:04Civil Rights laws and the 'War on Poverty' programs
17:07of the 1960's, the fact is that the poverty rate
17:10among blacks fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960,
17:15but over the next 20 years the poverty rate among blacks
17:19fell another 18% points.
17:21This was just the continuation of a previous economic trend,
17:25but at a slower rate of progress.
17:28It was not some grand deliverance.
17:32Close quote.
17:34That is so counter to what we are taught in school,
17:40what appears on the editorial pages of newspapers.
17:43(laughs)
17:44I feel as though I want to ask you,
17:46you really want to stick with that assertion.
17:49- I have more evidence in my most recent book,
17:54Discrimination and Disparities,
17:56I point out that this really is a pattern
17:57not peculiar to blacks or even to the United States,
18:00but you can see the same thing in England.
18:03You can see it in any number of other countries,
18:05that the poor we're much worse off economically.
18:09Let's say on the first day after the 20th century
18:11and yet the in terms of their own behavior
18:14they were far more decent societies.
18:19And afterwards, after this welfare state,
18:25they're supposed to make them better off,
18:26and better human beings.
18:28That's when the crime rates skyrocketed
18:31on both sides of the Atlantic.
18:33The British were famous for being
18:36perhaps the most polite, considerate society in the world
18:42prior to that.
18:44After that, you get things like the 2011 riots over there.
18:48Went through London Manchester
18:50where they anticipated Ferguson and Baltimore
18:58by a few years.
19:00And the same things, the burning down of buildings,
19:04the throwing of gasoline bombs at police,
19:06the whole schmear and none of those people
19:09were descendants of slaves.
19:12- So poor people were doing things,
19:15the lesson of the 20th century is something like
19:18poor people, including in this country African-Americans,
19:21we're improving their lot
19:22and leading fundamentally decent lives
19:24until the government decided to help them?
19:27- Yes.
19:28- That's a fair statement.
19:30- They're better off economically
19:33because of what's been given,
19:35but of course when you have the crime rate,
19:39I mean I got I got the first inkling of this some years back
19:43when I was a at some school in Harlem doing some research
19:46and I looked out the window and I mentioned in passing
19:50that when I was a little kid
19:51I used to walk my dog in that park
19:54and looks of horror came over the students faces.
19:57Nobody in his right mind would have a child
20:01going to that park walking a dog or not.
20:05The principal was warning these students
20:07not to cross this park,
20:09which is about a block a half wide.
20:11Even in groups of six.
20:13And when I tell them about how in these hot summer nights
20:17I would sleep out on the fire escapes in Harlem,
20:21they looked at me like I was a man from Mars.
20:23People were are doing that all over New York.
20:26They were doing it in Philadelphia, Washington,
20:28wherever I've known people.
20:29That was a common thing.
20:31We didn't have the money for air conditioning.
20:33You slept out and on a fire escape or in the parks.
20:37Where Walter grew up in a--
20:38- Walter Williams.
20:39- Walter Williams grew up in a housing project
20:43in Philadelphia.
20:44He was saying on the hot summer nights the people would be,
20:47in this project we had little balconies,
20:49they'd sleep out on the balconies
20:50and the ones on the first floor who didn't have balconies
20:53would sleep out in the yard.
20:55And that there were old men who you could see sit
20:58on a hot summer night sitting outdoors
21:00into the wee hours playing cards or checkers or whatever.
21:04it was a different world.
21:07- It was a safe world.
21:09- Infinitely safer.
21:10- Now what about family structure?
21:12Tom again, I'm quoting you.
21:14Most black children were being raised in
21:15two-parent families in 1960.
21:1730 years after the liberal welfare state,
21:19the great majority of black children
21:21were being raised by single parents.
21:23What's the, how does that,
21:25by the way we should note that Patrick Moynihan
21:30publishes the Moynihan report in 1965
21:34and he's alarmed because the illegitimacy rate
21:37among black families is 25% then.
