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Rating:  -
Another great book by Thomas Sowell. I couldn't put it down and I look forward to reading it again. I found the analysis of pre-WWII France to be especially interesting.
As companions I also recommend "A Conflict of Visions" and "Black Rednecks, White Liberals."
Rating:  -
In this unbelievable book, Thomas Sowell has produced what must be the most incomplete discussion of modern U.S. History ever written. The book contains many factual errors and uses such lopsided statistics that one can get dizzy, even after the first chapter. I don't even know where to begin:
-Sowell implies that (liberal) intellectuals have great power and influence in our society. WAY off the mark. Big corporations, well-funded think-tanks and industry lobbying-groups call the shots in this age and Sowell knows it. To make matters worse, most think-tanks are either conservative or libertarian. Hardly a liberal arena....
-Sowell says that these intellectuals are "not accountable" for they propose or advocate. Well, neither are many OTHER folks in our society. (For-profit) doctors and hospitals for medical errors and wrongful deaths, Big Pharma for the very same reasons, accountants, CEOs and boards of directors for their company's profit-losses and/or stock collapse, big-money lawyers who sue without merit, etc., etc..
-And why *are* most college professors "liberal" ? Or at least "not conservative" ? Because they know the facts. Any honest teacher of history knows that the GOP has done little good for our country. The failed Presidents (Grant, McKinley, Harding, Hoover, Nixon, Bush I, Bush II, the stolen elections in the 1870s and 80s, the 1995-2007 Congress (very bad). And many other things...
-Sowell asks who the "robber barons" stole from, back in the 1800 and 1900s. How about the taxpayer - who paid for SUBSIDIES that went right into the rich-man's pockets.
-He mentions how the Ford Motor co. paid their employees well. Ya, 100 years ago ! How about since 1970 - where (national) wages have fallen 15%, adjusted for inflation. And this, in the age of RECORD corporate profits.
-The author blames the government (Pres. Hoover) for partially causing the Great Depression, by enacting tariffs. Actually, it was *business* that pushed for the protectionist bill...and Hoover simply went along with it. Over 1,000 economists (academics) urged Hoover NOT to sign the bill into law - but he did anyway....
-Throughout the book, Sowell (very carefully) doesn't mention the failed CONSERVATIVE intelligentsia. From Milton Friedman's market philosophies - being a big cause of the depression we're in now, to tax cuts "stimulating business investment", these ideas have been *disastrously* wrong...and have done great harm to our nation.
-Also, the for-profit "medical" intelligentsia - pushing for many tests, procedures and surgeries that have proven to be in-effective. Government simply goes along with what they want - they are the "experts", after all. But their ideas and theories have subsequently bankrupted our nation and contributed to what is likely the largest cause of death in the U.S. - the U.S. health care system.
-Sowell defends monopolies. Sure, they're not *all* bad...but too many are. From no-competition cable TV to Microsoft Windows to Frito-Lay, they routinely rip-off the American consumer. Or sell them low quality products. Take Frito-Lay - they don't have to make a good potato chip, since they control the market. So they make (cheap) chips that break. I get through about half a bag before I have to throw it out.
-On the Vietnam War, Sowell blames the liberal academia for our defeat there. Ouch ! To put it in perspective, there was concern that we didn't have enough troops in Iraq - with only 130,000 originally. This wasn't a problem in Vietnam - where we had (at one point) *500,000* troops in action. Plus heavy carpet-bombing throughout the (full) eight-year campaign - conservatives never got over the fact that we were ultimately defeated. But like always - they blame someone (or something) else....
-On gun rights, the author attacks liberals for advocating gun-control. This would have been a problem if they succeeded. BUT THEY DIDN'T: 35-40% of American homes contain a gun and there's no end in sight.
-Sowell attacks environmentalists for driving-up home prices. Maybe they did a little. But it's not even CLOSE to what *free-market* intelligentsia have done to home prices, since the 1990's !! Whether "securitizing" mortgage debt, removing capital-gains taxes on houses (causing "flipping"), lowering standards of risk assessment for home buyers, rubber-stamping bonds (from for-profit rating agencies), etc, etc. These forces did FAR more damage than any environmentalist could hope to do. We can't even blame the CRA of 1977 - proven to be a false reason for the housing bubble-crash.
-We also can't blame environmentalists for the Gulf Oil Spill. Big Oil was drilling offshore well before environmental laws kicked-in. But I'm sure Sowell tried to pull a fast-one here as well.
-Last, but not least, is Sowell's citation of the Federal Reserve system as "government". IT IS NOT GOVERNMENT. The Fed is a private banking cartel that sells *to* and buys *from* the government (the U.S. Treasury). This unbelievable statement by a professor of economics is shocking and sad. Sad because it's a *deliberate* attempt into fooling our nation's readers into thinking the Fed is part of the public-sector. The Fed is owned by profit-banks, *makes* profits in their business activity and has never been audited by Congress...or its investigative arms. This, because it is "not an agency" - quoting Ben Bernanke last year. Blaming the Fed for what they've done to our financial system (and country at large) is basically blaming a private-money cartel. A cartel that was created by the Morgans and Rockefellars nearly a century ago.
Rating: -
The book is as dry as dust but its still worthy of reading. I think it offers a variety of excellent points that will give the reader something to mull over.
Rating: -
I think one of these days I am going to publish a list of the top 10 books that every single thinking person has to read. For a conservative like myself, there are books that have played a formative role in developing, defining, and defending an ideology. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Kirk's The Roots of American Order come to mind - classic works that no serious conservative reader would dare miss.
