Product Description

The nationally bestselling author of Race and Culture and Inside America presents a devastating examination of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past 30 years, whose defects have led to crises on education, crime, and family dynamics, "An important and incisive book."--New York Times Book Review.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41990 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 305 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this broadside against the received wisdom of America's elite liberal intelligentsia, noted conservative Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, offers some strenuous arguments as well as fuzzy generalizations. Thus, his attacks on the war on poverty, sex education and criminal justice policies forged in the 1960s counter some slippery rhetoric by their defenders, yet his suggestion that these policies exacerbated things is questionable. Sowell deconstructs how statistics can be distorted to prove assumptions (that lack of prenatal care is the cause of black infant mortality) and gleefully skewers "Teflon prophets" such as John Kenneth Galbraith (who said that big companies are immune from the market) and Paul Ehrlich (who said starvation loomed). While "the anointed" favor explanations that exempt individuals from personal responsibility and seek painless solutions, those with the "tragic vision" see policies as trade-offs. Sowell scores his targets for disdaining their opponents, but this book also invokes caricature-these days, many of "the anointed" are less unreconstructed than he assumes. Conservative Book Club and Laissez-Faire Book Club selections.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ever the contrarian, this time Sowell targets the rhetorical methods liberals use to support their views of social issues. Usually, they frame a crisis to which the well-educated, articulate liberal, ruthlessly disparaged by Sowell as the "anointed," offers a categorical solution. To reach the solution, the liberal resorts to argumentative means that Sowell regards as fallacious. Examples he cites are the "Aha!" statistic in which condition A (say, infant mortality) is claimed to have cause B (inadequate budgets for prenatal care); or the assertion of a policy preference as a right, which is how a federal judge ordered a public library to allow an odoriferous, boisterous vagrant to roam the stacks--so that he could exercise his "right to receive ideas." These means defend a worldview of perfectible man that Sowell contrasts with the "tragic" view, stemming from human fallibility. Sowell's targets will find his criticisms irksome, if even worthy of their notice, but avid conservatives, for whom Sowell is a true-blue intellectual force, will certainly seize upon his analysis for succor. Gilbert Taylor

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Are people missing the books bigger message?
It is very rare that I will write more than one review for a book. I wrote one for "Vision of the Annointed" a few years ago, and is by now burried in the heap of 5 star reviews below. In it, I praised Sowell for walking us through some of the rhetorical tricks used predominantly by the left wing (though since reading the book, I've become sensitive to the 'right' using similar arguments). I stand by that review. So why am I writing a new one?

I've recently picked up the book again after 2 or so years and have read through some - not all - of the chapters again and...it really hit me. The most important thing about this book is not simply the 'expose of the left'; rather, the predominant message seems to be about how the left (and I would argue, the right) ignore why 'tradeoffs' have to be made.

To put it more philosophically, the politicians dream is the policy that has no downsides. Sowell realizes that in a nation of many millions, every policy has negatives and that politicians should, instead of being focused on perfection, should be focused on taking the most gain for the least loss. This, Sowell says, is capitalism and markets. Yes, there are some losers. But there will be more winners and less losers through markets than there will through a regulatory state.

Now, let's put Sowells argument into modern context (the issue that made me pick the book up again). Lately, companies have been moving overseas and this, says the dems (and to a lesser degree the reps) is a problem. The solution being proposed? Let's pass laws to keep them here. The problem with that is that it ignores the real problem (by refusing to look at tradeoffs). The real reason companies have been moving is that they are so regulated both in what they can produce and how much it costs to hire workers (what, with minimum wages, increased benefits and such). Liteally, any company that didn't go overseas where they can produce cheaper goods with more freedom would be a fool. So there you have a Sowellian dilemma: either we can keep wages extraordinately high and regulations tight, while accepting the fact that companies are going to move in revolt, or we keep more companies here by accepting a bit of deregulation and decrease in payroll expenditure. WE CAN'T HAVE BOTH even though BOTH parties are trying to deny economic fact in favor of utopianism by telling us that we can. (This, of course, is not an example Sowell gives in his book, but the idea is there throughout the chapters, the one on how Nader hurts consumers being one of the best).

My point in this is simply to give a taste of what Sowell's big point is (one that I think has been lost in the excitement of bashing lefties). My first review also failed to pick it out through the excitement but the more I think about what is wrong with much policy today, the more I'm convinced that Sowell pegged it here: good gains require a willingness to take small losses.