21:41Now among whites it's over a third,
21:44Hispanics it's over half and among African-Americans
21:47it's over 70%.
21:49What's going on there?
21:50- Well this is again, this too,
21:52you find the same thing in Britain,
21:54you find it in France and Norway,
21:56you find it in the Western world.
21:59In fact--
22:00- Their dissolution of the family structure.
22:01- Oh yeah, there are a number of Western nations
22:05where 40% of the children are raised with only one parent.
22:09At the extremes, I compared Asian countries.
22:15At the extremes Iceland, it's two out of three children
22:19are born are raised in single-parent home.
22:22In South Korea is one out of 66.
22:25- Wow.
22:27Wow and so that's the welfare state?
22:30- [Tom] Yes.
22:32- It is.
22:33- You're creating a situation where the...
22:36first of all, well you're creating a situation
22:41where if the man stays there,
22:43the government will not give the woman welfare
22:46and if he leaves he it will.
22:50And so they're paying,
22:51when you pay people not to get married,
22:54more people don't get married.
22:55- Right, right.
22:58Okay so what would have happened
23:00if Lyndon Johnson instead of becoming a liberal
23:04had remained a crusty tough skeptical Texas conservative,
23:09which is certainly the way he started his career.
23:11If Lyndon Johnson had embraced the constrained vision
23:15instead of instituting the war on poverty
23:18and the Great Society and so forth,
23:20what would the country look like today?
23:21- A lot better.
23:22You would not have the same rates of crime and so on
23:25because you see, you can't have a welfare state
23:28in a democratic country
23:29unless you first have a welfare state vision
23:32and when you buy all the assumptions of that vision,
23:36then you're buying a lot of trouble.
23:37One of the episodes I think epitomized,
23:40it was in France in this case,
23:42that there were knife attacks by various people
23:44from North Africa against Chinese people
23:47in some suburb of Paris.
23:49And one of the things that the attacker said,
23:53you know, why are you attacking the Chinese?
23:57And it wasn't because anything the Chinese had done to them.
23:59He said they have nice clothes and big cars,
24:02that's not fair.
24:04I mean that's you know,
24:06egalitarianism as a philosophy is one thing
24:09but the actual consequences of it
24:12mean things like resenting other people's good fortune.
24:16- All right so one response to the gap,
24:20again I return to this gap between African Americans
24:24and other Americans.
24:26Affirmative action.
24:27Which brings us back to your alma mater, Harvard.
24:31According--
24:32- I'll never live it down.
24:33- You'll never live it down, yes.
24:35You once told me that the principle benefit
24:37of a Harvard degree was never again
24:39having to be impressed by anybody who had a Harvard degree.
24:42(laughing)
24:42- Absolutely.
24:43- These are figures that were published
24:46in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
24:48In the Harvard class of 2019,
24:50these are the kids will be graduating next June,
24:52the average SAT score for black students was 2149.
24:56By the way these are all good scores,
24:58but for black students 2149, white students 2218,
25:02Asian students 2300.
25:05Well now that must be reasonable
25:07because it's taking place at Harvard, the seat of reason.
25:11- Well that wasn't quite how I described it
25:14when I was there.
25:16- Affirmative action.
25:18Is that...
25:19we ought not to be doing this?
25:21- There are various laws and policies
25:25that benefit in one group at the expense of another
25:27ut I think affirmative action has the distinction
25:31of being one that it harms everybody
25:33though in different ways.
25:35And so there's a lot of evidence that there are black kids
25:41who have all the qualifications to be successors in college,
25:44who nevertheless are failures
25:46because they are systematically mismatched with institutions
25:50whose standards they don't meet.
25:52Even though they may meet the standards of 80
25:54or 90% of the colleges in America.
25:57I remember I was first aware of this
25:59when I was teaching at Cornell
26:00and I found a half the black students at Cornell
26:03were on some kind of academic probation.
