April 18, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(upbeat music) | |
| We're live on location at Stanford University and joining me today is an economist, author, scholar, | ||
| senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and living legend, Dr. Thomas Sowell. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
| I feel I have to get the gushing out first. | ||
| That way we can focus on the book. | ||
| I don't know that there's anyone on this mortal coil whose writing and thinking has influenced me more than you. | ||
| So this is truly an honor for me, and I just have to get that out right at the beginning. | ||
| I just hope I haven't misled you. | ||
| We'll find out. | ||
| I'll let you know at the end. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I only know what people tell me. | ||
| That's even true at Stanford. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I only know what my research assistants tell me. | ||
| All right, well, I will certainly accept that. | ||
| Well, take my word for it, then. | ||
| So, I want to talk a little bit about your history for a bit, and then we'll move on to your new book. | ||
| Born in North Carolina, grew up in the Bronx. | ||
| In Harlem. | ||
| In Harlem, sorry, in Harlem. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about some of your formative years. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Were you always interested in education? | ||
| I mean, even as a young person? | ||
| No! | ||
| I mean, I was a little kid. | ||
| There was nothing in my background that would have put me there. | ||
| But fortunately in Harlem there was a kid named Eddie that members of the family had run into | ||
| before I ever arrived from North Carolina. | ||
| And he was a very, came from a highly educated family. | ||
| And they immediately saw the implications if they could get him to sort of mentor me. | ||
| And now had I had met Eddie on my own, chances are I would never have seen any significance. | ||
| He would just have been one of the people I passed by. | ||
| But of course the adults understood what the future was like | ||
| and thinking about things that kids don't think about despite the great worship of child talkers these days. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| And so he took me to a public library and I had no idea what a public library was. | ||
| I was eight years old. | ||
| And I saw all these books, and I had no idea why we were there when I don't have any money to buy one book. | ||
| And so, what am I going to do with all these, you know, hundreds of books up on the shelf? | ||
| And he very patiently walked me through the whole thing. | ||
| And again, I was very reluctant to take out a library card because I didn't know what all this is about. | ||
| But he talked me into it, and I borrowed a couple of books. | ||
| And really, had I not encountered him, the entire rest of the story could not have been The way it was. | ||
| I mean, at some point I would have learned what a public library was, but by that point it would be too late. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dare I ask if you have any recollection of what you might have taken out of the library at eight years old? | ||
| One of the books was the Dr. Dolittle books. | ||
| I don't know if you even know what those are. | ||
| He could talk to the animals. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Alice in Wonderland and the rest of them. | ||
| But I came in on May and school wasn't open until September so I had no one to play with and I was just bored to tears. | ||
| And so I started reading really for the first time and I got the habit of reading. | ||
| And on that You know, that made the rest possible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were there any other formative things that happened to you over those younger years? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's pretty clear from all the reading of yours that I've done, you put basic, education basically is number one, right? | ||
| I mean, is that the number one thing that you can do as a human being? | ||
| Get educated? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So perhaps critical thinking with a little education? | ||
| I will settle for almost any kind of thinking. | ||
| It's so rare these days. | ||
| It is oddly rare. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it's not that unusual. | ||
| Most of the leading conservative thinkers of our time did not start off as conservatives. | ||
| You had a couple like Bill Buckley and George Will. | ||
| But Milton Friedman was a liberal and a Keynesian. | ||
| Hayek was a socialist. | ||
| Ronald Reagan was so far left, at one point the FBI was following him, you know? | ||
| So, there's a huge movement from the left to the right as people get older. | ||
| Yeah, I'm well aware, as I mentioned to you earlier, as a former progressive, I understand that movement in the modern sense. | ||
| Do you remember sort of what you were thinking, what appealed to you at that time about Marxism? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So then, what was your wake-up to what was wrong with that line of thinking? | ||
| Facts. | ||
| We could probably end the interview right there. | ||
| Facts. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, how much longer did you last at the department? | ||
| No, that was really the turning point. | ||
| And then I began to see that all these government agencies and whatnot, they have their own institutional incentives. | ||
| And you cannot say that the government will step in and do what's right for these people and whatnot, because they'll do what's right for themselves. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I don't know what that would have led to. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Or do they produce the opposite in many areas? | ||
| And they produce lots of opposites. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Steven Pinker. | ||
| I had him on the show a few weeks ago, and I think he's one of the clearest thinkers we have. | ||
| And his new book, Enlightenment Now, is that things are trending more positively. | ||
| But even hearing that is very hard for a lot of people. | ||
| Well, it depends on what your baseline is. | ||
| Pinker is much more optimistic than I am. | ||
| I happen to be very pessimistic about the future, but I hope the optimists are right. | ||
| Do you think you're a pessimist by nature? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, we've got a lot of that these days. | ||
| Do you think that has ramped up? | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're saying that's really not a new phenomenon. | ||
| You were kind of facing that. | ||
| It was not that bad in the 1950s when I was a Marxist and when Senator Joe McCarthy was tracking down anybody on the left. | ||
| But I said whatever I felt like, wherever I felt like it, and I got no such blowback. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
| So McCarthy's talking about all this stuff, but you had no problem being an open Marxist? | ||
