Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality

[00:00:00] Peter Robinson: - It happens to me all the time and it happened just this week. A young person I'd never met introduced himself to me and said that when he saw our guest today on an earlier episode of this program, he felt he was seeing a man who knew how to think. Dr. Thomas Sowell on Uncommon Knowledge, now. - Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson. Thomas Sowell has studied and taught economics, intellectual history, and social policy at institutions that include Cornell, Brandeis, UCLA, and Amherst. Now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Dr. Sowell has published more than a dozen books, including the classic A Conflict of Visions. Coming soon, a revised edition of his most recent volume, Discrimination and Disparities. Tom Sowell, welcome. - Thank you. - You grew up in Harlem, dropped out of high school to join the Marine Corps during the Korean War, received an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master's from Columbia, and your doctorate from the University of Chicago. All of which pales by comparison with the fact that you once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But during this period, from Harlem to the University of Chicago, throughout your 20s, you've said, you spent most of the decade of your 20s as a Marxist. - Yes. - Why? What was the attraction? [00:01:38] Thomas Sowell: - Well, I guess at first, it was very puzzled. See, there's one little correction I would make. At age 16, I was a dropout, high school dropout, and I went to work full-time as a Western Union messenger. [00:02:00] Peter Robinson: - Delivering telegrams. - Delivering telegrams. - We'd better say that because there will be a generation that won't know what Western Union was, but go ahead. [00:02:06] Thomas Sowell: - Yeah, that's true too. - Right, right. And so I worked in the area of Manhattan called the Chelsea District, which is around 23rd Street, 9th Avenue. And at the end of the day, I had several ways of getting back home. The easiest and fastest way was the subway, which was a nickel in those days. - Wow. - When I was feeling flush, I might go for a bus, for a dime. And then when I was really getting reckless, I would take the Fifth Avenue bus, which was the elite of the buses, for 15 cents. And so I would walk over to Fifth Avenue, take that bus, and it would take me up through all the glamorous parts of Fifth Avenue, past the Empire State Building, past the great stores and things of that sort. And then on 57th Street, it would turn, and this is just the elite part of town. - Sure, right there where the park starts. - Yes, and then the park starts at 59th. - Oh, sorry. - 57th, I would turn over, again, the same kind of scene, past Carnegie Hall. - Right. - Up Columbus Circle, there was no Trump Tower at that time. And on up to about 72nd Street, and go out to Riverside Drive, which is another elite area. So for miles after that, you'd have all these wonderful luxury apartment buildings and so on. And finally, around 129th or 30th Street, it would go on a long viaduct. And then it would do a right turn back into the occupied area, and there you'd see the tenements. And I would wonder, why is this? I mean, why this huge disparity? And there was nobody else, there was no other explanation around. There was nothing there other than Marxism. And I stumbled across, I had not read Marx, but I bought a secondhand pair, a set of encyclopedias, small set, for some ridiculously low price. And there, I looked up Karl Marx, I'd heard the name, and the stuff that he said seemed to make sense. And later on, I would get more and more into it. And the argument was that the rich had gotten rich by taking from the poor. - Right. - And well, that was one explanation. But what is interesting, there was no other explanation out there really. And that's true largely in our colleges and universities today. [00:04:42] Peter Robinson: - So by the time you went to Harvard undergrad, well, so you drop out at the age of 16, and you start reading Marx in your late teens. [00:04:51] Thomas Sowell: - No, I start reading Marx, yes, 1940, at age 19. [00:04:57] Peter Robinson: - Age 19. And then you were in the Marine Corps for a couple of years. What was it, two, three years? [00:05:03] Thomas Sowell: - Two years. It was actually one year, 11 months and five days, but who's counting? - But who's counting? [00:05:09] Peter Robinson: - All right. So by the time you went to Harvard, you had already become intellectually engaged with Marxism. - Yes. - And remained, and Harvard didn't talk you out of it, and the study of economics at Harvard didn't talk you out of it, nor did getting a master's at Columbia, nor did getting a doctorate at Chicago dissuade you from Marxism. And you studied with Milton Friedman of all people. How could you have sat in Milton Friedman's classroom and remained a Marxist? [00:05:38] Thomas Sowell: - Some people are just stubborn. But what really changed me was not the University of Chicago. It was my first job working in a professional capacity in the government. I was a summer intern. - This is after Chicago? - No, no, while I was still a graduate student. - Got it. - And so during the summer vacation, I worked in the U.S. Department of Labor, and I began to realize for a number of things that the government is not simply the personification of the general will like Rousseau or others. The government institutions have their own institutional interests. One involved the minimum wage law. I was a big supporter of that. But I also knew that there was an argument that minimum wage laws simply price low-wage workers out of a job. [00:06:30] Speaker ?: - Mm-hmm. [00:06:30] Thomas Sowell: - And my first assignment was dealt with minimum wages in Puerto Rico. And as I looked at the numbers, I would see as they would jack up the minimum wages, the number of jobs would go down and so forth. But there were two explanations. One was that of the economists, that