26:05And so I went over to the administration building
26:07to look up the SATs of these students.
26:09The average black student at Cornell at that time
26:12scored at the 75th percentile.
26:15- Which is pretty darn good.
26:16- Yes and so that means that in most colleges
26:20in this country they would have no trouble
26:22and many of them would be on the Dean's List.
26:24But at Cornell, the average a liberal arts student
26:27at that time was in the 99th percentile
26:30and when you're teaching students like that,
26:34you teach at a pace that most people of any race
26:38cannot keep up with.
26:40It was always complained that I was assigning
26:43all kinds of reading but heck,
26:46I'm teaching kids who are in the top 1%,
26:48they can keep up with the reading that I'm assigning.
26:52- So Cornell was taking very talented black kids
26:54and spending four years teaching them to feel inadequate.
26:57- Yes and succeeding at that.
27:01- A couple quotations.
27:03These are both from the last affirmative action case
27:05to reach the Supreme Court,
27:06last big affirmative action case to reach the Supreme Court.
27:092003 Grutter versus Bollinger.
27:12Here's the majority opinion,
27:13which was written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,
27:15quote: "The court expects that 25 years from now
27:20the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary."
27:24This upholding the use of in a decision, 5-4 decision,
27:27upholding the use of racial preferences.
27:30Now, that's quotation one.
27:31Here's quotation two, Justice Thomas.
27:33Justice Clarence Thomas in a dissent.
27:36Quote: "I believe that blacks can achieve
27:39"in every avenue of American life
27:42"without the meddling of university administrators.
27:45"The Court holds that racial discrimination
27:47"and admissions should be given another 25 years.
27:50"While I agree that in 25 years these practices
27:53"will be illegal, they are illegal now."
27:56(laughing)
27:58Close quote.
27:59So here's...
28:03what do you do with the argument
28:05that Justice O'Connor writing that majority opinion,
28:08there's something of the constrained vision there.
28:10Look we have these, all universities across the country
28:13are using these racial preferences
28:15as the basis of admission.
28:18The best we can hope to do is tell them
28:20they ought not to be doing it.
28:22That they should be developing other standards
28:24and give them a clock.
28:26(laughing)
28:27Is that a reasonable thing to do?
28:29- No, but it's a universal thing to do.
28:32I wrote a book about affirmative action,
28:35it was called Affirmative Action Around The World
28:37and I made a couple of international trips
28:40at the expensive of Hoover Institution
28:42around the world to check out affirmative action.
28:44This is one of the most common arguments.
28:47It is absolutely fallacious time and time again.
28:50The argument like so much in the unconstrained vision,
28:53it assumes that we have a power that we do not have,
28:57cannot have, and never have had.
28:59In England there was a man named Scarm
29:02and it was saying for the now we must do this in order.
29:05And in many countries these programs was set up
29:09with an actual cutoff date,
29:12so it was set up in Malaysia with a cut-off date
29:15I think of around 1990 and in Pakistan
29:19it was supposed to go for 10 years.
29:22None of those cut off dates has meant a thing.
29:27These programs not only continue, they increase.
29:30They spread.
29:32So the idea that you can control the future
29:35because of these wonderful sounding words.
29:38I can't think of a country in the world
29:41where that's ever happened.
29:43In the case of Pakistan,
29:45they did have an actual cutoff date
29:48and because people in the East Pakistan were,
29:51for whatever historical reason,
29:53way behind the people in West Pakistan,
29:55and so there's these preferences with East Pakistanis.
29:59Now before time for this thing to expire.
30:01The East Pakistanis succeed from Pakistan
30:04and form of a new nation to Bangladesh.
30:07And the preferences continued right on
30:10because there were other groups had been added to it
30:12and so once you get the constituency,
30:14you can't say no to them.
30:17It is an argument that has never worked out
30:22anywhere that I've been able to check.
