Thomas Sowell, interviewed at Stanford, details his ideological shift from Marxism to conservatism based on factual evidence rather than dogma. He argues that minimum wage laws exacerbate unemployment and critiques liberal policies like expanded welfare for increasing venereal diseases and teenage pregnancies. Challenging systemic racism narratives, Sowell highlights economic factors and historical data, while dismissing universal basic income as a failed concept. Ultimately, he advocates scaling back government regulations to address housing shortages and school failures through informed discourse over uninformed slogans. [Automatically generated summary]
So first I thought, I want to do a little bit on your history and I want to focus on your new book.
But I was curious if you have a sense of the sort of renaissance that your writing is having right now with young people.
Because when I tweeted out that we finally had you on the show and we've been trying to make this happen for quite some time, I mean thousands of responses, and I had tons of people just say, please tell him this, tell him this, my awakening was because of Dr. Sell, all this.
Are you noticing something happening right now because of the unique place we're in?
Well, you know, I thought about it as I was doing the research for the first chapter where I get into the birth order thing.
Now, had my parents lived a normal lifespan, I would have been the sixth child in the family.
They died young.
And so I was adopted in infancy, and raised as the only child in a home with four adults.
And in terms of what I found out in the research on birth order, clearly that was a huge advantage.
And so their misfortune was my good fortune.
And moreover, the family in which I was raised, Moved to New York, which at that time had a far superior educational system to that in North Carolina, and far superior to what it is today.
I mean, when you start getting in the habit of reading when you're eight years old, that's a different ballgame than if you have to wait until you're a teenager and it's too late now.
The same fellow was very knowledgeable about the school system.
So when I finished elementary school and they assigned me to a junior high school in a very bad neighborhood, he told me, you can get transferred.
And I, in fact, got transferred to a much better school.
Had I gone to that other school, again, the story would have been entirely different.
One of the themes of the early part of the book here is that there are a whole number of things that have to come together, and if you don't have all of those prerequisites, then whatever good qualities you have don't matter.
I mentioned illiteracy in the middle of the 20th century.
Something like 40% of the adults in the world were still illiterate.
And so it doesn't matter what their native talent or any of that came along.
You can't read.
There are a whole lot of occupations you just simply can't get into.
I guess, although I wouldn't carry it too far, because some of the most disastrous notions in the world have come from highly educated people with, I'm sure, high IQs.
One of the things that I found out that was sort of amazing about your history, you briefly mentioned it right before we started, you were a Marxist at one time in your life.
Most people will find this hard to believe, but it is true.
Yes, I mean, there was no alternative being discussed.
My first job was as a Western Union messenger, and I would come home on some nights, I would take the Fifth Avenue bus, which cost all of 15 cents in those days, but I figured I'd splurge now and then, and I would drive, it would go all the way up Fifth Avenue, past all these Lord & Taylor and all these fancy places, And then I crossed 57th Street past Carnegie Hall and down Riverside Drive and that was sort of the Gold Coast area.
And then as I came across this long viaduct And it turned into 135th Street.
Suddenly, there were the tenements.
And I wondered, why is this?
I mean, it's so different.
And nothing in the schools, or most of the books, seem to deal with that.
And Marx dealt with that.
So, it's like winning an election when there's only one person running.
And specifically, my first professional job, I was a summer intern at the U.S.
Department of Labor.
And I realized from dealing with these people that the U.S.
Department of Labor, one of my biggest concerns was about minimum wages.
has been for a long time. And so at first I thought, well, this is good because all
these people are poor and they'll get a little higher income and so that'll be helpful. And
then as I studied economics I began to see, well, there's a downside. They may lose their
jobs completely. So it's that. And so I tried, when I was at the Labor Department, I tried
to talk about that to them. And eventually I came up with some test of it.
And when I came up with this test, how we might test this, I was waiting to hear congratulations, you see, that I had this.
And I could see these people were stunned.
They said, oh, this idiot has stumbled on something that will ruin us all.
Wow.
Yeah.
And I realized the U.S.
Department of Labor had its own agenda and interests, and that did not necessarily mean that whether poor people lost their jobs from minimum wages or got higher pay was their highest priority.