you price the people out of a job. And the other was that there were hurricanes in the country of Puerto Rico, you see, during the sugar harvesting. And therefore, and I was studying the sugar industry, and therefore, it destroyed a lot of the crop. Therefore, you wouldn't hire as many workers. Now, in Chicago, I had been taught that if there are two different theories, there should be some more, some empirical evidence and principle that could distinguish what would happen under one theory from what would happen under the other. - Right. - And so I wrestled with that for most of the summer. And one morning, I came in and I said, "I got it. What we need are data on the amount of sugarcane standing in the fields before the hurricane struck." And as I waited for the congratulations, I could see stricken looks around me in the room. Like, "This guy has stumbled on something. They will ruin us all." You know? And they said, "Well, we don't have those data." I said, "Oh, I'll bet the Department of Agriculture has it." And he said, "Well, but that doesn't mean we can have it. You'd have to have a request go off the chain of command to the Secretary of Labor." He would then confer it with the Secretary of Agriculture. It would come down the chain of command in the Department of Agriculture to whoever has those numbers and so on. I said, "Good. Well, they say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So I will now submit my request to the Secretary of Labor," which I did. And I am still patiently awaiting this reply. And the institutional fear of the number was what? Oh, the U.S. Department of Labor administers the minimum wage law. And the money and the careers of perhaps a third or some other significant percentage of the Labor Department's resources come from administering the minimum wage law. One of the real forces of all this is that the law itself, Section 4D, I still remember, requires the Labor Department to study the employment effects of minimum wages. And those studies are absolutely a farce. In fact, some years after I left, I did an article saying why those studies were a farce. And when I came back later on to the Labor Department to do some research, one of the older librarians who remembered me turned to the younger librarian, and she said, "This is the man who wrote that article that has everybody up in arms." [00:09:08] Peter Robinson: So you began to be dissuaded of Marxism. And of government in general, because [00:09:16] Thomas Sowell: the government is not out there at the personification of the national interests. They have their own interests. And the Labor Department was clearly an interest in keeping the minimum wage, because that's their jobs and careers and power. [00:09:30] Peter Robinson: In your...which brings us, if I may, to one of my favorite books, your 2000 book. This is a beat-up old copy. This book, Conflict of Visions, which you published in 2007. And you lay out...I'm sorry. 1987. I beg your pardon, 1987. Reprinted in 2007. Well, beat up as this book is, it turns out this is a reprint. Sorry. 1987. And you lay out two competing ways of looking at economics and politics, really two competing ways of looking at life that go back at least 200 years. The constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. The constrained vision, I'm quoting from A Conflict of Visions, sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and unhappy choices available, given the inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings, close quote. So the constrained vision under itself understands itself as constrained by the limitations of reality itself. Yes. [00:10:30] Thomas Sowell: Is that, that's correct? Yes. Okay. In other words, they cannot proceed as so many do, that good things happen automatically, but bad things are somebody's fault. [00:10:41] Peter Robinson: Got it. Got it. And then to continue here, the constrained vision, again, quoting from A Conflict of Visions, for the amelioration improvement of the human condition, the constrained vision relies on certain social processes, such as moral traditions, the marketplace, or families, not government. So explain that. Why do we rely, why do we rely on so on processes rather than the will of the people instituting changes to improve our condition? [00:11:14] Thomas Sowell: Well, it doesn't ignore government. Even for the market, the work you have to have with government, as Europe discovered when the Roman Empire collapsed and the economies collapsed also. But I guess one of the reasons would be that with the government, you have surrogate decision makers, and they cannot possibly know as much as the individuals whose personal decisions have been preempted. [00:11:43] Peter Robinson: I see. I see. All right. Which brings us to the unconstrained vision. When, again, I'm quoting you, when Rousseau said that man is born free, but everywhere in chains, he expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision, in which the fundamental problem is not nature or man, but institutions. Yes. Would you explain that one? [00:12:05] Thomas Sowell: Well, he has the notion that, again, that good things happen naturally. And if they're bad things, it's because institutions, including civilization itself, have made these bad things happen. And, of course, and I think that that's really the implicit assumption behind a lot of things that are said on the left today. And why in my most recent book, I go to a lot of trouble to show that in nature, there's nothing resembling equal opportunity. That wherever you look around the country, around the world, you find people who live up in the mountains, poor and backwards, even in the richest country, including the United States. Mm-hmm. I believe the poorest country in the United States, the county, rather, was in a mountain community, which was almost 100% white. Somewhere in Appalachia, West Virginia, Southern Ohio, or right now. Yes. And that men in that county had a life expectancy 10 years less than men in a county in