Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality

- It happens to me all the time and it happened just this week. A young man whom he had never met introduced himself and told me that when he saw our guest today, on a previous episode of this program, he felt that he was seeing a man who he knew how to think. Dr. Thomas Sowell on Uncommon Knowledge Now. (classical music) Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Thomas Sowell has studied and taught

economic

s, intellectual history, and social policy at institutions such as Cornell, Brandeis, UCLA, and Amherst. Now, Dr. Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, has published more than a dozen books, including the classic A Conflict of Visions.

Coming soon is a revised edition of his most recent volume, Discrimination and Disparities. Tom Sowell, welcome. - Thank you. - You grew up in Harlem, dropped out of high school to join the Marine Corps during the Korean War, received a bachelor's degree from Harvard, a master's degree from Columbia, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. All of which pales in comparison to the fact that he once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers. (laughter) But during this period from Harlem to the University of Chicago, throughout your 20s, as you said, you spent most of your 20s as a Marxist. - Yes because?

What was... what was the attraction? - Well, I guess at first I was... very puzzled. Look, there's one small correction I would make. At 16 I dropped out of high school and started working full time as a Western Union courier. - Delivery of telegrams. - Delivery of telegrams. - We better say that because there will be a generation that will not know what Western Union was, but go ahead. - Yes, that's true too. And then I was working in the area of ​​Manhattan called the Chelsea district, which is around 23rd Street, Ninth Avenue, and at the end of the day I had several ways to get home.

The easiest and fastest way was the subway, which at that time cost five cents. When I was feeling flushed, I could take a bus for ten cents and then when I was getting really reckless I would take the Fifth Avenue bus, which was the elite bus for 15 cents. So I would walk down Fifth Avenue, take that bus, and it would take me around all the glamorous parts of Fifth Avenue, past the Empire State Building, past the big box stores and things like that. And then on 57th Street I would turn and this is just the elite part of the city. - Of course, what I'm planning begins right there. - Yes and then... the park starts at 59th. - Oh, sorry. - 57, which would have the same type of scene again, passing through Carnegie Hall.

Columbus Circle, there was no Trump Tower at the time, and up to about 72nd Street and up to Riverside Drive, which is another elite area. So four miles later you would have all these wonderful luxury apartment buildings and so on. And finally, around 129th Street, 30th, you would go over a long viaduct and then turn right back to the occupied area and there you would see the homes. And I would ask myself why is this? I mean, why this huge disparity? And there was no one else, there was no other explanation around. There was nothing there but Marxism.

I stumbled upon them, I hadn't read Marx, but I bought a couple of second-hand encyclopedias. A small set for a ridiculously low price and there they met. I looked up Karl Marx, heard the name and the things he said seemed to make sense. And later I would get more and more involved in it. And the argument was that the rich had gotten rich by taking from the poor. And well, that was one explanation, but the interesting thing is that there really was no other explanation. And that is largely true of our colleges and universities today. - But when you went to Harvard University, well, wait, you dropped out at 16 and started reading Marx in your late teens. - I started reading Marx, yes, at 19 years old. - At 19 years old and then you were in the Marine Corps for a couple of years, what was it, two, three years? - Two years.

It was actually a year, 11 months and five days, but who's counting? (laughs) - So, when you went to Harvard you had already committed yourself intellectually to Marxism. - Yes. - And it stayed, and Harvard did not dissuade you from doing it and studying

economic

s at Harvard did not dissuade you from doing it, nor did obtaining a master's degree at Columbia, nor a doctorate at Chicago dissuade you from Marxism. And you studied precisely with Milton Friedman, how could you have sat in Milton Friedman's classroom and still been a Marxist? - Some people are just stubborn. (laughs) But what really changed me wasn't the University of Chicago, it was my first professional job for the government.

I was a summer intern. - Is this after Chicago or? - No, no, when I was still a graduate student. - I understand. - And so, during the summer vacation I worked at the United States Department of Labor and I began to realize several things that the government is not simply the embodiment of the general will like Rousseau or others. Government is an institution, government institutions have their own institutional interests. One involved in the minimum wage law. I was a big supporter of that, but I also knew that there was an argument that minimum wage laws simply took jobs away from low-wage workers and my first assignment was about minimum wages in Puerto Rico and looking at the numbers, We would see how the minimum wage would increase, the number of jobs would decrease, etc., but there were two explanations.