So I think a lot of people watching this, and I know because I've been so open about my own sort of awakening, are going through this right now.
They're realizing that the things that they've been taught for so long are not The truth, and are not based in fact.
When that happened to you, and you started telling other people, not just the people you were working with, be it family or friends, what kind of pushback did you get?
Because it was sort of radical ideas, in a way, that you were talking about then.
Well, actually, I didn't feel any need to do a lot of proselytizing.
It was enough for me that I was now beginning to understand things I hadn't understood before.
And as you've noted in the book, I mentioned minimum wage studies, and really, they're incredibly flawed.
There's a whole chapter on numbers.
And the other thing, getting back to my personal development, I mean, I left home when I was 17.
No high school diploma, no skills, no job experience.
And I discovered that there was not a huge amount of demand for people like that.
But in retrospect, decades later when I do research, I realize that in 1948, the unemployment rate for black 16 and 17 year olds was 9.4.
For whites, the same age, it was 10.2.
And those numbers are much smaller than we're used to in recent decades.
And there's no serious racial difference.
In fact, the blacks in my age bracket, we're doing just slightly better.
And of course, one of the things that the minimum wage law does is that it Creates unemployment, raises it to multiples of what it was.
1948 was a special time because the minimum wage law was passed in 1938 and in the intervening ten years there was huge inflation and the law hadn't gotten changed.
And so for all practical purposes there was no minimum wage law.
But had we had these wonderful liberals insisting that I be paid a living wage that would support a family of four, I would have been unemployed.
Right, it probably would not have led up to everything else.
So when you think about these wonderful liberals, as you just said, you know, I think there's sort of two lines of thinking.
One is that, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I try not to besmirch the... And it's a superhighway.
It's a superhighway, exactly.
I try not to besmirch their intentions.
But then I think there are people that either have confused thinking or have ulterior motives or whatever else.
What do you think it is?
As someone that is so based in fact, and we're going to get to plenty of that fact in a moment, what do you think the thinking is, the flaw in the thinking?
Oh, I think it's the idea that you don't have to check a good-sounding idea against what actually happens.
There are people to this day who think that the 1960s was just a great period, and I'll say to them, do you realize how many good trends, the murder rate among black males had been going down for two decades,
you know, by 18% in one decade, 22% in the next decade.
And in 1960, it suddenly takes a U-turn straight up.
And that was not peculiar to blacks or even to the United States.
Pinker's book about violence, that throughout the Western world,
the homicide rates did a U-turn in the 1960s.
So the question is, what actually happens when you put your wonderful ideas to work?
Do they produce the kind of thing you thought they were going to produce?
No, but I think having studied so many things that sounded so good and ended up so bad, it makes me doubt, especially when there are people who are anxious to spout off with very little study of what they're talking about.
I think social media seems to amplify things, but do you think it's always been that way, about just sort of this endless pontificating of people that really don't know what they're talking about?
Well, there's always been that, as long as they've been human beings.
But the question is the magnitude of it, and the ability of various institutions to shut out any other viewpoint, of which the universities are the worst examples.
When I see the riots when Charles Murray shows up, and I happen to know Charles Murray.
I mean, if you can demonize Charles Murray, you can demonize anybody.
I mean, and I listen to see, what are they going to quote that he said?
I've never heard a single quote of it.
All the books the man has written, they never quote anything he said.
And a lot of what he said is the direct opposite of what they claim he said.
That tells you a little bit about the state we're in right now.
So this thing that's happening on college campuses right now that everyone seems to think is freezing free speech, and it seems to be speech that's generally thought of as right.
So it's conservatives, libertarians, further people on the right than that.
Venereal diseases, for example, were going down at a very steep rate.
It was either syphilis or gonorrhea that was one half as prevalent in 1960 as it was in 1950.
The brilliant idea was to bring in sex education, you see, to avoid unwanted pregnancies and so on.
But neurodiseases skyrocketed, unwanted pregnancies, teenage pregnancies skyrocketed.
It's amazing that so many people on the left are able to just ignore any facts that go against their theory.
Yeah.
I mean, it just does not...