Virginia. [00:13:16] Peter Robinson: And the constrained, the unconstrained vision says, let's fix that. Surely we can pass a law that would improve that. And the constrained vision says, well, now, wait a moment. If people who live in isolated pockets in mountains are poor and backwards all around the world, and we see this pattern over and over and over again, maybe there's something very deeply rooted in reality about that, that's hard for us to get at. Correct? Yes. All right. So in the book, A Conflict of Visions, you're very dispassionate and very analytical, and you lay out the unconstrained vision, and you lay out the constrained vision, and you don't really come out blazing in favor of one or the other. [00:14:01] Thomas Sowell: No. Yeah. That is not a book meant to show that one vision is better than the other. It's there to show you what they are and what you're assuming if you go one direction or another. Okay. And it's to encourage people to understand the implicit assumptions behind all this, without which you're just at loose ends. All right. So, pondering all this, I noticed something, [00:14:29] Peter Robinson: a column that you wrote, this is a couple of years ago, in which you rebutted Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. And Kristof had ascribed the gaps between African Americans and whites in America, gaps in wealth, gaps in educational achievement, the usual gaps, to, and this is a quotation from Kristof to the lingering effects of slavery, close quote. Oh, yes. And here's Tom Sowell, quote, "If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood 100 years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on the legacy of slavery with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals." Close quote. And so there it is, life is hard. You use the word hard, you use the word serious, you use evidence. Tom Sowell is a man of the constrained vision through and through and through, correct? [00:15:28] Speaker ?: Yes. Yes. [00:15:28] Thomas Sowell: Yes, you know, part of a vanishing breed, I might add. [00:15:35] Peter Robinson: So when you were a Marxist, the notion, explain that, because the Marxism- Well, but no, no, you see- [00:15:43] Speaker ?: So that's complicated. [00:15:43] Thomas Sowell: Even when I was a Marxist, I had the same intellectual standards. [00:15:47] Speaker ?: Right. [00:15:47] Thomas Sowell: And that's what eventually led me away from it. Oh, I see. In other words, I hadn't done all the research. I hadn't gone around the world- Looking for evidence. Yes, yes. Okay. So- And socialism is a great idea. That does not mean it's a great reality. One of the things that disturbs me tremendously is about this enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and socialism at a time when people are literally starving in Venezuela, an oil-rich country, you know, and they're, you know, they're breaking into, into grocery stores to try to get food and they're fleeing to neighboring countries, most of which are not all that prosperous themselves, but they're, but at least you don't starve to death in them. And none of that makes a bit, a bit of difference. I don't think most of these people who are out there cheering for Bernie Sanders have given a thought to Venezuela. To the evidence. [00:16:42] Speaker ?: That's right. [00:16:42] Thomas Sowell: To the evidence. [00:16:43] Peter Robinson: Yeah. All right. Which brings us to something that you refer to in a number of columns as the retrogression, the experience of African Americans in this country. Economic progress, I'm quoting you, "Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and the war on poverty programs of the 1960s. The fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960. But over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points. This was just the continuation of pre of a previous economic trend, but at a slower rate of progress. It was not some grand deliverance." Close quote. That is so counter to what we are taught in school, what appears on the editorial pages of newspapers, that I feel as though I want to ask you, you really want to stick with that, that assertion. [00:17:49] Thomas Sowell: I have more evidence in my most recent book, Discrimination and Disparities. I point out that this really is a pattern not peculiar to blacks or even to the United States, that you can see the same thing in England, you can see it in any number of other countries, that the poor were much worse off economically, let's say in the first half of the 20th century. And yet, in terms of their own behavior, they were far more decent societies. And afterwards, after this welfare state, they're supposed to make them better off and better human beings. That's when the crime rates skyrocketed, on both sides of the Atlantic. The British were famous for being perhaps the most polite, considerate society in the world, prior to that. After that, you get things like the 2011 riots over there, London, Manchester, where they're going through this. They anticipated Ferguson and Baltimore by a few years. And the same thing is the burning down of buildings, the throwing of gasoline bombs, the whole smear. And none of those people were descendants of slaves. [00:19:12] Peter Robinson: So the poor people were doing, if the lesson of the 20th century is something like poor people, including in this country, African Americans, were improving their lot and leading fundamentally decent lives until the government decided to help them. Yes. That's a fair statement. [00:19:29] Thomas Sowell: Well, they're better off economically because of what's been given. Right. But of course, when you have the crime rate, I mean, I got the first inkling of this some years back when I was at some school in Harlem doing some research. And I looked out the window and I mentioned in passing that when I was a little kid, I used to walk my dog in that park and looks of horror came over the students' faces. Nobody in his right mind would have a child going to that park, walking