One was that the economists were taking away people's jobs and the other was that they were hurricanes that passed through Puerto Rico, you see, during the sugar harvest and therefore, and I was studying the sugar industry, and therefore Therefore it destroyed much of the crop, so you wouldn't hire as many workers. Now, in Chicago I had been taught that if there are two different theories, in principle there should be some empirical evidence that could distinguish what would happen under one theory from what would happen under the other. So I struggled with it for most of the summer and one morning I walked in and said, I've got it.

We needed data on how much sugar cane was in the fields before the hurricane hit, and as I waited for congratulations I could see distressed looks around the room, as if this guy had stumbled upon something that will ruin us all. (laughs) And they said well, we don't have that data. I said, oh, I bet the Department of Agriculture has it. He said, well, but that doesn't mean we have it. You would have to send a request up the chain of command to the Secretary of Labor. Then I would consult with the Secretary of Agriculture. I would go down the chain of command and the Department of Agriculture, whoever has those numbers and so on.

I said, well, well they say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so now I'm going to apply to the Secretary of Labor, and so I did. And I'm still patiently waiting for this answer. (laughs) - And the institutional fear of the number was what? - Oh, the US Department of Labor administers the minimum wage law and the money and careers of perhaps a third or some other significant percentage of the other sources of the Department of Labor come from the administration of the wage law minimum. One of the real strengths of all of this is that the law itself, Section 4D, I still remember, requires that a Department of Labor study the effects of minimum wages on employment, and those studies are an absolute sham.

In fact, a few years after I left, I wrote an article explaining why those studies were a sham, and when I later returned to the Department of Labor to do some research, one of the older librarians who remembered me approached the older librarian. young man and she said, this is the man who wrote that article that has everyone up in arms. (laughs) - Then you began to dissuade yourself from Marxism. - And the government in general because the government is not the personification of the national interest. They have their own interests and the Department of Labor was clearly interested in maintaining the minimum wage, because that is their job, their career and their power. -In his, which takes us, if I may, to one of my favorite books, his book from the year 2000, this is an old and dilapidated copy.

This book A conflict of visions. - Yes. - That you published in 2007 and your layout, I'm sorry. - 1987. - Sorry, 1987? - Reprinted in 2007. - Well, this book is tattered, it turns out it's a reprint. Sorry, 1987. And you expose two opposing ways of looking at economics and politics, actually two opposite ways of looking at life that go back at least 200 years. Restricted vision and free vision. The narrow view, I quote from A Conflict of Visions, sees the world's evils as stemming from the limited and unhappy options available given the inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings.

Close appointment. So the restricted vision understands itself as constrained by the limitations of reality itself. - Yes, that is correct? - Yes. In other words, they cannot proceed as many do, that good things happen automatically, but bad things are someone's fault. - I have it, I have it, and then to continue here, the restricted vision, again quoting A Conflict Of Visions, to improve the human condition, the restricted vision is based on certain social processes such as moral traditions, the market, or families. Not the government. So explain that. Why do we trust processes rather than the will of people to institute changes to improve our condition? - Well, he doesn't ignore the government.

Even for the market to work you need to have a government, as Europe discovered when the Roman Empire collapsed and the economy collapsed as well. But I suppose one reason would be that the government has surrogate decision makers and they cannot possibly know as much as the individuals whose personal decisions have been advanced. - I see, I see, it's okay. Which brings us to the unrestricted vision. When Rousseau said that man is born free but everywhere chained, he expressed the essence of the unrestricted vision, in which the fundamental problem is not nature or man but institutions.

Could you explain that? - Well, he has the notion that, again, good things happen naturally and if they are bad it is because institutions, including civilization itself, have made these bad things happen. And I think that's really the implicit assumption behind a lot of things that are said on the left today. And that's why in my most recent book I go to great lengths to show that there is no such thing as equal opportunity in nature. That wherever you look in the country, throughout the world, you find people living in the mountains, poor and backward, even in the richest countries.

