Thomas Sowell Turns 90

Thomas Sowell is like a bottomless well of statistics and historical knowledge, so it’s tough to distill all of the information I’ve learned from him. In honor of his birthday I thought I would make a list of five things he has taught me and many others over his long career.

1) “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.”

People are flawed and every solution we come up with causes new problems. No one can predict the future and there are always intended and unintended consequences of actions. Choices in life simply have larger or smaller lists of pros and cons, and we usually see these most clearly in hindsight. The best we can do is give people as much personal freedom as possible until it infringes on the next person’s freedom, as decided by laws agreed to by society.

2) Some of the most deadly and dangerous movements in societies happened because academics tossed around their theories, right or wrong, with or without evidence, and regular people later latched on to them. The academics could continue on unscathed because they didn’t have to live in the segment of society that was most affected by their ideas.

3) Regular people who work in their industries/farms/neighborhoods usually have a better idea of what is going on in those areas than government bureaucrats who study them.

4) The loudest voices in a group do not always reflect the sentiments of the majority of that group.

5) Affirmative Action creates higher acceptance rates of minorities on college campuses, but lower graduation rates. These students are often academically mismatched with elite colleges where most white students couldn’t compete when they could have done very well at other prestigious colleges where their academic record could have gotten them in without Affirmative Action. Many minority students (who could make it into elite institutions without Affirmative Action) thrive there. Sadly, many who couldn’t qualify without affirmative action end up losing confidence in their academic abilities and dropping out from colleges they are mismatched with due to the program instead of finding a school for which they are better suited.