5/06/23
In a recent summary of Thomas Sowell’s contributions, my friends Brian Albrecht and Art Carden rectify the travesty known as “Sowell underappreciation.”
Underappreciated? Underrated? Doesn’t every “conservative” know of Thomas Sowell? Yes. And that may be part of the problem, according to Albrecht and Carden. They write:
“…within academic circles, he is too often seen as merely a popularizer of economics or, worse, just a political pundit.”
This is unfortunate due to Sowell’s sophisticated contributions to our understanding of culture, discrimination, slavery, dispersed and tacit knowledge, social theory, and the history of economic thought—all areas Albrecht and Carden highlight in their paper. Like P.T. Bauer, Sowell repeatedly emphasizes that prosperity, not poverty, must be explained.
On Sowell’s view of slavery, they write:
“Sowell has worked to understand general causes rather than specific causes. Something that has been a part of virtually every society, like slavery, cannot be the explanation for differences between those societies. European slave traders, colonizers, and imperialists did horrible things wherever they went, but this has been true of virtually every conquering group throughout history. If exploitation per se could explain how the West grew rich, it presumably would have happened somewhere else long ago.”
In Sowell’s own words:
“slavery was in fact one of the oldest and most widespread institutions on Earth. Slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus’s ships appeared on the horizon, and it existed in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for thousands of years. Slavery was older than Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity, and both the secular and religious moralists of societies around the world accepted human bondage, not only as a fact of life but as something requiring no special moral justification. Slavery was ‘peculiar’ in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which this nation was founded. Historically, however, it was those principles which were peculiar, not slavery.”
Another related contribution of Sowell’s has been his thinking about group differences. Again, Albrecht and Carden:
“He notes, in Race and Culture and elsewhere (Sowell 1994:3ff), that many of the pathologies we associate with American black culture are the inherited pathologies of Southern white culture, which are in turn the inherited pathologies of regions of Scotland and England from which Appalachian settlers came.”
All in all, Albrecht and Carden pack a lot into a short piece. So much of what makes Sowell fascinating and important is here: His deep contributions in Knowledge and Decisions, his understanding of “middleman minorities,” his thinking about “worldviews,” all framed with a heavy dose of Sowell’s most memorable quotes.
“There are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs.”
“The first rule of economics is scarcity. The first rule of politic is is ‘ignore the first rule of economics.’”
Read the whole thing here.
It’s high-time the economics profession engaged in some serious Sowell searching.