Including the United States. I think the poorest country in the United States, rather county, was in a mountain community, which was almost 100% white. - Somewhere in Appalachia, West Virginia, southern Ohio. - Yes, and the men in that county had a life expectancy 10 years less than the men in a county in Virginia. - And the unrestricted vision says let's fix that. Surely we can pass a law that improves that and the narrow view says, well, wait a minute, if people who live in isolated areas in the mountains are poor and backward all over the world and we see this pattern again and again and again , maybe there is something very deeply rooted in reality about that that we find difficult to understand.

Correct? - Yes that's fine. So in the book of A Conflict of Visions, you are very dispassionate and very analytical and you present the unrestricted view and you present the restricted view and you don't really come out in favor of one or the other. - This is not a book intended to commit to showing that one view is better than the other. It's there to show you what they are and what you're assuming if you go one direction or another. It's about encouraging people to understand the implicit assumptions behind all of this, without which they are just loose ends. - Alright.

So, reflecting on all this, I noticed something, a column that you wrote a couple of years ago, in which you refuted that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and Kristof had attributed the gaps between African Americans and whites in America, the gaps in wealth. , gaps in educational achievement, the usual gaps and this is a quote from Kristof, on the lingering effects of slavery, close quote. - Oh yeah. - And here is Tom Sowell, quote, if we wanted to take the evidence seriously, we could compare the situation of black people a hundred years after the end of slavery with the situation after 30 years of the liberal welfare state.

In other words, we could compare hard evidence about the legacy of slavery with hard evidence about the legacy of liberals. Close appointment. And there it is, life is hard. You use the word tough, you use the word serious, you use evidence. Tom Sowell is a man of limited vision through and through, right? - Yes. - No, no... - Yes. Part of a disappearing species, I might add. - So when you were a Marxist, explain that to yourself, because Marxism... - Well, but no, no. - So that's complicated. - Even when I was a Marxist, I had the same intellectual standards and that is what finally made mewalked away from it. - Oh, sure. -In other words, he hadn't done all the research, he hadn't gone around the world---Looking for evidence. - Yes Yes. - Okay, then... - And then socialism is a great idea.

That doesn't mean it's a great reality. One of the things that worries me tremendously is this enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and socialism at a time when people are literally starving in Venezuela, an oil-rich country. And you know they're breaking into grocery stores to try to get food and fleeing to neighboring countries, most of which aren't as prosperous, but at least you're not starving in them. And none of that makes the slightest difference. I don't think most of these people who are out there cheering for Bernie Sanders have given Venezuela a thought. - To the evidence. - That's how it is. - Which brings us to something you refer to in several columns as pushback.

The experience of African Americans in this country. Economic progress, I'm quoting you. Despite the great myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and "War on Poverty" programs of the 1960s, the fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960, but over the next 20 years the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points. This was just the continuation of a previous economic trend, but at a slower rate of progress. It wasn't much of a release. Close appointment. This goes very much against what we are taught in school, what appears on the editorial pages of newspapers. (laughs) I feel like I want to ask you if you really want to follow through with that statement. - I have more evidence in my most recent book, Discrimination and Disparities, I point out that this really is a pattern that is not unique to blacks or even the United States, but you can see the same thing in England.

It can be seen in many other countries that the poor are in a much worse economic situation. Let's say the first day after the 20th century and yet in terms of their own behavior they were much more decent societies. And then, after this welfare state, they are supposed to become better human beings. That's when crime rates skyrocketed on both sides of the Atlantic. The British were famous for being perhaps the most polite and considerate society in the world before that. After that come things like the 2011 riots there. He passed through Manchester in London where they were a few years ahead of Ferguson and Baltimore.

And the same thing, the burning of buildings, the throwing of Molotov cocktails at the police, all that nonsense and none of those people were descendants of slaves. - So the poor were doing things, the lesson of the 20th century is something like that the poor, including African Americans in this country, are improving their lot and leading fundamentally decent lives until the government decided to help them. - Yes. - That's a fair statement. -They are better off financially because of what they have been given, but of course when you have the crime rate, I mean, I first had the idea of ​​this a few years ago when I was at a school in Harlem doing a little research and I looked out the window and mentioned in passing that when I was little I used to walk my dog ​​in that park and the looks of horror would appear on the students' faces.

