Commentary - Sowell Economics
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This is a clip taken in 1972 of Ugandan citizens reacting to the expulsion of Asian Gujaratis in the country by Idi Amin. One citizen comments: “Asians are very shrewd people, and Africans have been denied opportunities.” Reminds me of this observation by Thomas Sowell: “Middleman minorities are most hated where they are most needed.”
Commentary - Sowell Economics194,962 görüntüleme • 1 gün önce
Uganda expelled the Gujaratis in the 1970s. They were “too wealthy” and controlled too much of the economy. They left with almost nothing. A few years later they were prosperous in England. Uganda’s economy collapsed. You can seize shops and inventory. You cannot seize the knowledge that built them. Human capital walks out the door. The buildings stay empty.
Commentary - Sowell Economics197,903 görüntüleme • 1 gün önce
Thomas Sowell on Paul Krugman’s favorite inequality talking point. Krugman claimed that between 1979 and 2005, median household income rose only 13 percent while the top 0.1 percent rose nearly 300 percent. America, he said, is no longer a middle-class society. Sowell’s response is immediate: “All I have to hear is the word household income, and I know we’re not serious.” Households are not the same size. The bottom 20 percent contain 39 million people. The top 20 percent contain 64 million. Households have been getting smaller over time. When a household drops from three working adults to two and still earns the same total money, that is not stagnation — it is a 50 percent rise in per capita income. Per capita income always means one person. Household income is a political metric, not an economic one.
Commentary - Sowell Economics373,153 görüntüleme • 11 gün önce
The press goes to the usual civil rights leaders (Vernon Jordan, Benjamin Hooks). Sowell’s difference is simple: he has no financial stake in the programs they defend. Those organizations depend on the money flowing from government. Whether the programs help blacks or harm them is secondary to keeping the funding. Sowell has more confidence in black people than the leaders do. He does not believe they need to be led by the hand or handed results by the state. Give the opportunity and they take it — as they always have.
Commentary - Sowell Economics128,987 görüntüleme • 5 gün önce
Nobody in the Arab world actually cares about the Palestinians. The Jordanians loathe them. The Egyptians loathe them. The Lebanese loathe them. Arab states have done nothing for them in 70 years. Yet the moment Israel acts, Muslims across the West flood the streets. Why? Because the real fuel is not Palestinian suffering — it’s hatred of Jews. That hatred hits something deeper than any other conflict.
Commentary - Sowell Economics488,870 görüntüleme • 19 gün önce
Victor Davis Hanson on why Sowell is finally winning: He was treated unfairly for decades by the intellectual class. Condescending, leftist reviews. Caricatures. Isolation. He never wrote a long rebuttal. He just kept writing — blunt, clear, Anglo-Saxon English. No fluff. Noun-verb-predicate. YouTube made him unstoppable. Now young men of every race are finding him like water in the desert. He overwhelmed his critics with the sheer power and volume of the work. And he was right.
Commentary - Sowell Economics277,415 görüntüleme • 13 gün önce
Stephen Kotkin explains the real reason Marxism keeps attracting intellectuals and young people, even after the body count. It is not because the theory works. It is because it offers something far more seductive: total, rapid transformation and a special role for the intellectual class. In a market system, ordinary people make their own decisions. Under Marxism-Leninism, the intellectuals get to make the decisions for everyone. They become the engineers of society. Workers and peasants are treated as people with “false consciousness” who need to be led. The ideology flatters the people who believe they are smarter than the rest of society. That is why the blood does not put them off. The power is worth the cost.
Commentary - Sowell Economics455,155 görüntüleme • 27 gün önce
Buckley asks Sowell why most black leaders ignore his kind of analysis. Sowell’s answer is blunt: They need political solutions to stay relevant as leaders — and victimization is the easiest explanation for failure. Then he drops the killer line: “Name me three Japanese American leaders.” No one can. Yet Japanese Americans advanced anyway. Leadership isn’t what moves groups forward. Skills and culture do.
