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Gwern's Reviews > Intellectuals and Society
Intellectuals and Society
by Thomas Sowell
by Thomas Sowell
I started this hoping that it would be a bit like Scott's _Seeing Like A State_, which is one of my favorite books, or if not exactly like that, at least like something Charles Murray, who is one of my favorite writers, might have written on the topic.
I was quickly disabused of both hopes. Sowell is not that great a prose stylist and has a gift for putting things in ways that irritate the hell out of me even when I already agree with him.
More importantly, the promise of the flaps and introduction is *not* borne out as far as I read. It was not an investigation, either psychological or historical or economic, of intellectuals or recent intellectual history. It was simply a partisan rant bringing up all the old arguments and citations we've seen a million times before; I give him points for thorough - dare I say, intellectual - sourcing, which is more than one can say about eg. Michael Moore or Ann Coulter's books (he wrote, damning with faint praise).
There are arguments in it which I find hard to believe would pass Sowell's own muster if they were dressed up in liberal guise.
For example, on pg27 I was shocked to see - in the middle of his haranguing liberals for insufficient attention to economics - him *seriously* argue that oil company executive salaries are irrelevant because they add only a dime to the cost of gasoline gallons! Wow! Imagine Sowell's reaction to the following argument: "regulation XYZ is not worth debating about because, after all, when implemented it will add no more than a dime to the cost of gas" - can there be any doubt that he would rip this argument to little eeny-weeny shreds for failing to 'think on the margin' and realize that an extra dime will make or break many economic decisions and ramify throughout the economy? How was it possible for him to write such a transparently partisan thing? Because it was a good bash at his enemies.
('Politics is the mind-killer', as we say on LessWrong.)
Or another example from pg21; having finished reciting the Hayekian argument that no one can generalize over the entire economy or populace and central planning is impossible, he then goes on (???) to discuss how Cicero told his friend all English slaves were completely worthless and how Teddy Roosevelt hated all Indians and rather than criticizing their opinions as a perfect example of the intellectual's arrogance in generalizing from tiny tiny samples (both Cicero and Teddy were intellectuals par excellance), he *defends* their bigotry, arguing that critics are themselves being arrogant! What is this I don't even -
It came as no surprise on pg28 to see a caricature of economic libertarianism and zero mentions of standing disproofs of the simplistic models like Coase's point about large firms being economic absurdities and central planning in a different disguise, since I wasn't expecting very much any more.
By pg30, I abandoned my sporadic note-taking and began playing a little game: write down every time a thinker or politician who could be described as conservative or libertarian is criticized or given as an example of the evils of intellectualism.
Naturally, I didn't expect to see Hayek come up for hobnobbing with dictatorships (any more than people discussing Mother Theresa usually bring up her more questionable funding sources), but still - an entire book ought to provide at least 1 or 2 examples.
In the 70s or 80s, I thought I might *finally* have something to add to my list: Naziism and Italian fascism. Surely those would get criticized, as they notoriously aimed to remake their entire societies, with disastrous results? But no! I learned, to my surprise, apparently fascism and Naziism are socialist liberal parties and they are just more liberal examples of intellectual arrogance!
Apparently no one on the right end of the political spectrum has ever proposed or implemented any bad idea, ever. Even if I granted the fairness and accuracy of all his descriptions of left-wingers, his conclusions or synthesis would be completely worthless as it omits half the political spectrum! It would be like doing a study of cancer patients and throwing out every patient who was a Democrat - what could you possibly hope to learn at the en, after you did that?
The Naziism-is-socialism finally broke me. Writing a bad review is not so worthwhile as to be worth going through this. The book was nothing but capsule hitjobs of everyone Sowell disliked at any point, and gave no indication that it would be anything but that for the entire rest of the book.
Life is too short to read Sowell, and I had Charles Murray's _Coming Apart: The State of White America_ to read, which I've been looking forward to reading for a long time.
I was quickly disabused of both hopes. Sowell is not that great a prose stylist and has a gift for putting things in ways that irritate the hell out of me even when I already agree with him.
More importantly, the promise of the flaps and introduction is *not* borne out as far as I read. It was not an investigation, either psychological or historical or economic, of intellectuals or recent intellectual history. It was simply a partisan rant bringing up all the old arguments and citations we've seen a million times before; I give him points for thorough - dare I say, intellectual - sourcing, which is more than one can say about eg. Michael Moore or Ann Coulter's books (he wrote, damning with faint praise).
There are arguments in it which I find hard to believe would pass Sowell's own muster if they were dressed up in liberal guise.