a dog or not. The principal was warning these students not to cross this park, which is about a block and a half wide, even in groups of six. And when I tell them about how in hot summer nights I would sleep out on the fire escapes in Harlem, they looked at me like I was a man from Mars. People were doing that all over New York. They were doing it in Philadelphia, Washington, or wherever I've known people. That was a common thing for Portland. We didn't have the money for air conditioning. Right. You slept out on the fire escape or in the parks. Where Walter grew up in a- Walter Williams. Walter Williams grew up in a housing project in Philadelphia. He was saying on the hot summer nights the people would be in this project would have little balconies. They'd sleep out on the balconies. And the ones on the first floor who didn't have balconies would sleep out in the yard. And that there were old men who you could see sitting on a hot summer night sitting outdoors into the wee hours playing cards or checkers or whatever. It was a different world. It was a safe world. It was an infinitely safe world. [00:21:10] Peter Robinson: Now, what about family structure, Tom? Again, I'm quoting you. Most black children were being raised in two-parent families in 1960. Thirty years after the liberal welfare state, the great majority of black children were being raised by single parents. Yes. How, what, what, what's the, what, how does that, by the way, we should, we should note that Pat Moynihan, Patrick Moynihan publishes the Moynihan Report in 1965. Yes. And he's alarmed because the illegitimacy rate among black families is 25% then. Now, among whites, it's over a third. Yes. Hispanics, it's over half. And among African Americans, it's over 70%. What's going on there? [00:21:49] Thomas Sowell: Well, this is how, again, this too, you find the same thing in Britain, you find it in, uh, France, in Norway, you find it in the Western world. Uh, in, in fact, uh, the dissolution of the family structure. Oh, yeah. There are any number of, uh, Western nations where 40% of the children are, uh, are raised with, with only one parent. Right. Uh, at the extremes, uh, I, uh, compared to Asian countries, uh, at the extremes of Iceland, it's, uh, two out of three, uh, children are born, are raised in a single parent home. Uh, in South Korea, it's one out of 66. Wow. Wow. And so what, that's the welfare state? Yes. It is. Oh, you, you, you're paying, you're, you're, you're creating a situation where if the, if the, uh, first of all, the, the, well, you're creating, you're creating a situation where if the man stays there, the government will not give them, give the woman welfare, uh, and if he leaves, he, uh, it will. And so they're paying, they're paying, they're, when you pay people not to get married, more people don't get married. Right. Right. Right. [00:22:57] Peter Robinson: Okay. So, so what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson, instead of becoming a liberal, had remained a crusty, tough, skeptical, Texas, Texas conservative. Yes. Which is certainly the way he started his career. If he, if Lyndon Johnson had embraced the constrained vision, instead of instituting the war on poverty and the great society and so forth, what would the country look like today? [00:23:21] Thomas Sowell: A lot better. You were, you would not have the same rates for crime and so on because you see, you can't have a welfare state in a democratic country unless you first have a welfare state vision. And when you buy all the assumptions that had vision, then you're buying a lot of trouble. One of the, one of the episodes I think epitomized, it was in France in this case, uh, that there were attacks, knife attacks by various people from North Africa against Chinese people in, uh, in some suburb of Paris. And one of the things that, uh, the attackers said, you know, that, uh, why, why are you attacking the Chinese? And it wasn't because of anything the Chinese had done to them. He said, they have nice clothes and big cars. That's not fair. I mean, that's, you know, egalitarianism as a philosophy is one thing, but the actual consequences of it, uh, uh, mean things like, uh, resenting other people's good fortune. Right. [00:24:17] Peter Robinson: All right. So one response to the gap. Again, I returned to this gap between African Americans and other Americans. Affirmative action. Yes. Which brings us back to your alma mater, Harvard. According to- I never, I'll never live it down. You'll never live it down. Yes. You once told me that the principal benefit of a Harvard degree was never again having to be impressed by anybody who had a Harvard degree. Absolutely. All right. So of course, these are figures that were published in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. In the Harvard class of 2019, these are the kids who will be graduating next June. The average SAT score for black students was 2149. By the way, these are all good scores, but for black students, 2149. White students, 2218. Asian students, 2300. Well, now that must be reasonable because it's taking place at Harvard, the seat of reason. Well, that wasn't quite how I described it when I was there. Affirmative action. Is that we ought not to be doing this? [00:25:20] Thomas Sowell: You know, there are various laws and policies that benefit one group at the expense of another. But I think affirmative action has the distinction of being one that it harms everybody, though in different ways. And so there's a lot of evidence that there are black kids who have all the qualifications to be successes in college, who nevertheless are failures, because they are systematically mismatched with institutions whose standards they don't meet, even though they may meet the standards of 80 or 90 percent of the colleges in America. I remember first aware of this when I was teaching at Cornell, and I found that half the black students at Cornell were on some kind of academic probation. And so I went over to the administration building