My Ultimate Collection of Thomas Sowell Quotes!

There’s too much to cover in one article, but this will explain much of what is to come…

Back when I identified as a libertarian, one of my favorite quotes was from Thomas Sowell, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

Looking at it now, I think it encapsulates everything that makes him popular. Most people who like him are exposed to him only through these aphorisms, his guest appearances on Rush Limbaugh, and perhaps they’ve read one or two of his books. In most cases, you become exposed to him through rightwing sources, and then grow to love him mainly because he confirms all of your biases.

Sowell’s worldview is something like, We need to return to some idealized past where the government didn’t interfere with business, before lying politicians, biased media, unaccountable bureaucrats, and idealistic teachers corrupted our children, society, and government and ruined everything with multiculturalism and socialism. His methodology is to examine a widely held concept (or a caricature of a concept) that conservatives refuse to believe, introduce a factoid, and reason from that factoid that the simple truth that what conservatives have always believed is in fact still true despite what any non-conservative may say. In Sowell’s world, everything is simple, as it always was. In this way, he leaves the reader thinking that they have been shown some secret knowledge that confirms what they have always known. This is why readers frequently come away thinking that he is really insightful, when all he has done is confirmed their own biases. He talks about critical thinking and reason, but does not invite it; almost all of his extensive writing has been book-length polemics, think-tank quality essays, and newspaper columns which he turns into books. Very little of his writing appears in peer-reviewed journals, and what little there is are generally retrospectives or paeans to some great economist of the past. Despite this, his supporters frequently call him “wise”, “inspirational”, “deep”, and “the greatest economist” (sometimes qualified with “one of”, “in our time”). Among economists, I don’t think he is well regarded.

Again, one of the ways that Sowell is kept viable in the conservative public eye is by these ubiquitous quotes. They’re frequently offered with no context, and yet people see much wisdom in them. I believe they read into them what they want to see. Also, it’s worth pointing out that fans pick these out, not Dr. Sowell himself. It creates a self-reinforcing narrative in which they pick out things that embody their beliefs, publish them, and then read them and have their beliefs confirmed. Dr. Sowell is almost immaterial to the process, except that his legendary and prolific scholarship provides authority for those beliefs. “He’s very wise — I know because he says things I believe, based on my mad critical thinking skillz, which consist of reading short quotes and agreeing with them.”

Considering the aphorism introduced above: What is the source for saying this is the first lesson of economics? It isn’t a bedrock foundation since it completely fails to encapsulate, for example, public goods- has there never been enough air, water, or sunlight? And has it always been true that wants can never be satisfied? Does marketing have no effect on wants? If not, why do businesses (who are perfectly rational cost-minimizers) waste money on it? What is the factual basis for making this claim? Or is Sowell just doing the thing he condemns: stating an opinion as fact? I would have thought the first lesson of economics might be something like “human cooperation has the potential to improve life for everyone”, but what do I know?

It combines an unsupported hyperbolic assertion with a dig at “politics”. Under what theory is the first lesson of politics to ignore economics? Politics as a science pre-existed economics as a science by a few thousand years. Does he mean all of politics, or just certain politicians? If the latter, who? And what does it mean to “ignore” the first lesson of economics? Do they always assume there are infinite amounts of all valuable things? If so, why is there budgeting, why are there five year production plans, why is tax revenue a concern, why are some things subsidized, why does politics require compromise? If not, then he seems to be committing some fallacy of generalization. Some specifics would be useful since, as a generalized statement, it appears to be incoherent. It seems that a first lesson of politics might be something along the lines of “human cooperation has the potential to improve life for everyone”, but what do I know?

One issue I’ve run into online: when I criticize one of these standalone, self-contained aphorisms while hundreds of people are smashing the LIKE button, if I try to explain why it is bad — as itself, which clearly most of the LIKE mashers are agreeing with — I usually run into Sowell fans who will say, “but you need to understand it in context!”. Even though I’ve already explained that I am critiquing it just as it stands (which is the point of an aphorism), just as those who are liking it are doing. If I go further and look up the context (if there is one: I’ll get to that) and provide more detailed, nuanced critique based on the original context, there will invariably be other people who insist that I have to read his entire book, or body of work, in order to make a valid critique. I have never seen one of these people bring evidence that his statements make sense if combined with some completely different book. Typically, what I have seen is that people then move on to doubt whether I’ve read his books because, obviously, anyone who has ever read Sowell — like, really read Sowell — agrees with 100% of what he says without reservation because he is very wise. Therefore, they are not sheep.

