Coleman Hughes on Thomas Sowell

Coleman Hughes wrote an article about economist Thomas Sowell for City Journal titled The Nonconformist (Summer 2020). 

« Sowell’s books on economics, the field in which he is trained—he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1968—form the core of his achievement. Foremost among them is Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. The book draws its inspiration from Friedrich Hayek’s classic 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The knowledge that concerned Hayek was not timeless, scientific knowledge of the sort discovered by Einstein, or the bureaucratic knowledge that a government agency gathers, but practical knowledge—the kind required, say, to run a deli on a particular street corner in a specific neighborhood or grow crops on a particular plot of land in a variable climate. Knowledge of this kind is both fleeting (what was true last week may not be true this week) and local (what is true on one street corner may not be true on the next). No single person can ever possess much of it. »

« Thus, when faced with the question, “Who gets to decide?” we ought to answer not by reference to the superior goals or moral fiber of some institution or another but to the incentives and constraints facing different decision makers. »

« The more common choice between decision makers pits the government against the market. Yet for Sowell, “the market” is “a misleading figure of speech.” Many “refer to ‘the market’ as if it were an institution parallel with, and alternative to, the government as an institution.” In reality, “the market” is not an institution… Market arrangements may differ, but what unites them—and separates them from government plans—is that those who make decisions experience both their costs and benefits. Their feedback mechanisms are therefore instantaneous. »

« As with the Labor Department, the problem was not the employees, who “were very nice,” he remembers; it was the “nature of a bureaucracy” itself, with its bad incentives and slow feedback mechanisms. »

« A frequent theme in Sowell’s writing is what philosophers would call reversing the explanandum—the phenomenon to be explained. Take poverty. Many observe the enormous chasm between rich and poor nations and, understandably, wonder why poverty exists. But the real question, in the constrained vision, is why wealth exists. »

« The main determinants of economic success are education and skills—“human capital,” as economists call it. »

Thomas Sowell books mentioned in the article:

• Wealth, Poverty, and Politics (2016)
• Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (2014)
• A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (2007)
• Conquests and Cultures: An International History (1999)
• Migrations And Cultures: A World View (1997)
• Knowledge and Decisions (1996)
• Race And Culture: A World View (1995)
• The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late (2002)
• Late-Talking Children (1997)