30:24- All right.
30:25So Tom Sowell says no to the welfare state,
30:28no to affirmative action.
30:30What is to be done?
30:32And now you were kind enough to share with me
30:35the galleys of your forthcoming edition of
30:37Discrimination and Disparities.
30:39Let me give you a few quotations from
30:42some of the new chapter in that book.
30:44Quote, "The poverty rate among black married couples
30:49"has been less than 10% every year since 1994.
30:53"As far back as 1969, young black males
30:56"whose homes included newspapers, magazines,
30:58"and library cards had similar incomes
31:01"to those of their white counterparts.
31:03"Academic outcomes show a pattern of disparities
31:06"similar to the pattern of disparities
31:08"in the amount of time devoted to school work.
31:13"Apparently lifestyle choices have consequences."
31:18Close quote.
31:19So this is the constrained vision once again.
31:22Welfare state that's government, we don't rely on that.
31:26Affirmative action, government, we don't rely on that.
31:30We rely on hard work.
31:32We rely on the institution of marriage.
31:35That's correct?
31:38- Yes, in other words these things
31:39and I don't think it's the marriage as such,
31:42the library cards as such.
31:44It's that there are lifestyle choices that have been made
31:47and the comparison I made was between,
31:49if you look at the poverty rate among blacks,
31:52it was a 22% and among whites was 11%,
31:56but among black married couples it was 7.5%.
31:59So not only do better than blacks as a whole,
32:03they do better than whites as a whole,
32:05and so it's lifestyle choices.
32:08Similarly with the results and some of these
32:11more successful charter schools
32:13that you have these kids not only meeting
32:16but exceeding the national standards
32:19in places like Harlem and in the South Bronx.
32:23And these are not kids who are skimming the cream.
32:27They're kids chosen by lottery.
32:29They don't even test them for ability.
32:32They don't even look at their academic records.
32:34They take it into the schools
32:35and they and they have hard work
32:37and they make it clear at the outset
32:39and they don't tolerate a lot of nonsensical behavior
32:42and these kids are doing incredibly.
32:45- So Tom, here...
32:47Again, I think back to the Moynihan,
32:50well no I think the Moynihan report in '65,
32:53and he was very alarmed by the illegitimacy rate
32:57of 25% among African-Americans.
32:59By the way in fairness to the late Moynihan,
33:01we should point out, one reason he was alarmed by this
33:04was his own father had walked out on the family
33:06when he was 10 years old.
33:07He experienced what it meant to be two kids
33:11to have one parent.
33:12Okay and now it's all gotten dramatically worse
33:15for whites and Hispanics and blacks, for everybody.
33:18And then I think back beyond that
33:21to your experience of Harlem.
33:24You drop out of high school and do what?
33:27Go on welfare?
33:29Start cashing, no.
33:31You went to work and you spent some of that money
33:34to buy some inexpensive Encyclopedias.
33:38And Harlem was so...
33:40but I feel this counsel, it's almost a counsel of despair
33:46in that world just seems so utterly vanished.
33:50- No question.
33:51- So your argument is if we can stand up
33:54to the welfare state, we can somehow get back to that world,
33:58a family family structure will reassert itself?
34:01- That that's gonna be reconquering the same ground,
34:06which is very tough to do but it can be done.
34:09I was so lucky at the time I had no clue about all this.
34:15I left home in 1948,
34:19many decades later I learned that the unemployment rate
34:25among black teenagers in 1948 16, 17 year olds was 9.4%.
34:33Among whites the same age it was 10.2%.
34:37So both blacks and white teenagers had only a fraction
34:41of the unemployment that they have today.
34:44- You were expected to work,
34:45you were expected to be able to get a job.
34:47- And more importantly the jobs were there for you.
34:51And this is because of a fluke really.
34:55The minimum wage law in the United States,
34:58Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938
35:01was passed with specified rates of pay
35:04that you're supposed to get.