After going through a few dozen of these aphorisms, I found that there are certain categories that repeat. A large portion are taken from his “Random Thoughts” columns, which are literally a collection of random thoughts, offered with no support or context. Most of them are unsupported assertions — true, they might be supported in the context of the article or book from which they are lifted (when there is one), but not in the quotes themselves. The reader is left to fill in the proof. I would guess that for most people who are fans of this kind of discourse, the means by which this is accomplished is to simply assume a proof exists. I think (guesswork only) that Sowell fans want to believe that they have a great patron saint of conservative wit on a level with Mark Twain, but Twain’s aphorisms typically don’t suffer from these afflictions. For example, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” is self-proving.

These quotes usually rely on undefined terms and vague language, which the reader is free to fill in as needed. Sowell quotes are Rorschach tests, vague enough to apply to whatever conservative culture war talking point is currently in vogue. An example of this is: “Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.” When I have asked whether the activism of Harriet Tubman, suffragettes, freedom riders, Tiananmen Square protestors, etc., is “damaging to the fabric of society as a whole,” the reaction generally veers towards insisting on specific interpretations of the quote that are not there. “He didn’t say ‘ALL’ activists!”, “He said activists, not people who take action!” (really), etc. At best, we could guess that Sowell meant some specific type or types of activism are counterproductive — but he doesn’t say “some activism”. If he had qualified “activism” with “some”, all we are left with is a trivial statement that Thomas Sowell doesn’t like some other people’s actions.

Harriet Tubman

Suffragettes

Freedom Riders

The quotes also frequently take digs at groups of anonymous targets. Government, bureaucrats, and politicians are one group. Another is teachers, academics, and intellectuals. Another common target is the vague, anonymous “people” and “they” (them, those who, etc.). There is of course no way to verify that “those who say” have actually said what Sowell claims. As with activists, when he says something like “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children,” does he mean “all teachers”, or “some teachers”, and if the latter, since he hasn’t specified, which teachers? Here again, the vagueness of the quote allows the reader to read into it their own biases, and borrow from Sowell’s arguable reputation for diligent research (all of which is absent from the quote) in order to justify the strength of their own biases and to assume that anything they don’t know or understand is what Sowell means by “ignorant nonsense”.

Yet another characteristic found in many of these quotes is what I think of as Sowell’s personal relationship with “truth”. Considering again the quote about teachers just related, it is not unusual to find Sowell painting other people as liars, inept logicians, corrupt investigators, and so on. Unlike Mark Twain, Sowell rarely pokes fun at himself, but rather seems to hold a view of himself as an arbiter of truth, a master logician, a dedicated finder of fact... but despite his entire career, he is NOT an academic, teacher, or intellectual. Somehow, he has managed to write dozens of books and never had to retract one single problem with his “research”. At best, we have his word that he was a Marxist in his 20s.

Two more characteristics that show up in these quotes are the use of hyperbole — the best of all time, the destruction of civilization, the stupidest idea — and the use of inflammatory language, ad hominem arguments, or just name-calling — ignorance, dangerous nonsense, stupid, race hustlers, etc. From a man who despises “rhetoric” and whose fans like to describe him as dispassionate, intellectual, wise, and so on, it is surprising how many of these show what they really like — red meat for conservatives. Much of the fan-favorite Sowell work is indistinguishable from the “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS …” kind of rhetoric.

Another surprisingly frequent characteristic in these quotes is the number which consist of opinion stated as fact. For a man who is renowned (among his fans) for bringing facts (that conform with their views), I find it interesting how frequently they let these kinds of smuggled concepts get through. When he says things like, “Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them — instead of answering their arguments,” you first have to wonder how one would go about making an objective measurement of something like that. After you’ve read Sowell quotes for more than 15 minutes, you will recognize this for the projection it is, given how often he denigrates and demonizes those he disagrees with. “One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain” complains Sowell, without bothering to tell us who is doing these things or who the producers, refusers, and complainers are, nor telling us how that is different from the past when idle lords and barons were subsidized and some peasants were literally called “villeins”.

Related characteristics are how Sowell sometimes states something as if he were making a clever point, but is in fact being too clever by half, suppressing the context of his statement, or introducing an unlikely hypothetical or unlikely counterfactual. An example of this may be his “What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what ‘someone else’ has worked for?” question, in which one should wonder who is “you” and who is “someone else”? Since Sowell admits that some people are subsidized, it must be that some of those “someone[s] else” have used some of “my” “fair share” to generate the income they “worked for”. Suppressing the context of how the economy has worked for hundreds of years is typical of “free market” advocates like Sowell. Public roads, which promote commerce, are taken for granted. Yes, everyone has access to them, anyone could have earned their fortune by taking advantage of those roads. Nevertheless, they resent being taxed to pay for the creation of new roads and maintenance of old roads which would afford future generations the same opportunities as the present generation. But rather than acknowledge that, they simply say that taxation is theft, government is wasteful, government neglects maintenance and risk, and roads should be privatized, as if there were some guarantee that private road owners wouldn’t try to monetize the benefits they provide while simultaneously minimizing their costs by neglecting maintenance and making cost benefit decisions along the lines of “repairing bridges might cost a few lives, but the risk-adjusted, present value of a future possible lawsuit payout would be less expensive than actual current costs of maintenance…”