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No. | |
| He was in Washington, I was in Cambridge, and so be it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you do think something has gotten worse now? | ||
| There was a number of things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, when it comes to impact, that's a different story entirely. | ||
| I mean, long ago, I stopped accepting invitations to testify before congressional committees. | ||
| It's an absolute waste of time. | ||
| They have made up their minds, and they just want to be able to say they've heard all points of view. | ||
| And then it pretty much stops there. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're being very humble, sir. | ||
| No, I'm realistic. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Are there any examples where the money is turned over to the institution, whatever the institution might be, where it really does work? | ||
| Are there any aberrations in most of your theories? | ||
| There must be somewhere by the law of averages, but it is not prevalent. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| 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? | ||
| I mean the words have all sort of gotten... Milton Friedman used to always say that he was a liberal, so did Hayek. | ||
| And of course, in different countries, the word means different things. | ||
| In Australia, if you said you were a liberal, they would understand what you were saying. | ||
| But a liberal in Australia is different from a liberal in the United States. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you say liberal, you mean leftist, basically, right? | ||
| Yeah, in the American sense of the word. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think there's any sort of real distinction that needs to be made between classical liberal and libertarian? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is that still where you're at? | ||
| Yeah, except of course in foreign policy. | ||
| We can talk about that too. | ||
| And I guess also the libertarians seem to have this atomistic view of the world, which I think is... | ||
| Completely unrealistic. | ||
| Because not only in my life, but in the lives of people around me, the surroundings make a huge difference. | ||
| One of the things I get into a lot in the book is the disparities imply either discrimination on the one hand or genetic differences on the other. | ||
| And disparities are the norm. | ||
| I mean, I was just reading something the other day, you know, that Latin America has 8% of the people in the world. | ||
| They commit 38% of all the murders. | ||
| And in Latin America, 80%, no, 38% for that. | ||
| But in Latin America, 80% of the murders occur on 2% of the streets. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't believe in entire history. | ||
| Well, we had Ichiro on Seattle. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No? | ||
| There are people of Japanese ancestry who have become baseball stars. | ||
| All of them are from Japan. | ||
| None of them are Japanese-American. | ||
| Ah, okay. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Right, he was a star in Japan for many years. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So how many 50-year-old men are going to be baseball stars? | ||
| And by the same token, how many 26-year-old men are going to be surgeons or CEOs? | ||
| Any other kind of job that requires long years of study and or long years of experience? | ||
| And that really is what this book is about. | ||
| same, if the two groups were the same in every other way and if there was absolutely no distinction | ||
| or discrimination or whatnot, there would be a huge difference in income simply because | ||
| of age. | ||
| And that really is what this book is about. | ||
| And you know, the book itself, it's about 160 pages. | ||
| But what I loved, you know how many pages of notes you have in there? | ||
| Do you know offhand by any chance? | ||
| Well, I know 127 pages are text, and the rest of it is notes. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| We look at things from one angle, and then you start the screaming. | ||
| And I think that's what you're really a master of here. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I try to, but we'll see how it works out. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Do you make any meaningful distinction between sort of a classical liberal and a libertarian? | ||
| Is that just sort of... That's wholly peripheral, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| I mean, just trying to get a few simple facts across is a full-time job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about some of the facts that you lay out in the book. | ||
| You talk about two types of discrimination. | ||
| Could you lay those out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The word has almost opposite meanings. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes, and it's devastating. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What would you do about our school systems? | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| I'll try to be rational. | ||
| Do try! | ||
| They are so awful. | ||
| The public has no idea. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So how do we scale back this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're not very good at taking Economics 101, I don't think. | ||
| So would your answer be in almost every case to just scale back government, scale back regulation? | ||
| It depends on what they're doing. | ||
| There are some things that government is necessary to do. | ||
| So what are those type of things? | ||
| Oh, security. | ||
| First of all, having dependable laws. | ||
| Some people think that if you're for free markets that means you don't think the government should do anything. | ||
| No, the free markets don't operate except within a framework of laws. | ||
| That's wholly different from having them operate with politicians jumping in at unpredictable times to suddenly pass some new legislation. | ||
| What can we do right now? | ||
| I mean, so really this would be about just sort of electing more libertarian-minded politicians then? | ||
| I mean, is that really the only way we can change things, do you think? | ||
| No, I think the main thing, people have to know what the facts are themselves. | ||
| If everyone knew what all the facts were, I think you'd have an entirely different set of people elected. | ||
| I can't believe that either of the presidential candidates in 2016 would have been the candidates if you had an informed public. | ||
| We're not very good at that. | ||
| How much of this do you think is part of the media's fault? | ||
| That's one of the things... Well, the media are mostly uninformed. | ||
| No, no, they're not uninformed. | ||
| They are misinformed. | ||
| And they simply do not check the facts on large issues or small. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What can we do to fix that, do you think? | ||
