By Mathew Goldstein
Thomas Sowell is an American economist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His economic orientation is libertarian, although he does not more generally hold the views of political libertarianism across the board. His recent book, Social Justice Fallacies, cites and/or quotes various other economists. Sowell favorably cites Friedrich August Hayek multiple times. He characterizes Hayek as ״a landmark figure in the development of an understanding of the crucial role of the distribution of knowledge in determining which kinds of policies and institutions were likely to produce what kinds of results”, one of the themes of this book. Sowell also draws on the work of economist Milton Friedman, citing this quote: “A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.” Throughout his book Sowell cites empirical evidence that supports his conclusions. I found some of his arguments more convincing than others.
His book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter, “Equal Chances” fallacies, was the strongest, and I recommend it. He observes that “At the heart of the social justice vision is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities, these disparities are evidence or proof of the effects of such human vices as exploitation and discrimination.” He then proceeds to show why this conclusion is factually false. I think it is very clear that the premise, even insofar as it is true, does not suffice to reach that strong conclusion. We should acknowledge that disparities of outcomes are the result of many different factors, most of which have little or nothing to do with exploitation or discrimination. Ibram K. Kendi, et al., are wrong insofar as they argue otherwise.
The second chapter, Racial Fallacies, is also very good and again, I highly recommend it. Here he criticizes two tendencies that accompany the belief “that racism was the primary explanation of such group differences.“ which he identifies as : (1) the extent to which such beliefs prevail without being subjected to tests of either facts or logic, and (2) the extent to which people who present empirical evidence counter to prevailing beliefs are met with ad hominem denunciations and with efforts to suppress their evidence, by means ranging from censorship to violence, especially on academic campuses.”
The third chapter, Chess Pieces Fallacies, he discusses the tendency of social justice literature to advocate for various policies “on grounds of their desirability from a moral standpoint—but often with little or no attention to the practical question of whether those policies could in fact be carried out and produce the end results desired.” Sowell is concerned that governments compel, which is not the same as merely arranging. There are “dangers to be considered when expanding government compulsion for whatever seems desirable.” Also, “The exaltation of desirability and neglect of feasibility…” is a mistake the social justice vision tends to overlook. He focuses here on the impracticalities of wealth redistribution. He criticizes some of the ideologically driven assumptions built into the assertions of social justice advocates, some of whom like to target “millionaires and billionaires”, such as their “… implicit assumption that tax revenues automatically move in the same direction as tax rates seems impervious to factual evidence.” Again, this a good discussion overall and I recommend this chapter, but I also have some qualms.
Sowell discusses various complicated macro economic questions in this chapter. As a black economist it is not surprising that his discussion of social justice says nothing about trans women competing in women’s sports. He says Richard Nixon imposed price controls before the election to his second term because it was popular and helped him the win the election even though he knew it would be harmful in practice.
He argues that the minimum wage counter-productively increases unemployment among disadvantage youth. This is where my skepticism over his cherry picking evidence advancing his conclusions came to the fore. His argument is strong, yet I still found his conclusion that the minimum wage should be eliminated unconvincing because his argument, as expressed in this book, was too simplistically one-sided. The overall impact of the minimum wage is clearly multi-dimensional. Yet he does not engage at all in identifying, and refuting, the best arguments for the minimum wage. Maybe he does that somewhere in his other publications. Nevertheless, he does succeed in explaining how a minimum wage risks imposing substantial negative costs. Whether the benefits exceed the costs is a valid concern that merits careful evaluation.
It is easy to agree with a theme repeated throughout this book, and a central focus of both Chapter four, Knowledge Fallacies, and Chapter five, Words, Deeds, and Dangers, that policy makers, experts, and commentators, need to try to avoid hubris and recognize the limits of both their knowledge and their ability to change the way the world functions for the better. He occasionally cites examples of a too common, over simplistic, stereotyping intolerance of views that the social justice oriented speaker/writer is disagreeing with. One example cited in this book is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who depicted people who oppose increasing the minimum wage as people with “hostility” to “raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation” because of their “mean-spiritedness” or “at best, a lack of empathy toward those struggling.”
I am skeptical that a comprehensive evaluation of the overall history of government economic policies is as favorable to the hands-off libertarian economics approach that Sowell appears to favor. I am inclined to think the reality here is more complex in that this is ultimately context dependent. Whether any given government economic intervention is good or bad depends on the details.
We should always be considering that the existing, or proposed, government economic policies are misdirected, that government may be intervening too much, or too little. And while it is true that government exercising power is potentially dangerous, as libertarians correctly fear, government weakness is also potentially dangerous, so we should fear both. We can only hope that our governments act responsibly and wisely. And realistically we have to accept that no one, including our governments, fully understands everything they are doing.