My old mentor at the University of Chicago, George Stigler, argued, however, that economists have very little influence, and what they say makes very little difference.
And he was giving a talk at the Hoover Institution once, and he said, thanks to years of dedicated work by Tom Sowell, the next minimum wage increase will be five cents an hour less than it would have been otherwise.
Well, that's what's interesting to me is because, as I preface this with you, I think that the writings that you've done all these years in these books, they're becoming culturally relevant, maybe in a way that they weren't, I don't even want to say it this way, but maybe in a way that they weren't economically relevant.
Do you understand the point there?
That I think there's a cultural relevance to all the things that you've done for these last, you know, 40 some odd years that seems so actually powerful and impactful to me right now, which is incredible.
And I remember once Kenneth Clark, I was debating him and he was beside himself because of my supposed sinister influence in Washington during the Reagan administration.
I told him, if my influence in Washington is all you have to worry about, you are a very fortunate man.
I can't think of anything that happened any different than if I had never said anything to anybody.
I can remember testifying before one committee, and the audience was so rowdy that the chairman had to bang the gavel to shut them down, and they put some little tiny thing in the law they were building, and I would bet their rent money that that The provision is gone now because there are so many people who didn't.
I was saying that if you're going to help poor kids, then give the money to the kids or else, you know, provide it for wherever they go.
Don't turn it over to the institution because they will then use it in an entirely different way.
So a couple times you've mentioned liberals, and one of the things that I talk about on my show often, because I was a progressive, I was a lefty, I now call myself a classical liberal, and I've tried to make the point that being a liberal in the traditional sense has very little, if anything, to do with the left anymore.
Yes, it's true.
Do you see any sort of meaningful distinction between classical liberal and libertarian at this point?
Or do you see even, I'll ask you a couple things at once and you can go in any direction, do you see any, are there, do you see a difference of course between liberals and the left?
That's one of the things that people ask me all the time.
And I know you're not big on labels generally, but I did read something where you said that the closest thing that you could be labeled as is libertarian.
So, but you find that when you look up facts, that's what you find over and over again.
In all the discussions of income differences, they never take into account age.
And age is huge!
Japanese Americans have a median age of 50.
Hispanic Americans have a median age of 26.
Now, when you see Hispanic Americans, greatly overrepresented among baseball stars, And not a single Japanese-American baseball star in the major leagues.
Yeah, so you had about 30-some-odd pages on notes, and I actually started going through the notes because I thought, this is exactly what we need now.
You know, like, when I was reading it, there were pages that I had to read more than once, because you're obviously giving a lot of numbers and facts, and you have to look at these things from different angles.
And we're not very good at that these days, right?
I mean, the first meaning, when they say someone has discriminating tastes, you mean he can tell what is a good wine from a bad wine, what is a good camera from a bad camera, and so forth.
And that's almost the exact opposite of the meaning in the law, where you mean someone who judges someone by what group he comes from, irrespective of the individual's actual personal qualities.
So those are two very different things.
Ideally, you would like every person to be judged as an individual.
But as a practical matter, that becomes impossible because the costs are prohibitive.
I use the example where if you're walking down the street at night and you see a shadowy figure in an alley up ahead, I mean, do you judge him as an individual?
Or do you cross the street and go across on the other side?
Because the cost of judging him as an individual can be very high, including your life.
So we make that distinction.
But then I say, I call that discrimination.
Discrimination 1 is when you just have a very good understanding of what the facts are.
And so if you judge each person as an individual, I call that discrimination 1A.
And then if you judge them by the group they belong to, that's not as good, but that's discrimination 1B.
But it's still based on some facts.
Discrimination 2, which is the reason we have the anti-discrimination laws, You don't worry about that at all.
If he's someone that you don't like for whatever reason, then you're biased against him.
Yeah, are you shocked when you look at what's going on right now and see so much talk about race all the time, so much talk about all of the things that separate us, the very things that you've been arguing against based in fact for so many years that seem in an odd way more... I don't think there's more racism now than ever or more of these dividers, but there's more talk about it.
Wars in general are much easier to start than they are to stop.
I mean, when that fellow in Serbia shot the Archduke...