Commentary - Sowell Economics107,705 görüntüleme • 9 gün önce
Roland Fryer ran the numbers on millions of police encounters. Low-level force showed some racial bias. People liked that finding. Police shootings showed none. He expected the opposite. He hired a second team of eight researchers and got the same result. Colleagues told him not to publish. “You’ll ruin your career.” They wanted the convenient half of the paper and the inconvenient half buried. He published both. Then he bought diapers with an armed guard.
Commentary - Sowell Economics113,780 görüntüleme • 10 gün önce
Sowell’s Detroit file is brutal. Every time the city hiked the income tax, revenues fell. People left. The tax base shrank. In 2008 Gibson asked Obama why raise rates on the rich when lower rates often bring in more money. Obama’s answer: social justice. Sowell’s translation: revenue is not the point. Getting voters angry at the rich is the point. Coleman Young won that game in Detroit. The city lost.
Commentary - Sowell Economics22,144 görüntüleme • 2 gün önce
Buckley describes Rand’s Saturday circle in New York. Eleven people. One of them was a young economist named Alan Greenspan. He calls Atlas Shrugged a thousand pages of ideological fabulism. He liked The Fountainhead. He had to force himself through the later book. Then National Review ran Whittaker Chambers’s review. Rand never forgave it. She banned the review from being mentioned in her presence. After that she would ask a host if Buckley was coming. If the answer was yes, she stayed home.
Commentary - Sowell Economics60,967 görüntüleme • 6 gün önce
Konstantin Kisin says the single most important idea he ever learned came from Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions. Only trade-offs.” You’re not going to “solve” climate change. You’re not going to “solve” the NHS. You’re not going to “solve” poverty or free speech. Every policy has a cost. The real skill is choosing which costs you’re willing to accept — and being honest about them. We’ve completely lost that ability.
Commentary - Sowell Economics141,615 görüntüleme • 22 gün önce
Sowell puts the socialist story to a one-question test. If the rich are rich because they keep the poor poor, then countries packed with billionaires should be packed with misery. The United States has more billionaires than Africa and the Middle East combined — and America’s poor still live better than most people in those regions. The theory fails the data. Wealth is created. It is not a pile the rich stole from the poor.
Commentary - Sowell Economics14,186 görüntüleme • 2 gün önce
King accuses Sowell of being used by Reagan to downplay race. Sowell’s reply: he has been saying the same thing for twenty years. He did not predict Reagan. Racism exists. He expects it to last as long as oxygen. The real question is how much of the income gap it actually explains.
Commentary - Sowell Economics19,706 görüntüleme • 3 gün önce
Hunter Maats on Joe Rogan explaining how Thomas Sowell has spent decades fighting racism — not by denying it exists, but by insisting culture matters more than most people want to admit. Joe Rogan He puts two groups of Black people side by side: West Indians (think Colin Powell) who succeed at high rates… and Southern African Americans whose communities struggle with education, violence, and poverty. Both groups endured slavery. Both face racism. So why the massive difference in outcomes? Sowell’s answer: Southern Blacks were largely stripped of their original African culture and absorbed the culture of the white Southern “rednecks” around them — the same low-trust, low-education, high-violence patterns. Even African American Vernacular English carries features from the West of England. Liberals hate this explanation. Sowell has never cared.
Commentary - Sowell Economics111,587 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Thomas Sowell: "I was just doing some research on Detroit and it's decline, as they kept raising the city income tax, the revenues kept falling. Barack Obama was asked by Charles Gibson in 2008, why he wanted to raise the tax rate because he will raise more revenue if he does the opposite, and his response was that, 'it's a matter of social justice'. He didn't care about the consequences. If he can get people to be mad at the rich and vote for him, it's a political success. He doesn't care whether the government collects more revenues or not."
Commentary - Sowell Economics309,700 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
The left’s real priority, exposed in one sentence. An MP attacked Margaret Thatcher over the “widening gap” between rich and poor. Her reply cut straight through the rhetoric: “He would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.” That’s the entire equality-of-outcome argument, said out loud. Not lifting people up — dragging others down so the gap looks smaller.
Commentary - Sowell Economics62,215 görüntüleme • 19 gün önce