The Path Forward: Thomas Sowell
Making Way For Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell is an indispensable, challenging, and startling thinker to contend with. A sociologist by training and an empiricist by temperament, his prodigious scholarship pierces through common assumptions with an unflinching commitment to hard data and a Socratic discipline of rigorous interrogation, unperturbed by the pressures of the political climate. Whether challenging criticisms of “trickle-down” economics, debunking assumptions about discrimination, or exploring the role of culture in economic advancement, Sowell’s insights strike a welcome note of clarity in what can otherwise be a cacophony of political discourse, inviting both deeper reflection among (usually conservative) sympathizers and formative challenges for (usually liberal or progressive) skeptics to wrestle with.
Sowell’s expansive interests and empirical orientation elude systematic unity, but there are a few key threads that animate his thought. As Jason Riley argues in his documentary, Common Sense in a Senseless World, Sowell consistently reveals the importance of incentives and the reality of trade-offs in policymaking, the role that developing human capital plays in a group’s economic mobility, and the importance of existing institutions as causal factors in social outcomes. As a student of the Chicago school of economics, he emphasizes the power of individuals to guide their own lives and advance their own interests when given the opportunity to do so, ever skeptical of the constricting and demeaning effects that well-intentioned government programs can have.
Sowell might be called “conservative” insofar as he puts a premium on individual freedom of choice (particularly in education), denounces the distorted incentives created by welfare programs, and remains reluctant to assume that existing social disparities necessarily reflect discrimination, especially when differences in education and cultural values play a clear role.
The Path Forward: Applications of Sowell’s Thought
In the field of education, Sowell’s central concern has been the declining quality of public school education. The government, he argues, has made it harder to get jobs and lowered the economic mobility of those most in need by leaving students bereft of the skills required to be competitive in the market. In consequence, it has made it harder for folks to rise out of unskilled labor (which is increasingly precarious in a technical society) and make the income gains required to lift their families out of economic insecurity. But where some see this issue as primarily a result of underfunding, Sowell frames it as a symptom of distorted incentives, wherein the existing institutions lack the competitive pressure to be responsive to the needs of students.
For Sowell, the primary solution is to introduce market pressures on schools by allowing parents more freedom to choose which schools their children attend. Whether achieved through a voucher system, investment in charter schools, or a combination, Sowell argues that such a policy would make schools more rigorous, responsive to student needs, and diverse, as they would better reflect the various value-profiles of families seeking a better future for their children.
Sowell views the family as perhaps the most significant social unit insofar as it plays an outsized role in the transmission of cultural values, which in turn play a major role in a group’s economic mobility. Unfortunately, however, Sowell thinks that American families, and particularly black families, have been undermined by the distorted incentives created by welfare programs, which “pay people to fail” insofar as they make benefits dependent on remaining below a certain level. This results in corrosion of moral fortitude and a diminution of individual responsibility, which in turn create the conditions for parental abandonment (usually by the father) and single-parent households.
Families have also suffered under the yoke of minimum wage laws, according to Sowell. Like Milton Friedman, he argues that minimum wage laws automatically price out the most vulnerable unskilled workers, thereby preventing them from acquiring even a modest income and keeping a job that could lead to further skill development. Thus, where subpar education and welfare incentives hamper individuals and their dependents internally (by failing to develop their marketable skill set and discouraging self-responsibility and initiative), minimum wage laws narrow their opportunities by lowering the number of available jobs.
In like manner, when Sowell diagnoses gaps in wealth, he does so within the paradigm of competitive capitalism. For starters, he refutes sweeping assertions about the persistence of wealth gaps along alleged lines of discrimination, arguing that groups of comparable education and professional experience do not exhibit significant disparities. In the case of women making less than men, for example, Sowell points out that the real disparity is not between women and men writ large, but between married women and everyone else. This is because married women often leave the workforce for extended periods to raise children, putting them at a competitive disadvantage compared to those who have remained in the “workforce” continuously. Never married women, on the other hand, do not earn less than men of comparable background, and in some circumstances, they earn even more.
In consequence, the ultimate solution to any undesirable wealth gap in a competitive atmosphere (assuming that such a gap is not just reflective of group preferences) is the enhancement of human capital (capita, the Latin root of capital and capitalism, means “head”—the human source of creativity, and in turn, prosperity). Income gains ultimately depend on cultivating the marketable skills that a person or group wields, and these skills require not only the intervention of a decent educational program but also the family and cultural values to support that education.
Sowell’s views on education, family, and the wealth gap share a number of parallels with the philosophy of Booker T. Washington. Like Washington, he upholds the twin values of self-reliance and human capital, prioritizing initiatives that will help people help themselves. Where Washington called for the kind of industrial education that would help newly freed African Americans acquire marketable skills, property, and eventually the demonstrable power required to dissolve old racial prejudices, Sowell emphasizes school choice, the capacity of individuals and their families to advance economically if given a decent enough education, and the outsized influence that skills and group values have on social outcomes, particularly in circumstances where discrimination is the alleged cause of the disparity.
How, then, would Sowell suggest we reorient the role of government in these cases? As an empirical sociologist, Sowell does not tend in the direction of any general, a priori formulation of the role of government. But his extensive study of the negative effects of welfare programs, criticisms of minimum wage laws, and direct experience with bureaucratic inefficiencies indicates that he shares a “libertarian” wariness of government overreach.
Sowell’s libertarian leanings proceed from two sources. From his criticisms of welfare, we get a powerful critique of government programs that lean too far in the direction of paternalism and bureaucratic rigidity. Such programs, he argues, undermine self-possession and create cycles of social dysfunction that dissolve the integrity of the family structure. From his criticisms of minimum wage laws, on the other hand, we get a strong admonishment to tread cautiously in the domain of market intervention, for an imposed wage rate that is not reflected by market choices will lead to increased unemployment (and all the opportunities that come with learning on the job). In both cases, well-intentioned initiatives end up producing bad consequences by failing to grapple with both market realities and the psychological consequences of bureaucratic paternalism.
Regarding discriminatory police misconduct towards African Americans, Sowell is much less apt to recognize it as such. He remains critical of ideas like “systemic racism,” deeming them vague hypotheses incapable of verification, as well as the entire narrative of racial discrimination in America, which he views as a symptom of bad media and political incentives coming together. Like many Republicans, his general view of police misconduct is anything but “systemic”: prosecute misconduct where the evidence demonstrates such, presume innocence until guilt is proven, and do not jump to a racial explanation without sufficient evidence.