For example, on pg27 I was shocked to see - in the middle of his haranguing liberals for insufficient attention to economics - him *seriously* argue that oil company executive salaries are irrelevant because they add only a dime to the cost of gasoline gallons! Wow! Imagine Sowell's reaction to the following argument: "regulation XYZ is not worth debating about because, after all, when implemented it will add no more than a dime to the cost of gas" - can there be any doubt that he would rip this argument to little eeny-weeny shreds for failing to 'think on the margin' and realize that an extra dime will make or break many economic decisions and ramify throughout the economy? How was it possible for him to write such a transparently partisan thing? Because it was a good bash at his enemies.
('Politics is the mind-killer', as we say on LessWrong.)
Or another example from pg21; having finished reciting the Hayekian argument that no one can generalize over the entire economy or populace and central planning is impossible, he then goes on (???) to discuss how Cicero told his friend all English slaves were completely worthless and how Teddy Roosevelt hated all Indians and rather than criticizing their opinions as a perfect example of the intellectual's arrogance in generalizing from tiny tiny samples (both Cicero and Teddy were intellectuals par excellance), he *defends* their bigotry, arguing that critics are themselves being arrogant! What is this I don't even -
It came as no surprise on pg28 to see a caricature of economic libertarianism and zero mentions of standing disproofs of the simplistic models like Coase's point about large firms being economic absurdities and central planning in a different disguise, since I wasn't expecting very much any more.
By pg30, I abandoned my sporadic note-taking and began playing a little game: write down every time a thinker or politician who could be described as conservative or libertarian is criticized or given as an example of the evils of intellectualism.
Naturally, I didn't expect to see Hayek come up for hobnobbing with dictatorships (any more than people discussing Mother Theresa usually bring up her more questionable funding sources), but still - an entire book ought to provide at least 1 or 2 examples.
In the 70s or 80s, I thought I might *finally* have something to add to my list: Naziism and Italian fascism. Surely those would get criticized, as they notoriously aimed to remake their entire societies, with disastrous results? But no! I learned, to my surprise, apparently fascism and Naziism are socialist liberal parties and they are just more liberal examples of intellectual arrogance!
Apparently no one on the right end of the political spectrum has ever proposed or implemented any bad idea, ever. Even if I granted the fairness and accuracy of all his descriptions of left-wingers, his conclusions or synthesis would be completely worthless as it omits half the political spectrum! It would be like doing a study of cancer patients and throwing out every patient who was a Democrat - what could you possibly hope to learn at the en, after you did that?
The Naziism-is-socialism finally broke me. Writing a bad review is not so worthwhile as to be worth going through this. The book was nothing but capsule hitjobs of everyone Sowell disliked at any point, and gave no indication that it would be anything but that for the entire rest of the book.
Life is too short to read Sowell, and I had Charles Murray's _Coming Apart: The State of White America_ to read, which I've been looking forward to reading for a long time.
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Jul 17, 2016 08:56AM
The comparison between regulation of a market and a CEO's wage is hardly analogous. The argument Sowell makes is that an effective CEO can be decisive in raising the productivity of a company and hence command a high pay. This is the choice of share holders, who are primarily concerned with making more money so I think it's fair to say it's in their best interest. Saying a highly paid CEO raises the price of the good by x amount is only to say that the increase in productivity outweighs that measly cost. Otherwise there would be no reason to pay a CEO whatever amount. If you think you know better, I encourage you to corner every market in the world by creating firms that pay their CEOs less.
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No, that was not the argument he made, and you have no excuse for misunderstanding his argument because the book is available on Libgen to check. Here is the entirety of the footnote I was referring to where he makes the claim of triviality:Some try to claim that, as consumers who buy the products of the companies whose executives receive high pay, they are affected in the prices of the products they buy. However, if all the executives of oil companies, for example, agreed to work for no salary at all, that would not be enough to reduce the price of a gallon of gasoline by a dime, since the total profits of the oil companies are a small fraction of the price of a gallon of gasoline—usually much less than the taxes levied by governments at state and national levels. For a fuller discussion of executives’ pay, see my Economic Facts and Fallacies, second edition, (New York: Basic Books, 2011), pp. 159–164.
You will notice that there is nothing about your argument that the 10 cents is justified because paying executives less would wind up raising the final price by more than that; his point is that we ought to not care about 10 cents because it's so small - though this is over all oil prices which is a major part of the economy and would have large effects at the margin and 'some' people certainly would be affected, as someone lecturing us on economics should appreciate full well.
Sowell reminds me of Krugman in a lot of ways. Especially their career arcs. Started out with exceptional technical chops and uncommon charitability (look at Sowell's early work on Marxism and Krugman's on free traders), but somewhere along the way decided that winning hearts and minds for the cause was more important than correctness of argument or being fair to "the other side."