35:06Almost immediately inflation took off during the 1940s,
35:11so by 1948 those numbers were in the law were meaningless.
35:15- Oh I see.
35:16- In other words when I started out
35:19as a Western Union messenger,
35:20the minimum wage was 40 cents an hour.
35:23I started out at the bottom at 65 cents an hour.
35:27So it was the same as if there was no minimum wage
35:29and this is what happened, you had this,
35:31and I was so lucky, I of course,
35:33had no clue about any of this.
35:35Now a black kid 20 years later comes in there.
35:39People have become compassionate.
35:42They've raised the minimum wage.
35:44So he can't get a job.
35:46And I don't think it does any community any good
35:50to have a whole lot of teenage males
35:53hanging around on the streets with no job and nothing to do.
35:57- Right.
35:59Tom so...
36:00another thought here.
36:03You're describing a world, Harlem the urban world, gone.
36:08But you made visits when you were young,
36:10you knew the south as well, didn't you?
36:13You went back to the south when you were young
36:15from time to time?
36:16I said back to the south because as I recall
36:18you were born in the south.
36:19- Yeah, I went to New York.
36:21Yeah, well I think this was courtesy of the Marine Corps,
36:25which happened to locate the boot camp in South Carolina
36:28and had Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
36:31- So what I'm getting at is you were of the generation
36:33that saw Jim Crow with your own eyes.
36:36- Oh, no question, no question.
36:38- Okay.
36:39So well here's, let me read you a quotation.
36:42This is from a article that got a lot of attention
36:45in the Atlantic a couple years ago called
36:48The Case For Reparations by Ta-Nahesi Coates.
36:52Quote, "White supremacy is a force so fundamental
36:55"to America that it is difficult to imagine
36:58"the country without it.
37:00"Reparations is the price we must pay
37:02"to see ourselves squarely."
37:05Close quote.
37:06And Tom Sowell who actually saw Jim Crow with his own eyes
37:09and experienced it responds how?
37:11- It would be nice to know his evidence of what he said,
37:17just to be old-fashioned about it.
37:21No, it was a rotten system,
37:24but I don't know how we get from that to reparations.
37:28I mean what we see in the United States
37:31in terms of the bad things, you see all around the world.
37:36If you were to give reparations to everyone
37:39whose ancestors had been slaves,
37:41I suspect that you would have to give reparations
37:44to more than a half the entire population of the globe.
37:47Slavery was not confined to one set of races.
37:51I suspect that most of the people who either were slaves
37:54or slave owners around the world
37:56were neither white nor black.
37:59I mean this was this was a universal curse
38:01of the human species.
38:02- Africa, the Middle East, Asia,
38:04slavery took place everywhere.
38:06- And continued elsewhere long after it was abolished
38:11in the Western countries.
38:13- Let me try is sticking with Ta-Nahesi Coates.
38:18Shelby Steele talks about white guilt.
38:22And in Ta-Nahesi Coates you get
38:25almost the counterpart of that,
38:27a kind of African-American claim against the white guilt
38:31and this seems...
38:35beginning with the abolitionist,
38:36even beginning before the Civil War,
38:39you seem every generation there's some expression
38:43that racism and slavery as Shelby calls it,
38:47correctly of course, the sin of slavery is so deeply
38:51and it's something we still live with,
38:52how do we expiate it?
38:54How do we get past it?
38:55Is there something we can do
38:57to relieve ourselves of this legacy?
39:00- Oh, I'd like you to repeat
39:02If you were a slave owner,
39:04I don't see any reason why you should feel differently.
39:07On the other hand, I can't get over the idea of
39:10A apologizing for what B did.
39:13Even when their contemporaries much less
39:16when one is dead and the others alive.
39:21I mean Scalia I remember was saying you know,
39:24that I owe no man anything
39:27because people who look like me
39:30did something to people that look like him.