I mean, who knew that that was going to cause millions of people around the world, including people from the United States, about 10,000 miles away, are going to come over there and start shooting.
Yeah, the Great War.
Yeah, and I'm worried about the current trade war.
You start a trade war, you may never be able to stop it in the next decade, because there are too many people involved, too many currents of interest, and so on.
I'm reading a book about the schools, and the woman who's writing it, Diane Ravitch, is talking about how teachers have due process before they can be fired.
Now, when you look into the facts of it, right down here, and I think it was Atherton.
It cost half a million dollars to fire one incompetent teacher.
You know, you don't have a big enough budget, you know, and in New York you have something called the rubber room.
These are teachers who are so incompetent that the principals don't want them in the classroom, you know, and they get paid full salary and they show up and they accrue pension rights and so forth.
And the last time, I forget how many millions of dollars I spent a year in New York.
Paying for teachers who don't teach, and in fact don't do anything but show up at the same time as if they were teaching, and they read magazines or whatever they feel like doing.
And this farce goes on at a time when they don't have enough money to provide the kids with decent supplies.
I mean, we can talk about it through the lens of education, but in any And in an area where the government has taken on a bigger role than it's supposed to.
I think one of the things you hear all the time is it's sort of too late.
I think a lot of people think it's too late to take back that government power.
No, heavens, during the Reagan administration that was the only time I know of when the Federal Register grew smaller.
That is where they compile all the laws that have been passed in a given time.
So it can be done.
It's not easy, but it can be done.
There was some issue that Reagan was discussing, and someone said, you know, it's complicated.
He said, it's not complicated.
It's just not easy to do.
I mean, right now, one of the big forces out here talks about affordable housing, and they're appointing Blue Ribbon committees to look into why there's no affordable housing.
And I think that's like appointing a Blue Ribbon committee To explain why the ground is wet after a rain.
I mean, it's very simple.
If you prevent people from building housing and the population is growing, you're gonna have a housing shortage and you won't have affordable housing.
It's really, you know, economics won during the first two weeks.
Well, but I think more fundamentally, the public that votes has to itself become informed and not be so easily stampeded by slogans and a few numbers thrown around, like, you know, women make X percent of what men make and so on.
Yeah.
When I was studying that some years ago, for example, I found out that young Female doctors make much less money than young male doctors.
That seems like very odd.
But when you look into it, you discover that young male doctors work an average of 500 hours a year more than young female doctors.
And they get paid for the 500 hours.
But there's no reason why the women and men should be doing the same thing.
So are there any laws that are in place right now that you believe are discriminatory one way or another towards any community or against any community?
I would have to write a much larger book to cover them all.
The minimum wage law is absolutely devastating.
The policy of saying that you cannot have more kids from one ethnic group disciplined in the school than from another is nonsense.
Groups are different from each other in umpteen ways and to say let's have the presumption that they are the same except for the way they're treated is nonsense.
It's never been true and I don't know why we would think it's true here today.
So I do sense that some of what you just said there is bubbling up into the national conscious because I get a ton of email from black conservatives now, people that feel That they haven't been represented fairly or that the so-called leaders of the black community that are on television all the time are actually preaching the complete reverse of everything that you've said here.
Well I mentioned to you before we started that Larry Elder caused my awakening because I was a progressive and I said something to him about systemic racism on air and he beat me senseless with facts and I had to go back and reassess What was wrong with my thinking?
Well, you know, in one of the chapters there, I have a little section about the era of apartheid in South Africa, and I had that in there because there's so much argument about how much racism is there and so forth.
I said, let's test this hypothesis in a setting where there's absolutely no doubt of it.
And that's apartheid in South Africa, with a government where blacks are not allowed to vote and so forth.
And you then apply the economic principles, and you find that the economic principles apply in South Africa, that there are some occupations.
See, blacks weren't allowed by law to be in certain occupations more than a certain percentage, and in some occupations couldn't be hired at all.
In some of those occupations where they couldn't be hired at all, illegal to hire them at all, there were more blacks hired than there were whites.
Because there are economic factors that come in, and you don't just pass a law and that automatically produces the results you want.