Dr. Sowell incisively analyzes left wing group think
Thomas Sowell demonstrates how anti-intellectual the current intelligensia are and how closed minded. When good intentions are more important than outcomes, a closed belief system results, insulated from real world feedback, with catastrophic results.

Modern political discourse has degenerated into name-calling ("mean-spirited," "reactionary," "racist") without reference to actual merits of a proposed course of action. Until I read Dr. Sowell's discussion of "mascots" and the "benighted," I never understood why organizations like the ACLU display the most passion of the behalf on those who exhibit the most anti-social behavor (Nazis marching in Skokie, drunks yelling obscenities at ballball games): Now I do.

Dr. Sowell's description of the genesis of government "solutions" (a phony crisis, a proposed program whose critics are shouted down and a retroactive redefinition of the program's goals when the critics prove correct) was also a revelation. Read this section and then turn to any N.Y. Times article discussing either global warming or the gender "wage gap" to see this cycle in action today.

If you read the book (and I highly recommend it), look at the Kirkus Review of it for an example of what Dr. Sowell is talking about. Isn't funny how articulate liberal writers are "passionate" and articulate conservative writers are "venomous?"

Won't be read by those who need it most
Ever wonder why liberals are so emotionally in favor of gun control even though it's a conclusive fact that gun control doesn't reduce gun violence? Or why they support the bilingual education programs that do so much damage to immigrant children? Or why they favor rent controls that make housing unavailable to the poor people for whom they supposedly have so much sympathy? Or why they want to make it illegal for a person to be employed if (s)he lacks the skills to do more than $7 worth of work every hour?

If the motives of liberals were truly what they say they are, then these positions would never gather the support that they now enjoy from the liberal community. Liberals are not uninformed; they read the same books, newspapers and academic journals as conservatives or libertarians. So why do they so consistently advocate policies whose results are demonstrably contrary to the results they claim to want?

Sowell explains the answer in this wonderful book. The reason, he says, is that the real motives of liberals have nothing to do with the welfare of other people. Instead, they have two related goals: first, to establish themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rather distasteful population of common people, and second, to gather as much power as possible to tell those distasteful common people how they must live their lives. If a policy moves them closer to those two goals, they will find a reason to advocate it, regardless of how harmful the consequences of that policy may be.

Once you read this book, the dishonest posturing of liberals becomes far more understandable. They engage in a preposterous circular argument: They are wiser and more moral than others because they "understand" the need for the policies they advocate. In turn, those policies are the correct policies because they are advocated by the wiser and more moral members of society!

Many of Sowell's conclusions have become clear to me from personal experience. I recall attending a town meeting with a congressman in the early 80's, at which a pompous ass stood up and delivered a long diatribe on American policy in Nicaragua, ending with a rhetorical question about what "people of conscience" were going to do about those terrible policies. "People of conscience", by his definition, were the people who agreed with his beliefs regarding Nicaraguan policy. (Apparently the Nicaraguans themselves had no conscience, since at the first available opportunity they threw out the Sandinista government that he so fervently supported.)

When participating in a debate about gun control, the self-anointed liberals will assume without question that it is only the people who agree with their positions who care about children or violence. They assume without question that only narrow-minded chauvinists oppose bilingual education. They assume without question that only racists oppose racial discrimination (which they have renamed "affirmative action"). They assume without question that the people who feed and clothe them, who build their homes and cure their diseases, are engaged in a process of greed and exploitation - but that people who make their living by telling others what to do, and who get paid for doing so with money confiscated forcibly from those who earned it, are engaged in "public service".

Few liberals will read Sowell's book, because almost all liberals lack the moral and intellectual courage to confront their own motivations. But those few who read it by mistake will find themselves deeply pierced. Liberals are so accustomed to being able to bully their opponents with name-calling and preemption of the entire vocabulary of debate, that they scream with fury when their pretenses are stripped away.

Having said all that, I have to admit that a couple of previous reviewers are right when they accuse Sowell of ignoring the propensity of conservatives to sometimes engage in the same kind of sloppy thinking and self-serving prejudice which he attributes only to liberals. That criticism is fair; Sowell is a conscious partisan. It is only Libertarians (like me, of course! :-) ) who consistently stick to principle.