The list has grown by one this year thanks to Thomas Sowell, and I do not make such a claim easily. While his much earlier masterpiece, Conflict of Visions (1987), could arguably be on the list as well, I believe that his newest book, Intellectuals and Society, is not just Sowell at his finest but is perhaps the very essence of conservative thinking at its finest. The book is remarkably readable, extremely practical, and most of all, is such a lethal combination of head shots and body blows to the parasite of modern intellectualism that one finishes the book feeling splattered by the damage Sowell has done.
At its core, the book seeks to explore the phenomena of public intellectuals who Sowell carefully defines as "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas". There are extremely intelligent people in our society who we do not deem to be "intellectuals" - specialists who possess a particular expertise in a particular field. Sowell provides the important distinction that engineers and scientists and financiers, for example, while not considered to be "public intellectuals", are judged by external standards - by empirical notions of verifiability. Intellectuals, on the other hand, face no such external test. Rather, it is the mere acceptance their own peers provide them that defines their success. They are judged exclusively by internal criteria, devoid of methods of validation. Yet their ideas have consequences, and as Sowell demonstrates in every page of this 317-page delight, the ideas of the intelligentsia over the last century have largely been an unmitigated disaster. Often lethal and frequently incoherent, intellectuals have survived in the last 100 years despite the fruits of their labors. Sowell laments this development, questions its causes, and demonstrates its truth in crystal clear fashion. Intellectuals lack accountability for their disastrous ideas, aided and abetted by non-intellectual accomplices within the intelligentsia that share their unconstrained vision for humanity.
Sowell does not target the flaws of public intellectuals that may or may not exist within their particular field of specialization. The book calls these public intellectuals to the carpet for their espousing of ideas and policies to a wider audience than their field of study called for, carrying the same "air of authority" in the wider field that was outside of their field of expertise as they do within the more narrow field to which they claim some degree of knowledge. Sowell points out that "most non-intellectuals achieve public recognition or acclaim by their achievements within their respective areas of specialization, while many intellectuals could achieve comparable public recognition only by going outside their own expertise or competence." Public intellectuals feed off of a demand that is almost entirely self-manufactured. As Sowell has laid out in his aforementioned work, Conflict of Visions, the unconstrained vision of the left is one of an arrogant, elite, anointed - a vision that makes claim to the moral responsibility and intellectual ability to cure the world of its ills. The testing of this unconstrained vision through conventional and empirical validation methods has been devastating in its conclusiveness that the unconstrained vision has been a disaster. The challenge, though, is the lack of accountability that exists for these public intellectuals. Sowell makes clear that their vision is not only one for the world "as it exists and a vision of what it ought to be like, but it is also a vision of themselves as a self-anointed vanguard, leading toward that better world." For Sowell, "the role that they aspire to play in society at large can only be achieved by them to the extent that the rest of society accepts what they say uncritically and fails to examine their track record."
The real target of Sowell's book are those members of the "intelligentsia" who either make up these public intellectual frauds, or worse, serve as their willing accomplices. Judges in the legal system, politicians in government, journalists in media, and worst of all, academic charlatans in the academy, have all served as the support system for this age of public intellectuals promulgating their anointed vision to the world. Sowell meticulously walks through the effects intellectuals have had in 20th century economics, law, foreign policy, and media. He laments the attack on the very concept of truth itself that the intellectuals have launched, and again points out the self-serving nature of their vision.
Sowell is a brilliant thinker himself - an idea man - a scholar. But unlike the targets of Sowell's attacks, he does not claim that his expertise in socio-political thoughts exempts him from external validation tests should he branch out into other arenas of thought. Sowell invites external criticism. He holds himself to the standards that public intellectuals refuse to hold themselves to. And while Sowell is an ideologue, he is keenly aware that the repudiation of the unconstrained vision of the anointed - public intellectual leftism - is unlikely to take place as long as this vision maintains its dominance in our school system and modern media. The arrogance of collectivism and surrogate decision-making can be rebuffed in print (as Sowell does in decisive fashion), but the battle must be won where the battle is being fought. Sowell's book is a treasure for those who want to be armed when they engage this fight. The future of our civilization depends on those who hold to the constrained vision - the vision of the founders - taking this fight to the public square. The fight will not be won without Sowell's decimation of the likes of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Paul Ehrlich, and dozens of other blowhards whose ideas have represented indescribable agony for citizens of the 20th and now 21st centuries. But as Sowell makes painfully clear, the vision of the anointed is now the property of the teacher's unions and the New York Times. Conservatives have a lot of work to do.
I do not recommend doing anything else when you are done reading this review besides buying Sowell's book. Intellectuals and Society is the magnum opus of this man's life and career, and I have barely scratched the surface of what he accomplishes in this book. Read it. Encourage your kids to read it. And engage the fight. The arrogance of the self-anointed elites will not be defeated until we do.
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Rating: -
I am a big fan of Sowell's books, but in each of his books every word is carefully placed and he does not spend pages telling stories. Some of them I have even had to read with a dictionary by my side. Because I found some of his books so profound in changing the way I see the world I have eagerly recommended them to my friends hoping for them to experience the same enlightenment. However, all of these other people have found them too difficult too read and get through.
I believe this book provides a good summary of many of Sowell's other works and, although it is still not easy to read, it is much easier than say Conflict of Visions or Basic Economics. It also references his other books in the endnotes, pointing the direction if one wants to explore a topic in more depth. I will now try this one on my friends and see if I have any better results.
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