No one in their right mind would allow a child to go to that park to walk his dog or not. The principal was warning these students not to cross this park, which is about a block and a half wide. Even in groups of six. And when I tell them that on those hot summer nights I slept on the fire escapes in Harlem, they looked at me like I was a man from Mars. People were doing that all over New York. They were doing it in Philadelphia, Washington, wherever I've met people. That was a common thing. We didn't have money for air conditioning.

You slept outdoors and on a fire escape or in parks. Where Walter grew up in a... - Walter Williams. - Walter Williams grew up in a housing project in Philadelphia. He said that on hot summer nights people would be there, in this project we had little balconies, they slept on the balconies and those on the first floor who didn't have balconies slept in the patio. And that there were old men who could be seen sitting outside on a hot summer night until the early hours of the morning playing cards or checkers or whatever. It was a different world. - It was a safe world. - Infinitely safer. - And now what happens to the family structure?

Tom again, I'm quoting you. In 1960, most black children were raised in two-parent families. Thirty years into the liberal welfare state, the vast majority of black children were raised by single parents. By the way, we should note that Patrick Moynihan publishes the Moynihan report in 1965 and is alarmed because the illegitimacy rate among black families was then 25%. Now among whites it is more than a third, among Hispanics it is more than half and among African Americans it is more than 70%. What is happening there? - Well, this is it again, this too, the same thing is found in Great Britain, it is found in France and Norway, it is found in the Western world.

In fact... - His dissolution of the family structure. - Oh yes, there are several Western countries where 40% of children grow up with only one parent. At the extremes, I compared Asian countries. At the extremes, Iceland, where two out of every three children are born and raised in single-parent homes. In South Korea it's one in every 66. - Wow. Wow, and this is what the welfare state is like? - Yes. - It is. - You're creating a situation where... first of all, well, you're creating a situation where if the man stays there, the government won't give the woman welfare and if he he leaves, yes he will.

And so they're paying, when you pay people not to get married, more people don't get married. - Well well. Well, then, what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson, instead of becoming a liberal, had remained a tough, skeptical Texan conservative, which is surely how he began his career? If Lyndon Johnson had embraced the narrow vision instead of instituting the war on poverty and the Great Society and so on, what would the country be like today? - Better. We wouldn't have the same crime rates and so on, because you can't have a welfare state in a democratic country unless you first have a vision of a welfare state and when you accept all the assumptions of that vision, then we're buying a lot of issues.

One of the episodes that I think is summarized, in this case, was in France, where there were knife attacks by several people from North Africa against Chinese in some suburb of Paris. And one of the things the attacker said, you know, why are you attacking the Chinese? And it wasn't because the Chinese had done something to them. He said they have nice clothes and big cars, that's not fair. I mean, you know, egalitarianism as a philosophy is one thing, but its actual consequences mean things like resenting other people's good fortune. - Okay, a response to the gap, again I come back to this gap between African Americans and other Americans.

Affirmative action. Which brings us back to his alma mater, Harvard. According to... - I will never forget it. - You will never forget it, yes. You once told me that the main benefit of a Harvard degree was to never be impressed by anyone with a Harvard degree. (laughing) - Absolutely. - These are figures that were published in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. In the Harvard class of 2019, these are the kids who will be graduating next June, the average SAT score for black students was 2149. By the way, these are all good scores, but for black students 2149, white students 2218 and Asian students 2300.

Well, that must be reasonable because it will take place at Harvard, the seat of reason. - Well, that's not how I described it when I was there. - Affirmative action. Shouldn't we be doing this? - There are various laws and policies that benefit one group at the expense of another, but I believe that affirmative action has the peculiarity of harming everyone, although in different ways. That is why there is a lot of evidence that there are black kids who have all the qualifications to be successful in college, but who nevertheless fail because they systematically do not match with institutions whose standards they do not meet.

Although they may meet the standards of 80 or 90% of universities in the United States. I remember first realizing this when I was teaching at Cornell and finding out that half of Cornell's black students were on some kind of academic probation. So I went to the administration building to look up these students' SAT exams. The average black student at Cornell at the time scored in the 75th percentile. - Which is pretty good. - Yes and that means that in most universities in this country they would have no problems and many of them would be on the Dean's List.