39:34- Okay, so just get past it.
39:36Get to work.
39:37- Yeah.
39:38- All right.
39:39Tom Sowell's view is get an education,
39:41stay married, and do your job.
39:43Roughly.
39:44- Yeah.
39:45- All right.
39:46- Charles Murray.
39:47You used to write a column every so often
39:48called Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene.
39:51So I'm giving you little snippets here of the Passing Scene
39:54in our final questions.
39:55Charles Murray in his 1984 book Losing Ground,
39:58and Charles Murray writes about discussions and academia
40:02and government about the effort to close the gap again
40:05between African-Americans and whites.
40:07Quote.
40:081984, quote, "White's had created the problem,
40:12"it was up to White's to fix it,
40:14"and there was very little in the dialogue
40:17"that treated blacks as responsible actors."
40:18Close quote.
40:20Has that changed?
40:21- No, it has not.
40:22- All right.
40:26On we go.
40:27(laughing)
40:28Your friend, your longtime friend Walter Williams,
40:31now we come to current politics.
40:33"The bottom line is that president Donald Trump
40:36"does not have the personal character
40:38"that we would want our children to imitate,
40:41"but save his misguided international trade policies
40:43"has turned out to be a good president."
40:47Tom?
40:49- I think his policies have by and large have been policies
40:52that were far better than that
40:54of previous Democratic or Republican administrations.
40:58I go by the consequences.
41:00- Okay.
41:01- I mean he hasn't produced the right rhetoric,
41:04but the fact is that unemployment among low-income people,
41:08black, Hispanic included, is at a level
41:12that is far lower than it's been in decades.
41:19The economy is booming in a way that no one had predicted.
41:23People like Paul Krugman was saying that when Trump gets in
41:28the economy is gonna tank.
41:29No, the economy to hit new highs.
41:33But there there are so many people
41:36among the intelligentsia especially
41:38who are absolutely immune to facts.
41:41It's as if they took their anti fact shots every year
41:44and the facts will just not affect them.
41:48- So this brings us back.
41:50I can understand, I mean I really can,
41:52my understanding is limited which is why
41:54I'm going to put this in the form of a question.
41:55I can understand the never Trumpers
41:58who don't bother me with economic boom
42:01because this man is on my television screen
42:03every single night and I can't stand him.
42:05I can understand, I can see that impulse.
42:07I can understand what they feel.
42:09- This second consecutive president United States
42:10that I automatically turn off when I'm watching television.
42:14- All right.
42:15Keep the remote right to next you.
42:16- Oh yeah.
42:17- Okay, who was the first?
42:18- Obama.
42:19- Got it.
42:20You're totally bipartisan in that regard.
42:22- Oh, always.
42:23No other way.
42:26But the great,
42:27the larger point that you've been making here,
42:29the Great Society, the war on poverty,
42:32this is now six decades of experience
42:36and we have, as you have said, the gap hasn't closed,
42:40we've got dissolution of the family structure,
42:43rising crime rates.
42:44That I don't understand.
42:46How can it be that the people...
42:50now I don't know how to remain bipartisan,
42:52but Democrats, liberals, the progressives,
42:55just are not...
42:57the evidence is in.
42:59This has not worked.
43:00Like after more than half a century
43:03there's still a refusal to look at the evidence.
43:05- Yes and has even a tendency to falsify the evidence.
43:10- And how come?
43:11- I think people become attached to a vision
43:16and that really walks the way they see...
43:20human beings have any enormous capacity to rationalize.
43:24- All right.
43:25Again, notes on the Passing Scene.
43:27An article from the New York Times
43:29just a couple of days ago, quote,
43:30now this is the longest quotation,
43:33but it's important to lay out the facts here.
43:34Over the last decade the charter school movement
43:36gained significant foothold in New York,
43:39the movement hoped to set a national example.
43:40If charter schools could make it in a deep blue state
43:43like New York that could make it anywhere.