and looked up the SATs of these students. The average black student at Cornell at that time scored up the 75th percentile. Which is pretty darn good. Yes. And so that means that at most colleges in this country, they would have no trouble, and many of them would be on the dean's list. But at Cornell, the average liberal arts student at that time was in the 99th percentile. And when you're teaching students like that, you teach at a pace that most people of any race cannot keep up with. And I was always complaining that I was assigning all kinds of reading. But heck, I'm teaching kids who are in the top one percent. They can keep up with the reading that I'm assigning. [00:26:52] Peter Robinson: So Cornell was taking very talented black kids and spending four years teaching them to feel inadequate. Yes, and succeeding at that. A couple of quotations. These are both from the last affirmative action case to reach the Supreme Court, last big affirmative action case to reach the Supreme Court. 2003, Grutter versus Bollinger. Here's the majority opinion, which was written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Quote, "The court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." This upholding the use of, in a decision, 5-4 decision, upholding the use of racial preferences. Now, that's quotation one. Here's quotation two, Justice Clarence Thomas, in a dissent. Quote, "I believe that blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators. The court holds that racial discrimination and admissions should be given another 25 years. While I agree that in 25 years these practices will be illegal, they are illegal now." Close quote. So, here's, what do you do with the argument that Justice O'Connor writing that majority opinion, there's something of the constrained vision there. Look, we have these, all universities across the country are using these racial preferences to, as the basis of admission. The best we can hope to do is tell them they ought not to be doing it, that they should be developing other standards and give them a clock. Is that a reasonable thing to do? [00:28:28] Thomas Sowell: No, but it's a universal thing to do. I wrote a book about affirmative action. It was called Affirmative Action Around the World. And I made a couple of international trips at the expense of the Hoover Institution around the world to check on affirmative action. This is one of the most common arguments, and it's absolutely fallacious time and time again. The argument that, like so much in the unconstrained vision, it assumes that we have a power that we do not have, cannot have, and never have had. In England, there was a man named Skarman who was saying, "For now, we must do this in order to..." And in many countries, these programs were set up with an actual cutoff date. So it was set up in Malaysia with a cutoff date, I think, around 1990. And in Pakistan, it was like it was supposed to go for 10 years. None of those cutoff dates has meant a thing. These programs not only continue, they increase, they spread. So the idea that you can control the future because of these wonderful sounding words. I can't think of a country in the world where that's ever happened. In the case of Pakistan, they did have an actual cutoff date. And because the people in East Pakistan were, for whatever historical reason, way behind the people in West Pakistan. And so there's these preferences with East Pakistanis. Now, before time for this thing to expire, the East Pakistanis cc'd from Pakistan and formed a new nation of Bangladesh. And the preferences continued right on because there were other groups that had been added to it. And so once you get the constituency, you can't say no to them. I see. It is an argument that has never worked out anywhere that I've been able to check. [00:30:24] Peter Robinson: All right. So Tom Sowell says no to the welfare state, no to affirmative action. What is to be done? And now you were kind enough to share with me the galleys of your forthcoming edition of Discrimination and Disparities. Let me give you a few quotations from some of the new chapter in that book. Quote, "The poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10% every year since 1994. As far back as 1969, young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards had similar incomes to those of their white counterparts. Academic outcomes show a pattern of disparities similar to the pattern of disparities in the amount of time devoted to schoolwork. Apparently, lifestyle choices have consequences." Yes. Close quote. So this is the constrained vision once again. Welfare state, that's government. We don't rely on that. Affirmative action, government. We don't rely on that. We rely on hard work. We rely on the institution of marriage. That's correct? [00:31:37] Thomas Sowell: Yes. In other words, these things, I don't think it's the marriage as such or the library cards as such. It's that there are lifestyle choices that have been made. And the comparison I made was between, if you look at the poverty rate among blacks, it was 22%. And among whites, it was 11%. But among black married couples, it was 7.5%. So they not only do better than blacks as a whole, they do better than whites as a whole. And so it's lifestyle choices. Similarly, with the results and some of these more successful charter schools, that you have these kids not only meeting but exceeding the national standards in places like Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant and the South Bronx. And these are not kids who are skimming the crown cream. They're kids chosen by lottery. They don't even test them for ability. They don't even look at their academic records. They take them into the schools and they have hard work and they make it clear at the outset. And they don't tolerate a lot of nonsensical behavior. And these kids are doing incredibly. [00:32:45] Peter Robinson: So, Tom, here, again, I think back to the Moynihan, well, no, I think, so the Moynihan report in 65, and he was very