But at Cornell, the average liberal arts major at that time was in the 99th percentile, and when you teach students like that, you teach at a pace that most people of any race can't keep up with. He always complained that I was assigning all kinds of readings, but hell, I'm teaching kids who are in the top 1%, who can keep up with the reading I'm assigning them. -So Cornell took very talented black kids and spent four years teaching them to feel inadequate. - Yes and getting that. - A couple of dates. Both are from the last affirmative action case to reach the Supreme Court, the last major affirmative action case to reach the Supreme Court. 2003 Grutter v.

Bollinger. Here is the majority opinion, written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, quoted: "The court hopes that within 25 years the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." This supports the use of in a decision, decision 5-4, supports the use of racial preferences. That's the first date. Here's quote two, Judge Thomas. Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting. He quotes: "I believe that blacks can succeed" in all areas of American life "without the meddling of university administrators." The Court holds that racial discrimination "and admissions should be given another 25 years." Although I agree that in 25 years these practices "will be illegal, they are illegal now." (laughs) Close quote.

So here it is...what do you make of the argument that Justice O'Connor in writing that majority opinion is somewhat shortsighted? Look, we have this, every college across the country is using these racial preferences as a basis for admission. The best we can hope to do is tell them they shouldn't do it. That they should be developing other standards and giving them a clock. (laughs) Is that reasonable? - No, but it is something universal. I wrote a book on affirmative action, it was called Affirmative Action Around the World, and I took a couple of international trips on the expensive Hoover Institution around the world to check out affirmative action.

This is one of the most common arguments. It is absolutely fallacious time and time again. The argument, like so many in the unrestricted view, assumes that we have power that we do not have, that we cannot have, and that we have never had. In England there was a man called Scarm and he said for now we must do this in order. And in many countries these programs were established with an actual deadline, so it was established in Malaysia with a deadline, I think, around 1990 and in Pakistan it was supposed to last 10 years. None of those deadlines have meant anything.

These programs not only continue, but grow. They spread. Hence the idea that you can control the future thanks to these wonderful sounding words. I can't think of any country in the world where this has ever happened. In the case of Pakistan, they did have a real deadline and because the people in East Pakistan were, for some historical reason, far behind the people in West Pakistan, that's why there are these preferences with East Pakistanis. Now before this expires. East Pakistanis emerge from Pakistan and form a new nation in Bangladesh. And the preferences continued because other groups had been added and therefore once you get the electorate, you can't say no to them.

It's an argument that has never worked anywhere that I have been able to verify. - Alright. So Tom Sowell says no to the welfare state, no to affirmative action. What is to be done? And now he was kind enough to share with me the galleys of his next edition of Discrimination and Disparities. Let me give you some quotes from some of the new chapters in that book. Quote: "The poverty rate among black married couples" has been less than 10% every year since 1994. "As early as 1969, young black people "whose homes included newspapers, magazines" and library cards had similar incomes "to of their white counterparts. "Academic results show a pattern of disparities "similar to the pattern of disparities" in the amount of time spent on schoolwork. "Apparently, lifestyle choices have consequences." Close quote.

So this is once again the limited vision. Welfare state that is governmentWe don't depend on that. Affirmative action, government, we don't depend on that. We depend on the institution of marriage. Yes, in other words, these things and I don't. I don't think it's marriage as such, library cards as such, it's that lifestyle decisions have been made and the comparison I made was between, if you look at the poverty rate among blacks, it was a 22 % and among blacks. whites were 11%, but among black married couples it was 7.5%. So not only do they do better than blacks as a whole, but they also do better than whites as a whole, and the same goes for the results and some of these more.

Thanks to successful charter schools, these children not only meet but exceed national standards in places like Harlem and the South Bronx. And these are not children who are running out of milk. They are children chosen by lottery. They don't even test their skills. They don't even look at their academic records. They take it to the schools and they work hard and they make it clear from the beginning and they don't tolerate a lot of nonsensical behavior and these kids are doing incredibly well. - So Tom, here... Once again, I think of the Moynihan, well no, I think the Moynihan report of '65, and I was very alarmed by the 25% illegitimacy rate among African Americans.