43:45Over a 100,000 students in the city's charter schools
43:49are doing well on state tests
43:51and tens of thousands are waiting lists.
43:53But the election, the election of this November,
43:57suggested that the golden era of charter schools is over.
44:01The insurgent Democrats,
44:03Democrats did well across New York
44:05but especially in the state Senate,
44:06have repeatedly expressed hostility to the movement.
44:10Close quote.
44:11And Thomas Sowell responds to that set of facts how?
44:15- That really is one of the moral outrages
44:19that for many kids who were cut from a very poor background
44:24and who parents may not have had much education,
44:27a decent education is the one thing they have to have
44:30to have a better life.
44:32And these schools have been absolutely spectacular.
44:36- The charter schools.
44:37- The charter schools.
44:38The successful ones, now there are few that weren't.
44:42But for example a few years ago on a statewide,
44:48New York statewide math test,
44:50there was an elementary school grade four I believe
44:55in Harlem whose students passed those tests
44:58at a higher rate than any fourth grade kids
45:02anywhere in the state of New York.
45:04I mean we're talking Scarsdale, Briarcliff,
45:07places like that.
45:09The Success Academy schools as a whole,
45:16their students pass both the math
45:19and the English statewide tests
45:21at a higher rate than any school system,
45:25School District in the entire state of New York.
45:29The vast majority of the kids in the Success Academy schools
45:34are either black or Hispanic.
45:37If you look at the five highest-scoring district,
45:41school districts in the state in terms of
45:44the percentage of students who pass the math
45:47or the English tests, their average family income
45:53ranges from four times that of the kids
46:01in the success Academy Schools
46:03to more than nine times the family income of the kids
46:08in the Success Academy schools.
46:11And yet the mayor of New York is doing his darndest
46:14to put a stop to the expansion of schools in general
46:19but his special ire is aimed at the Success Academy schools.
46:24And this is happening all over the country.
46:26- Because they make the teachers unions look bad
46:28that run the public schools?
46:30What's the political motivation?
46:32Why would Mayor De Blasio have it out
46:34for the charter schools such a Success Academy?
46:36- Well the teachers union are the major reason
46:39and we're talking about the money they contribute,
46:42the number of votes they contribute,
46:45and the schools and what's happening again,
46:49not just in New York but other parts of the country,
46:51including California,
46:53is that they have all kind of chicanery
46:56to prevent this charter schools from expanding.
46:59That's why you have tens of thousands on the waiting list.
47:02It's not that the charter school is not willing to expand,
47:04but every conceivable obstacle is put in their way
47:07because if you let that go at the natural pace,
47:11it would be very hard for the public schools to compete.
47:14And one of the things they're doing is imposing
47:17the same kinds of restrictions on the on the charter schools
47:21that made this public school so bad.
47:24For example of restrictions on being able to get rid of
47:26kids who are running amok in this
47:29and ruining the education of everybody else
47:31and the charter schools don't tolerate that.
47:34The things that are tolerated
47:36in the public schools are unbelievable.
47:39- So when I asked you a moment ago
47:41how do we bring back the the standards of the Harlem
47:46in which you grew up, the answer is
47:47that's a hard thing to do but we do know
47:50how to do one thing.
47:51We do know how to establish schools
47:55where the kids in present-day Harlem have a shot,
47:57have a chance of getting a good education.
47:59- Yeah, you don't have to bring back the past,
48:01even if you could, because we have it in the present.
48:06We have this happening.
48:07- And so we know how to do that
48:09and the Democratic establishment in New York
48:11wants to shut it down.
48:12- Yes.
48:13- And the Republican establishment stands mute.
48:16- Stands mute.
48:20You know I love talking to you but I really don't know why.
48:23(laughing)
48:24It's all discouraging.
48:25Tom you mentioned a moment ago the way young Americans
48:31flocked to Bernie Sanders, Gallup poll this summer.