Can you go into some of the economic factors that you mentioned there?
Because I thought it was sort of interesting about the types of jobs that black people had and why that would affect... Well, no, it's the competitiveness of the industry.
In a competitive industry, discrimination in the sense that we use for anti-discrimination It costs the discriminator as well as the others.
Now, insofar as that price can be evaded by the discriminator, he will discriminate.
For example, minimum wage laws.
When you have a minimum wage law, you have more people applying for jobs in those categories than there are jobs available because raising the wage rate causes more people to apply and employers to hire fewer because they're more expensive.
And so you have a chronic surplus.
Now, if you've got a chronic surplus in an industry, it costs nothing to discriminate.
But if you have a competitive market, then of course it does cost something.
For every person that you discriminate against who's qualified, you've got to hire somebody else.
And you've got to raise that pay rate in order to get people in.
So I show how competitive industries have much less discrimination than, say, regulated public utilities.
So I was wondering when I was reading it if you were ever going to talk about how now technology is also changing this.
So we see a lot of these movements for $15 minimum wage, and I know why you don't think that's a great idea, but even now where we see McDonald's and some of these other places just replacing people with iPads and computers.
When I grew up in Harlem, When you went into a movie theater, this is a little neighborhood movie theater in Harlem, there would be a kid who would walk right down the aisle with you with a flashlight to show you to your seat, you see.
And so now, now that we have so many compassionate people who want people to be paid a living wage, you stumble down the aisle to your seat the best way you can, because they're not going to pay you the kind of money, you know, that's unrelated to productivity.
I hear a growing movement of people saying, well, this is why we need a universal basic income, because technology is going to force so many people out of the workplace.
One of the moments that I remember very well, when I was back in the school in Harlem for some reason, maybe doing research, and I looked out the window and I said, you know, when I was a teenager I used to walk my dog in that park, and looks of horror came over the students' faces, because that was a different world.
And so, and when I tell them that I used to sleep out on a fire escape on hot summer nights, because who could afford air conditioning, and they think I'm a man from Mars.
People did that all over New York.
They did it in Washington.
They did it in North Carolina.
Relatives in Washington used to go down Haines Point down near the Jefferson Memorial on hot summer nights and sleep there until sometime after midnight when the heat wouldn't be so bad and they'd go home at that time.
So my sister right now lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not too far from Harlem, and she's in a half rent-stabilized or rent-controlled building and half market price.
She's on the market price, so she's paying to be in a two-bedroom in New York City.
I don't even want to tell you how expensive it is.
But then there are basically half of the building that's paying next to nothing.
And that, of course, incentivizes people not to get Yes.
off the dole because if you're living in a nice area on the Upper West Side, very cheap,
So as someone that has survived the arrows and the venom that the left can throw at you, because I see a lot of this these days, I see even what they say to me, I get a lot of email from people saying, how can I be brave enough to do it?
And I think it's particularly a unique situation for minorities that consider themselves conservative or libertarian or a little bit to the right.
So I've mentioned Larry Elder before, and of course you and my friend David Webb.
And, you know, there are some more black conservatives than perhaps there used to be.
I mean, I've advised some young people, do not go into teaching in public schools.
Because the odds are so stacked against you, and people can write bad references for you, especially when you're young, and what they say about you is all that someone sees.
Now, by the time I was teaching at some of these schools, I remember one place where the department chairman used to threaten one of my colleagues that he wouldn't write good references for him.
I had published stuff while I was still in graduate school.
I had Milton Friedman and George Staler write references for me.
What this guy said there as chairman of the department wouldn't matter a bit.
So I want to, time is limited here, I want to mention one thing that you say right at the end of the book, that really what we need more than anything else, perhaps, is common decency.
When I was going to school and we'd have fights on the schoolyard grounds, when one guy was clearly beaten, whoever was the toughest kid in the crowd would simply step in and stop it.
Sir, this has been a true honor and a pleasure, and I know, I can see it in your eyes even, the sort of humility that you have and humbleness, but you've affected so many people and are still continuing to affect so many people, and I hope that we might have just given that a little extra bump today, so I'm truly honored that you took the time today.