By the way, to be fair to the late Moynihan, we should point out that one of the reasons this alarmed him was that his own father had abandoned the family when he was 10 years old. He experienced what it meant to be two sons to have one father. Well, now everything has gotten dramatically worse for whites, Hispanics, and blacks, for everyone. And then I think beyond that, to your experience of Harlem. You drop out of high school and do what? Go on welfare? Start charging, no. You got to work and spent some of that money on buying some cheap encyclopedias.

And Harlem was so... but I feel like this advice, it's almost an advice of desperation in that world that seems completely gone. - No doubt. - So your argument is that if we can confront the welfare state, we will somehow be able to return to that world, a family structure will be reaffirmed? -That is going to be reconquering the same terrain, which is very difficult to do but it can be done. I was so lucky at the time that I had no idea about all this. I left home in 1948, many decades later I learned that the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948, ages 16 and 17, was 9.4%.

Among whites of the same age it was 10.2%. So both white and black teenagers had only a fraction of the unemployment they have today. - You were expected to work, you were expected to be able to get a job. - And the most important thing is that the jobs were there for you. And this is really due to a coincidence. The minimum wage law in the United States, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, was passed with specific rates of pay that are supposed to be received. Almost immediately inflation skyrocketed during the 1940s, so by 1948 those figures in the law no longer made sense. - Oh, sure. - In other words, when I started as a Western Union courier, the minimum wage was 40 cents an hour.

I started at the bottom, with 65 cents an hour. So it was the same as if there was no minimum wage and this is what happened, you had this, and I was so lucky that of course I had no idea about any of this. Now, 20 years later, a black child arrives. People have become compassionate. They have increased the minimum wage. So he can't get a job. And I don't think it does any community any good to have a bunch of teenage boys wandering the streets with no jobs and nothing to do. - Good. Tom then... another thought here.

You are describing a world, Harlem, the urban world, gone. But you visited when you were young, you also knew the south, right? Did you come back to the South from time to time when you were young? I said back to the south because, as I remember, you were born in the south. - Yes, I went to New York. Yeah, well, I think this was courtesy of the Marine Corps, which happened to locate the training camp in South Carolina and had Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. -So what I mean is that you were from the generation that saw Jim Crow with your own eyes. - Oh, there is no doubt, there is no doubt. - Well.

Well, here you go, let me read you a quote. This is from an article that got a lot of attention in the Atlantic a couple of years ago called The Case For Reparations by Ta-Nahesi Coates. He quotes: “White supremacy is such a fundamental force” for the United States that it is difficult to imagine “the country without it.” Reparations are the price we must pay "to see ourselves in the face." Close appointment. And Tom Sowell, who actually saw Jim Crow with his own eyes and experienced it, how does he respond? -It would be nice to know the evidence for what he said, just to be old-fashioned about it.

No, it was a rotten system, but I don't know how we got from there to repairs. I mean what we see in the United States in terms of bad things, we see all over the world. If reparations were given to all those whose ancestors were slaves, I suspect that reparations would have to be given to more than half of the planet's population. Slavery was not limited to one set of races. I suspect that most people who were slaves or slave owners around the world were neither white nor black. I mean this was a universal curse of the human species. - Africa, the Middle East, Asia, slavery occurred everywhere. - And it continued elsewhere long after its abolition in Western countries. - Let me try to stay with Ta-Nahesi Coates.

Shelby Steele talks about white guilt. And in Ta-Nahesi Coates you get almost the counterpart of that, a kind of African-American claim against white guilt and this seems... starting with the abolitionists, even before the Civil War, it seems that in every generation there is some expression. that racism and slavery as Shelby calls it, correctly of course, the sin of slavery is so deep and it is something we still live with, how do we atone for it? How do we overcome it? Is there anything we can do to free ourselves from this legacy? - Oh, I would like you to repeat.

If you were a slave owner, I see no reason why you should feel any different. On the other hand, I cannot accept the idea that A apologizes for what B did. Even when he is his contemporaries, much less when one is dead and the others are alive. I mean, Scalia, I remember, he was saying, you know, I don't owe anything to any man because people who look like me did something to people who look like him. - Okay, then let it go. Get to work. - Yes that's fine. Tom Sowell's vision is to get an education, stay married, and do his job.