48:34The proportion of Americans aged 18 to 29
48:37that holds a favorable view of capitalism 45%.
48:41The proportion that holds a favorable view of socialism 51%.
48:45Now I would like you to take a look at a brief video
48:48of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who at the age of 29,
48:53calling herself a Democratic Socialist,
48:56has just been elected to the House of Representatives
48:59from New York and although she's not seated yet
49:02in the new Congress, she went to Washington
49:05and one of her first acts was to participate in a sit-in
49:08in the offices of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
49:14That is to say the leader of her own party.
49:17So here's a brief video.
49:19- I just want to let you all know how proud I am
49:22of each and every single one of you
49:25for putting yourselves and your bodies
49:28and everything on the line
49:31to make sure that you save our planet,
49:34our generation, and our future.
49:36It's so incredibly important.
49:39We have to get to 100% renewable energy.
49:44There is no other option.
49:46- Tom?
49:48(laughing)
49:49To her supporters, to us supporters of Bernie Sanders,
49:51to young Americans, what would you say?
49:54- I would say get some facts first,
49:57know what you're talking about
49:58before you start spouting out this kind of stuff.
50:01One of the things I do in a new new book is I suggest that
50:04there's a certain opinion about what happened in the 1920s
50:09where the taxes were cut,
50:11the highest tax rate was cut down from 73% to 24%
50:15and the argument was oh, this is tax cuts for the rich
50:18and I have suggested that students
50:20and that the secretary of the Treasury did this
50:24in support of us trickle-down theory and so forth.
50:26And I suggested to the students,
50:29would be a wonderful project to go read
50:30what the secretary of the Treasury actually said.
50:33- Andrew Mellon in the 1920s about these tax cuts.
50:36- And then go on the Internet
50:38and get the Internal Revenue official data
50:42on who paid how much taxes in the 1920s
50:45and it turns out if you do that you find that
50:47Andrew Mellon said the exact opposite
50:50of what is attributed to him in textbooks
50:54that have been sold widely for decades on end
50:58through successive editions.
51:02And what you'll find is that
51:05when the tax rate was a 73%, the people who are making
51:11over a hundred thousand dollars a year,
51:13and that's maybe a couple of million in today's money,
51:16paid 30% of the taxes
51:19and after the so-called tax cuts for the rich
51:22they pay 65% of all the taxes.
51:25And the people with incomes under $5,000,
51:28which is also was a nice income in those days,
51:31we're paying 15% when the tax rate was was cut
51:38but before the tax cut and after it was cut,
51:41they paid just under a quarter of 1% of all the taxes
51:45and so there's all kinds of indignation
51:49in these scholarly books,
51:50we're not talking about just political propaganda.
51:53How this is a bonanza for the rich and so on
51:57and people would ordinary income
51:59paid practically nothing in income tax after the tax cuts
52:02and the share of millionaires was I think 4% before that
52:08and and it was 19% afterwards.
52:12But the facts simply do not matter.
52:15They say these words, they say trickle down,
52:18and it's like saying abracadabra
52:21and all the miraculous things follow from that.
52:24- Tom Sowell author of a forthcoming edition
52:26of Discrimination and Disparities.
52:28Would you close by reading a brief quotation
52:31from your 1987 book, one of my favorites,
52:34A Conflict of Visions.
52:36- Logic of course is not the only test of a theory.
52:41Empirical evidence is crucial
52:43and yet social visions have shown a remarkable ability
52:47to evade, suppress, or explain away discordant evidence.
52:52Historic invasions of evidence are a warning, not a model.
52:57Dedication to a cause may legitimately entail
53:00sacrifices of personal interests
53:03but not sacrifices of mind or conscience.
53:06- Dr. Thomas Sowell thank you.
53:09- Thank you.
53:10- For Uncommon Knowledge the Hoover Institution
53:13and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
53:16(classic music)

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