Another example would be “Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.” As with many of these, it is an example of several of the characteristics including stating an opinion as if it were fact and being too clever by half and being an unlikely counterfactual. How do I know? Because past experiments have shown that this does not happen. For example, this experiment. Americans who have benefited from a public education system (which Sowell opposes) are generally skilled enough to not be competing for agriculture jobs since at least the 1940s (a demographic shift that, so far as I can tell, Sowell does not acknowledge). Even among Americans who haven’t completed high school, they have the advantage of human capital including contacts, language, and practical knowledge sufficient to earn a living that earns at least the wages available in agriculture without the back-breaking work. It’s as if Sowell has suddenly forgotten comparative advantage when he makes a statement like this. Also, does he not know that food can be and in fact is grown elsewhere and shipped here should the domestic costs rise? As is common among anti-free-immigration free-marketeers, his loyalties lie in such a way that free movement of capital across borders is okay, but labor? Not so much.

Two final characteristics that will show up from time to time are his invocation of what Albert Hirschman called the Rhetoric of Reaction: Futility, Perversity, and Jeopardy, and Sowell’s assumption of market infallibility. The second is easily outlined: it’s the idea that economies are simple, not complex, and work pretty much exactly as described in an Econ 101 class. There is perfect atomistic competition, goods and services are fungible (completely interchangeable) commodities, supply curves all have a smooth positive slope, demand curves all have an smooth negative slope, elasticities are neither 0 nor infinity, everyone is a perfect minimizer of cost and maximizer of profit, there are no principal-agent relationships, information is freely and equally available, there are no externalities to a transaction (all costs and benefits are captured by the transaction), there are no transaction costs, moral hazard doesn’t exist, etc. A meta-assumption is that there is a cost-free, stable, and fair system for adjudicating disagreements (which Tom never or rarely acknowledges, since it is government and by definition “bad”). An example of a relevant Sowell quote would be something like, “Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.” This would possibly be the case if, say, the Triangle Shirtwaist Co and its insurers weren’t willing to take the risk that they could make lots of money in the short term and hope nothing would go wrong in the long run, or if Bernie Madoff didn’t take advantage of imperfect information, etc.

As to the other, Hirschman describes his three types of reactionary rhetoric (and yes, he addresses similar progressive rhetorical problems) as “Futility” — the idea that no policy should ever be changed or introduced because the system will resist or ignore it and therefore nothing will really change; “Perversity” — the idea that policy changes will produce a result that is counter to the intent of the policy; and “Jeopardy” — the idea that policy changes will jeopardize previous successful policy changes. Again, the quote above about protecting consumers illustrates a claim about the futility of trying to protect consumers with laws. Hardcore libertarians may respond that these claims should be pursued in court, against the actual history of how courts have steered the common law towards the interests of businesses (see Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law). Note also that this quote includes suppressed context, opinion stated as fact, undefined terms (protect? consumers? competition?), and a dig at government.

Curiously, the previous quote about illegal immigration demonstrates a remarkable contradiction to Sowell’s normal assumption about the infallibility of markets. This is one of the ways in which Sowell occasionally drifts from a libertarian perspective to that of a conservative hack. In pure “free market” analysis, governments shouldn’t care who crosses which arbitrary geographic or other line to enter into free competition in a market for labor. Immigrants are not really different from children who come from “somewhere else” into the labor market, yet Sowell offers no rationale for regulating children who also compete to lower wages. In “free market” analysis, people would be drawn into a labor market until the wage achieves equilibrium because the costs of entering the market exceed the benefits — the self-regulating market theory. Sowell’s insistence on having government regulate entry into the market, in libertarian terms (very non-Hoppian libertarian terms), would be “choosing winners and losers” and “artificially props up wages and food costs to the disadvantage of the poor” and is therefore self-defeating (perversity). How Sowell squares that with his insistence in every other case that markets be free is unexplained and I think unexplainable except by appeal to conservative — not free market — values involving nationalism, culture, and nativism.