Barely. - Yes that's fine. -Charles Murray. You used to write a column from time to time called Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene. So here I give you little snippets of the passing scene in our final questions. Charles Murray in his 1984 book Losing Ground, and Charles Murray writes in debates, academia, and government about the effort to once again close the gap between African Americans and whites. He quotes. 1984, quote: "Whites had created the problem," it was up to whites to fix it, "and there was very little in the dialogue "that treated blacks as responsible actors." Close quote.

Has that changed? - No, No - Okay, let's go. Your friend, your old friend Walter Williams, now we come to current politics "The bottom line is that President Donald Trump "does not have the personal character" that we would have. "We want our children to emulate him, but except for his misguided international trade policies, he has turned out to be a good president." Tom? - I think his policies, in general, have been policies that were much better than those of previous Democrats or Republicans. I go by the consequences. - Well, I mean it hasn't produced the right rhetoric, but the fact is that unemployment among low-income people, including Hispanics, is at a much lower level than it is.

There has been a boom in decades that no one had predicted. People like Paul Krugman said that when Trump comes in, the economy will crash. No, the economy will reach new highs. But there are many people, especially among intellectuals, who are absolutely immune to it. The facts. It's like they take their anti-fact measures every year and the facts just don't affect them. - So this brings us back. I can understand, I mean, I really can, my understanding is limited, which is why I'm going to bring this up. in the form of a question. I can understand the Never Trumpers who don't bother me about the economic boom because this man appears on my TV screen every night and I can't stand him.

I can understand, I can see that impulse. I can understand what they feel. - This second consecutive president of the United States that I automatically turn it off when I'm watching television. - Alright. Keep the remote control at your side. - Oh yeah. - Well, who was the first? -Obama. - I understand. You are totally bipartisan in that sense. - Oh, always. No other way. But the most important point that you have been making here, the Great Society, the war on poverty, is now six decades of experience and, as you have said, the gap has not been closed, we have achieved the dissolution of the family structure , the increase in crime rates.

I do not understand that. How can it be that people... now I don't know how to remain bipartisan, but the Democrats, the liberals, the progressives just aren't... the evidence is there. This hasn't worked. After more than half a century there is still a refusal to examine the evidence. - Yes, and he even has a tendency to falsify evidence. - And how is that? - I think people stick to a vision and that really depends on the way they see... human beings have an enormous capacity for rationalization. - Alright. Again, notes on the passing scene. I quote from an article from the New York Times just a couple of days ago, this is the longest quote, but it's important to state the facts here.

Over the past decade, the charter school movement gained a significant presence in New York and hoped to set an example nationally. If charter schools could succeed in a deep blue state like New York, they could succeed anywhere. More than 100,000 students in the city's charter schools do well on state tests and tens of thousands are on waiting lists. But this year's November elections suggested that the golden era of charter schools is over. Insurgent Democrats, who did well throughout New York but especially in the state Senate, have repeatedly expressed hostility toward the movement. Close appointment. And Thomas Sowell responds to that set of facts, how? - That's really one of the moral outrages that for many children who come from a very poor background and whose parents may not have had much education, a decent education is the only thing they need to have to have a better life.

And these schools have been absolutely spectacular. - Charter schools. - Charter schools. Those who were successful, now there are few who were not. But, for example, a few years ago, on a statewide math test, across the state of New York, there was a fourth grade elementary school, I think, in Harlem, whose students passed those tests at a higher rate than any fourth grader anywhere in New York State. I mean, we're talking about Scarsdale, Briarcliff and places like that. Across Success Academy schools as a whole, their students pass state math and English tests at a higher rate than any school system or school district in all of New York State.

The vast majority of children in Success Academy schools are black or Hispanic. If you look at the five highest-scoring school districts in the state in terms of the percentage of students passing math or English tests, their median family income ranges from four times that of children in successful academic schools to more than nine times the family income of children in Success Academy schools. And yet, New York's mayor is doing everything he can to slow school expansion in general, but his special ire is directed at Success Academy schools. And this is happening all over the country. - Because they make the teachers unions that run public schools look bad?