alarmed by the illegitimacy rate of 25% among African Americans. By the way, in fairness to the late Moynihan, we should point out one reason he was alarmed by this was his own, his own father had walked out on the family when he was 10 years old. He experienced what it meant to kids to have one parent. Okay. And now it's all gotten dramatically worse for whites and Hispanics and for everybody. And then I think back beyond that to your experience of Harlem, you drop out of high school and do what? Go on welfare? Start cashing? No, you went to work and you spent some of that money to buy some inexpensive encyclopedias. Yeah. And the Harlem was sick. So, but I feel this council, it's almost a council of despair in that that world just seems so utterly vanished. No question. So, your argument is if we can stand up to the welfare state, we can somehow get back to that world, the family structure will reassert itself? That's going to be reconquering the same ground, [00:34:06] Thomas Sowell: which is very tough to do, but it can be done. I was so lucky. At the time, I had no clue about all this. I left home in 1948. Many decades later, I learned that the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948, 16, 17-year-olds, was 9.4%. Among whites of the same age, it was 10.2%. So, both blacks and white teenagers had only a fraction of the unemployment that they have today. [00:34:43] Peter Robinson: You were expected to work. You were expected to be able to get a job. [00:34:47] Thomas Sowell: And more importantly, the jobs were there for you. And so, and this is because of a fluke, really. The minimum wage law in the United States, Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, was passed with specified rates of pay that you're supposed to get. Almost immediately, inflation took off during the 1940s. So, by 1948, those numbers that were in the law were meaningless. [00:35:15] Peter Robinson: Oh, I see. [00:35:17] Thomas Sowell: In other words, when I started out as a Western Union messenger, the minimum wage was 40 cents an hour. I started out at the bottom at 65 cents an hour. So, it was the same as if there was no minimum wage. And this is what happened. You had this, and I was so lucky. I knew, of course, I had no clue about any of this. Now, a black kid, 20 years later, comes in there. People have become compassionate. They've raised the minimum wage. So, he can't get a job. Got it. And I don't think it does any community any good to have a whole lot of teenage males hanging around on the streets with no job and nothing to do. [00:35:58] Peter Robinson: Right. Tom, so, but another thought here. You're describing a world, Harlem, the urban world, gone. Yes. You, but you made visits when you were young. You knew the South as well, didn't you? Did you, you went back to the South when you were young from time to time? I said back to the South because, as I recall, you were born in the South. [00:36:18] Thomas Sowell: Yeah. Like, yeah, I went to New York. Went to New York. Yeah. Well, I think this was courtesy of the Marine Corps, which happened to locate the boot camp in South Carolina and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. [00:36:30] Peter Robinson: Okay. So, what I'm getting at is you were of the generation that saw Jim Crow with your own eyes. Oh, no question. No question. Okay. So, well, here's, let me read you a quotation. This is from an article that got a lot of attention in the Atlantic a couple of years ago called "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Quote, "White supremacy is a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. Reparations is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely." Close quote. And Tom Sowell, who actually saw Jim Crow with his own eyes and experienced it, responds, how? [00:37:12] Thomas Sowell: It would be nice to know his evidence for what he said, just to be old-fashioned about it. No, it was a rotten system. But I don't know how we get from that to reparations. I mean, what we see in the United States in terms of the bad things, you see all around the world. If you were to give reparations to everyone whose ancestors had been slaves, I suspect that you would have to give reparations to more than half the entire population of the globe. slavery was not confined to one set of races. I suspect that most of the people who were either slaves or slave owners around the world were neither white nor black. I mean, this was a universal curse of the human species. [00:38:02] Peter Robinson: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, slavery took place everywhere. [00:38:05] Thomas Sowell: And it continued elsewhere long after it was abolished in the Western countries. [00:38:13] Peter Robinson: Let me try, sticking with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Shelby Steele talks about white guilt. And in Ta-Nehisi Coates, you get almost the counterpart of that kind of African American claim against the white guilt. And this seems, beginning with the abolitionists, even beginning before the Civil War, you see almost every generation, there's some expression that racism and slavery, as Shelby calls it, correctly, of course, the sin of slavery is so deeply and it's something we still live with. How do we expiate it? How do we get past it? Is there something we can [00:38:57] Thomas Sowell: do to relieve ourselves of this legacy? Oh, I think you should repeat it. If you were a slave owner, I don't see any reason why you should feel differently. On the other hand, I can't get over the idea of A, apologizing for what B, did. Okay. Even when they're contemporaries, much less when one is dead and the others alive. All right. I mean, Scalia, I remember was saying, you know, that I owe no man anything because people who look like me did something to people who looked like him. [00:39:34] Peter Robinson: Okay. So just get past it. Get to work. Yeah. All right. Tom Sowell's view is get an education, stay married and do your job, roughly. Yeah. All right. Charles