| I mean, I suppose this, right? | ||
| Writing books like this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Their circumstances are different. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you sense that there is some sort of growing conservative movement in the black community? | ||
| Well, there was a time when that community consisted of me and Walter Williams. | ||
| I know Walter used to say we were the two, we should never fly on the same plane otherwise the whole movement will disappear if the plane goes down. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh yes! | ||
| This has been happening. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What would you say to the people? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, that argument has been made for centuries, and it's been proven wrong for centuries. | ||
| I would ask the question, what has happened? | ||
| We've moved in that direction already. | ||
| We have lots of people who can live off the welfare state and not have to be productive. | ||
| Are they better people as a result of that? | ||
| I saw some time back, and I haven't followed this, that the suicide rates among young people were among the negative consequences of the 1960s. | ||
| You've taken all meaning out of people's lives. | ||
| And so they find all kinds of crazy things to do. | ||
| Drugs, whatever. | ||
| And again, it's not peculiar to the United States. | ||
| You find this in Britain, other countries. | ||
| And so, again, people who say this almost never look at any facts about what's happened as we expanded the welfare state. | ||
| Did people behave better? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| 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. | ||
| It'd be out of your mind to do that today. | ||
| It'd be too dangerous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how do we sort of untie some of this? | ||
| 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, | ||
| why in the world would you ever get off the dole? | ||
| How do we start solving these problems? | ||
| And I know facts is your bedrock answer. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But what can we do to get people to understand some of this stuff? | ||
| 'Cause it seems so basic to understand. | ||
| If someone was giving you something that you didn't earn, it's hard to... Again, this is common. | ||
| In Europe, in England especially, it's a special problem because you have this place where rent is subsidized, and say you're in London. | ||
| And jobs are disappearing in London, and they're opening up in Manchester. | ||
| Now, if you go to Manchester, you get on a waiting list for that kind of job. | ||
| And if you stay in London, you're unemployed, but your rent is low. | ||
| And so you slow down the movement of people, you slow down the turnover of people in these apartments. | ||
| But again, most people who talk about this don't even talk in terms of if this, then that. | ||
| They talk about it as, this is how the world ought to be. | ||
| Well, heck, I can think of all kinds of things of how I think the world ought to be. | ||
| But unfortunately, most of those things involve a cost, a trade-off. | ||
| Do you think there's a system or a government that's doing it better, doing freedom better than we're doing it here? | ||
| For all the flaws that we have in this system, is anyone doing it better than us? | ||
| Oh, there may be marginally so. | ||
| But I think most of the Western world is less free than it was, say, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. | ||
| By what measurements do you view that? | ||
| Oh, just the amount of regulations. | ||
| And also by consequences. | ||
| I was reading Milton Friedman. | ||
| He and his wife had a joint autobiography. | ||
| And she's looking, at one point she says, looking back on the days when she would ride the IND subway in Manhattan. | ||
| And what a joy it was, and she said, in those long gone days. | ||
| And the IND subway goes through Harlem. | ||
| And Milton Friedman and his wife, when they were still courting, used to go dancing at the Savoy Ballroom. | ||
| Very few people, and you know the famous theme song of Duke Ellington, Take the A Train. | ||
| The A Train goes right through Harlem on the IND line. | ||
| And so Friedman, who was only five foot two, had no fear of being mugged or even accosted. | ||
| And go there. | ||
| And this was common. | ||
| There was a black actress who used to get finished with play and socializing afterwards. | ||
| And at one o'clock in the morning, she said, she would be taking the subway up to 155th Street and St. | ||
| Nicholas Avenue by herself and walking home. | ||
| Nobody does that these days. | ||
| And so you have to look, what are the facts? | ||
| How did they change? | ||
| And you don't simply say... The other thing is that they're saying the no child left behind thing with Bush. | ||
| There are kids who go to school to raise hell, and a handful of those can prevent the whole class from learning anything. | ||
| Now, the logical thing would be to separate those kids out, and the ones who want to learn something, learn something. | ||
| You can't do that, because the ideology says no. | ||
| And so you sacrifice whole generations of poor and minority kids for this ideology and this utopian notion. | ||
| Yeah, and we end up in an odd dystopia, probably. | ||
| Yeah, Milton Friedman used to say, the best is the enemy of the good. | ||
| And of course, it would be better if everybody could be educated at the same time. | ||
| It can't be done. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, no question about it. | ||
| What would be, if someone's watching this right now and just needs that little extra bit of courage to start saying... No, no, no, no. | ||
| You have to look at the circumstances. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But most people don't have that situation. | ||
| And so you have to pick your face. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we've kind of lost that. | ||
| It isn't common anymore. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The other guys would say, you want to fight? | ||
| You can fight me. | ||
| That's what we need in the public square now. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| There's only so much the police can do. | ||
| If you don't have common decency, the cops are not going to be able to handle it. | ||
| And especially when everyone is second-guessing it. | ||
| I love it when people who have never fired a gun in their lives say, why do the cops fire so many guns? | ||
| Now, at one time, I taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps. | ||
| It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they fired so many things under those conditions. | ||
| But people can't be knowledgeable about everything, but they can be knowledgeable about the extent of their own ignorance, even if they have PhDs. | ||
| 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. |
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