What is the political motivation? Why would Mayor de Blasio dare to create a Success Academy for charter schools? - Well, the teachers union is the main reason and we're talking about the money they bring in, the amount of votes they bring in, and the schools and what's happening again, not just in New York but in other parts of the country, including California . It's that they have all kinds of tricks to prevent these charter schools from expanding. That's why there are tens of thousands on the waiting list. It's not that charter schools aren't willing to expand, but every conceivable obstacle is put in their way because if that is left to proceed at its natural pace, it would be very difficult for public schools to compete.

And one of the things they're doing is imposing the same kind of restrictions on charter schools that made this public school so bad. For example, therestrictions so they can get rid of kids who go crazy on this and ruin everyone else's education and charter schools don't tolerate that. The things that are tolerated in public schools are incredible. -So when I asked you a moment ago how we bring back the standards of the Harlem you grew up in, the answer is that it's a hard thing to do, but we do know how to do one thing. We know how to establish schools where the children of today's Harlem have the opportunity to receive a good education. - Yes, you don't have to recover the past, even if you could, because we have it in the present.

We have this happening. - And then we know how to do it and the Democratic establishment in New York wants to shut it down. - Yes. - And the Republican establishment remains silent. - He remains silent. You know I love talking to you but I really don't know why. (laughs) It's all discouraging. Tom, you mentioned a moment ago how young Americans flocked to Bernie Sanders' Gallup poll this summer. The proportion of Americans ages 18 to 29 who have a favorable view of capitalism is 45%. The proportion that has a favorable view of socialism is 51%. Now I would like you to watch a short video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who at 29 years old, calling herself a democratic socialist, has just been elected to the New York House of Representatives and although she has not yet held a seat in After the new Congress, He went to Washington and one of his first acts was to participate in a sit-in at the offices of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

That is, the leader of her own party. So here you have a short video. - I just want you to know how proud I am of each and every one of you for putting your bodies and everything on the line to make sure we save our planet, our generation and our future. It's incredibly important. We have to reach 100% renewable energy. No choice. - Thomas? (laughs) To his followers, to us, Bernie Sanders supporters, to young Americans, what would you say? - I would say get some facts first, know what you're talking about before you start saying this kind of stuff.

One of what I do in a new book is suggest that there is a certain opinion about what happened in the 1920s when taxes were cut, the top tax rate was reduced from 73% to 24% and the argument was oh, this it's tax cuts for the rich and I have suggested that the students and the Treasury Secretary did this to support our trickle down theory and so on. And I suggested to the students that it would be a wonderful project to go read what the Treasury Secretary actually said. - Andrew Mellon in the 1920s about these tax cuts. - And then go on the Internet and get the official data from the Internal Revenue Service on who paid how much taxes in the 1920s and it turns out that if you do that, you will find that Andrew Mellon said exactly the opposite of what he is credited with in the textbook that has sold widely for decades through successive editions.

And what you will find is that when the tax rate was 73%, people who make over a hundred thousand dollars a year, and that's maybe a couple million in today's money, paid 30% of the taxes and after the Los So-called tax cuts for the rich pay 65% ​​of all taxes. And people with incomes under $5,000, which was also a good income in those days, we paid 15% when the tax rate was reduced, but before and after the tax cut, they paid just under a quarter of 1% of all taxes and that is why there is all kinds of indignation in these academic books, we are not just talking about political propaganda.

How this is a bonanza for the rich and so on and people with ordinary incomes would pay virtually nothing in income taxes after the tax cuts and the ratio of millionaires was, I think, 4% before that and 19% after. But the facts simply don't matter. They say these words, they say drip, and it's like saying hocus pocus and all miraculous things come from that. - Tom Sowell, author of a forthcoming edition of Discrimination and Disparities. Could I finish by reading a short quote from your 1987 book, one of my favorites, A Conflict of Visions? - Of course, logic is not the only test of a theory.

Empirical evidence is crucial, and yet social views have demonstrated a remarkable ability to evade, suppress, or justify discordant evidence. Historical invasions of evidence are a warning, not a blueprint. Dedication to a cause may legitimately involve sacrifices of personal interests, but not sacrifices of mind or conscience. - Dr. Thomas Sowell, thank you. - Thank you. - For Uncommon Knowledge, Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson. (classical music)