Murray. I'm taking, you used to write a column every so often called Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene. Oh, yes. Yes. And so I'm giving you a little snippets here of the passing scene in our final questions. Charles Murray in his 1984 book, Losing Ground, and Charles Murray writes about discussions in academia and government about the effort to close the gap again between African Americans and whites. Quote, 1984, quote, "Whites had created the problem. It was up to whites to fix it. And there was very little in the dialogue that treated blacks as responsible actors." Close quote. Has that changed? No, it has not. All right. On, on we go. The passing scene. Your friend, your longtime friend, Walter Williams. Now we come to current politics. The bottom line is that President Donald Trump does not have the personal character that we would want our children to imitate, but save his misguided international trade policies, has turned out to be a good president. Tom? [00:40:47] Thomas Sowell: I think his policies have been, by and large, have been policies that were far better than that of previous Democratic or Republican administrations. So, I go by the consequences. I mean, he hasn't produced the right rhetoric, but the fact is that unemployment among low-income people, black, Hispanic included, is at a level that is far lower than it's been in decades. The economy is booming in a way that no one had predicted. People like Paul Krugman Krugman was saying that when Trump gets in, the economy is going to tank. No, the economy hit new highs. All right. But there are so many people among the intelligentsia, especially, who are absolutely immune to facts. It's as if they took their anti-fact shots every year and the facts will just not [00:41:47] Peter Robinson: affect them. So, this brings us back. I can understand. I mean, I really can't. My understanding is limited, which is why I'm going to put this in the form of a question. I can understand the never-Trumpers who don't bother me with economic boom, because this man is on my television screen every single night, and I can't stand him. I can understand. I can see that impulse. I can understand what they feel. [00:42:08] Thomas Sowell: This is the second consecutive president of the United States that I automatically turn off [00:42:12] Peter Robinson: when I'm watching on television. All right. Keep the remote right next to your hand. Oh, yes. Okay. Who was the first? Obama. Got it. You're totally bipartisan in that regard. Oh, always. No other way. But the great society, the larger point that you've been making here, the great society, the war on poverty, this is now six decades of experience. Yes. And we have, as you have said, the gap hasn't closed. We've got dissolution of the family structure, rising crime rates. That I don't understand. How can it be that the people, now I don't know how to remain bipartisan, but Democrats, liberals, the progressives just are not, the evidence is in. This has not worked. Why, after half, more than half a century, there's still a refusal to look at the evidence. [00:43:05] Thomas Sowell: Yes. And there's even a tendency to falsify the evidence. [00:43:09] Peter Robinson: And how come? [00:43:10] Thomas Sowell: I think people become attached to a vision and that really warps the way they see the world. Human beings have an enormous capacity to rationalize. [00:43:23] Peter Robinson: Yeah. All right. Again, notes on the passing scene. An article from the New York Times just a couple of days ago. Quote, now this is a longish quotation, but it's important to lay out the facts here. "Over the last decade, the charter school movement gained significant foothold in New York. The movement hoped to set a national example. If charter schools could make it in a deep blue state like New York, they could make it anywhere. Over a hundred thousand students in the city's charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands are on waiting lists. But the election, the election of this November, suggested that the golden era of charter schools is over. The insurgent Democrats, Democrats did well across New York, but especially in the state Senate, have repeatedly expressed hostility to the movement." Close quote. And Tom Sowell responds to that set of facts. How? [00:44:14] Thomas Sowell: Oh, that really is one of the moral outrages that for many kids who are cut from a very poor background and whose parents may not have had much education. A decent education is the one thing they have to have to have to have a better life. And these schools have been absolutely spectacular. The charter schools. The charter schools. The successful ones. Now, there are a few that weren't. But, for example, a few years ago, on the statewide, New York statewide math tests, there was an elementary school grade four, I believe, in Harlem, whose students passed those tests at a higher rate than any fourth grade kids anywhere in the state of New York. I mean, we're talking Scarsdale, Bridecliffe, places like that. The Success Academy schools as a whole, a high school district, their students passed both the math and the English statewide tests at a higher rate than any school system, school district in the entire state of New York. The vast majority of the kids in the Success Academy schools are either black or Hispanic. If you look at the five highest scoring districts, the highest scoring school districts in the state in terms of the percentage of the students who passed the math or the English tests, their average family income ranges from four times that of the kids in the Success Academy schools to more than nine times the family income of the kids in the Success Academy schools. And yet, the mayor of New York is doing his darndest to put a stop to the expansion of schools in general. But his special ire is aimed at the Success Academy schools. [00:46:24] Peter Robinson: And this is happening all over the country. Because they make the teachers unions look bad that run the public