A final comment before getting into them: a vast number, perhaps even the majority of these come from Sowell’s “Random Thoughts” columns for various outlets. Someone who writes this prolifically may be thought to be really smart because he says so many things that are universal and timeless (we shall see). But since nobody collects “Stupid things said by Thomas Sowell”, that view is a “survivor bias” effect. Nobody endlessly publishes his 2015 thoughts on what an idiot Donald Trump is — why wouldn’t his truth-loving audience appreciate his prescience on that topic? “If ever there was a time when we needed a serious, mature President of the United States, with a depth of knowledge and a foundation of personal character — a grownup in the White House — this is that time. But seldom a week goes by without Donald Trump demonstrating, yet again, that he is painfully lacking in all these prerequisites.” Nobody publishes this gem in their Thomas Sowell’s Wisdom page: “Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these cars has to be generated somewhere — and nearly half the electricity generated in this country is generated by burning coal.” He made that statement in 2011 even as he and other conservatives were arguing against changes in the national energy structure because of his strong but uninformed opinions about global warming. As you can see from the EIA charts below, coal’s contribution to energy consumption peaked in about 2008 as producers shifted towards the much cheaper natural gas, and also solar and especially wind started increasing in contribution to electrical power generation while hydro stayed about steady. Today, coal, renewables, and nuclear run at around 20% each with natural gas contributing about 40% of electrical production. This illustrates several of Sowell’s blindspots: policy that favors the status quo is not a “free market” even though capital frequently favors the status quo, policy can be changed, the policy change does not have to backfire, academics and activists aren’t 100% wrong about everything all the time, Sowell does not have a monopoly on “truth”. It also supports one of his favorite themes: facts are better than rhetoric, and you shouldn’t put decisions in the hands of someone paid by those interested in that decision to shill for their preference.

So in a few subsequent stories, I’m going to review some of the more popular Sowell quotes, using these categories

1. Unsupported assertion
2. Undefined term
3. Dig at government generally
4. Dig at “bureaucrats”
5. Dig at “politicians”
6. Dig at “teachers” or “academics”
7. Dig at “people”
8. Response to “they”, “those who”, etc. Anonymous interlocutors whose statements we can’t verify. Possible strawmen
9. Sowell’s personal relationship with “truth”
10. Hyperbole
11. Ad hominem, name-calling, or emotional language
12. Opinion stated as fact
13. Very clever, too clever by half
14. Suppressed context
15. Rhetoric of Reaction: Futility, Perversity, Jeopardy
16. Market infallibility
17. Unlikely hypothetical / counterfactual

For the first one,

“The endlessly repeated argument that most Americans are the descendants of immigrants ignores the fact most Americans are NOT the descendants of ILLEGAL immigrants.”

This quote usually leaves out the next part: “Millions of immigrants from Europe had to stop at Ellis Island and had to meet medical and other criteria before being allowed to go any further.”

Source: “Random Thoughts”

I’ve written about this at some length. The second part is misleading: yes, millions of immigrants had to stop and meet criteria. During the lifetime of Ellis Island, the rejection rate was somewhere between 0.5% and 3%, but usually around 1.5%. If you didn’t have open sores and could claim at least “laborer” as 65% of the people coming through did, you were good to go.

The first part of the quote is basically meaningless. Ellis Island didn’t open until 1891. Prior to 1875, anyone could enter the country. Between 1875 and 1882, Chinese women were restricted. After 1882, only Chinese were restricted from entry. Many, however, did enter the country (including both Chinese and European rejects from Ellis Island) because entry from the Americas was unrestricted until 1965 and all you had to do was come in through Canada, Mexico, or Cuba. Even after the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act closed the door, many Europeans came in illegally but were given bureaucratic waivers (dried out, paroled, etc.). Saying that you were not the descendant of ILLEGAL immigrants for the vast number of US citizens whose ancestors entered the country in their grandparents time or earlier is like saying your great grandfather never got a speeding ticket or OSHA violation — true, but trivially true since OSHA and speeding tickets didn’t exist in his day.

So this falls into the following categories:

1 Unsupported assertion: Sowell evidently doesn’t know about the history of immigration laws

2 Undefined terms: doesn’t define ILLEGAL immigrant

8 Anonymous interlocutor: who is endlessly repeating the argument?

9 Tom’s personal relationship with the truth: Tom knows not to ignore the “fact”

10 Hyperbole: endlessly

11 Ad hominem: capitalization of ILLEGAL

12 Opinion states as fact: Tom doesn’t appear to know what “meet medical and other criteria” means, or that there were ways around it

13 Too clever by half: the statement is trivially true and therefore meaningless

14 Suppressed context: As I note in the linked article, the history of US immigration shows how wrong he is

16: On immigration, Sowell’s normal assumption of market infallibility seems to vanish, and he believes that government regulation is required. This seems to be a position that he moved to later in life.