schools? What's the political motivation? Why would Mayor de Blasio have an out for the charter [00:46:34] Thomas Sowell: schools, such a Success Academy? Well, the teachers union are the major reasons. And we're talking about the money they contribute, the number of votes they contribute. And the schools, and what's happening, again, not just in New York, but other parts of the country, including California, is that there's all kind of chicanery to prevent the charter schools from expanding. That's why you have tens of thousands on the waiting list. It's not that the charter schools aren't willing to expand, but every conceivable obstacle is put in their way. Because if you let that go at a natural pace, it would be very hard for the public schools to compete. And one of the things they're doing is imposing the same kinds of restrictions on the charter schools that made the public schools so bad. For example, restrictions on being able to get rid of kids who are running amok and ruining the education of everybody else. And the charter schools don't tolerate that. The things that are tolerated in the public schools [00:47:37] Peter Robinson: are unbelievable. So when I asked you a moment ago, how do we bring back the the standards of the Harlem in which you grew up, the answer is that's a hard thing to do. But we do know how to do one thing. We do know how to establish schools where the kids in present-day Harlem have a shot. They have a chance of getting a good education. Yeah, you don't have to bring back the [00:48:00] Thomas Sowell: past, even if you could, because we have it in the present. We have this happening. [00:48:07] Peter Robinson: And so we know how to do that. And the Democratic establishment in New York wants to shut it down. Yes. And the Republican establishment stands mute. Stands mute. You know, I love talking to you, but I really don't know why. It's all discouraging. Tom, you mentioned a moment ago the way young Americans flocked to Bernie Sanders. I had a Gallup poll this summer. The proportion of Americans age 18 to 29 that holds a favorable view of capitalism, 45%. The proportion that holds a favorable view of socialism, 51%. Now, I would like you to take a look at a brief video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who at the age of 29, calling herself a democratic socialist, has just been elected to the House of Representatives from New York. And although she's not seated yet in the new Congress, she went to Washington. And one of her first acts was to participate in a sit-in in the offices of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi. That is to say, the leader of her own party. So here's a brief video. [00:49:18] Speaker 3: I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you, for putting yourselves and your body and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future. And it's so incredibly important. We have to get to 100% renewable energy in 10 years. There is no other option. [00:49:45] Peter Robinson: BILL MOYERS: Tom, to her supporters, to the supporters of Bernie Sanders, to young Americans, what would you say? [00:49:53] Thomas Sowell: TOM FRIEDMAN: I would say, get some facts first. Know what you're talking about before you start spouting out this kind of stuff. Ask the question. One of the things I do in a new book is I suggest that there's a certain opinion about what happened in the 1920s where the taxes were cut from the highest tax rate was cut down from 73% to 24%. And the argument was, oh, this is tax cuts for the rich. And I have suggested that the students and that the Secretary of the Treasury did this in support of a trickle-down theory and so forth. And I suggested that the students would have a wonderful project to go read what the Secretary of the Treasury actually said. BILL MOYERS: Andrew Mellon in the 1920s, all these tax cuts. TOM FRIEDMAN: Yes. And then go on the internet and get the internal revenue official data on who paid how much taxes in the 1920s. And it turns out, if you do that, you find that Andrew Mellon said that the exact opposite of what he is attributed, is attributed to him in textbooks that have been sold widely for decades on end through successive editions. And what you'll find is that when the tax rate was at 73%, people who are making over $100,000 a year, and that's maybe a couple of million in today's money, paid 30% of the taxes. And after the so-called tax cuts for the rich, they paid 65% of all the taxes. And the people with incomes under $5,000, which is also a nice income in those days, were paying 15% when the tax rate was cut, before the tax rate was cut. And after it was cut, they paid just under a quarter of 1% of all the taxes. And so there's all kinds of indignation in these scholarly books. We're not talking about just political propaganda, how this was a bonanza for the rich and so on. And people with ordinary income paid practically nothing in income tax after the tax cuts. And millionaires, the share of millionaires was, I think, 4% before that. And it was 19% after the tax rate. But the facts simply do not matter. They say these words, they say trickle down, and it's like saying abracadabra. And all the miraculous things follow from that. [00:52:23] Peter Robinson: Tom Sowell, author of a forthcoming edition of Discrimination and Disparities, would you close by reading a brief quotation from your 1987 book, one of my favorites, A Conflict of Visions? [00:52:36] Thomas Sowell: - Logic, of course, is not the only test of a theory. Empirical evidence is crucial. And yet, social visions have shown a remarkable ability to evade, suppress, or explain away discordant evidence. Historic evasions of evidence are a warning, not a model. Dedication to a cause may legitimately entail sacrifices of personal interests, but not sacrifices of mind or conscience. [00:53:06] Peter Robinson: - Dr. Thomas Sowell, thank you. - Thank you. - For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson. [00:53:25] Speaker ?: - Thank you. - Thank you.