Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society

welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson be sure to follow us on twitter at twitter.com/usembassymanila and social policy at such institutions as cornell UCLA and amherst the author of more than a dozen books dr. Sol is now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution his newest work intellectuals and society Tom we'll begin with a quotation then candidate Barack Obama in July 2008 quote it's like these guys Republicans take pride in being ignorant they should go talk to some experts and actually make a difference close quote well talking to experts does make a difference many of the great disasters of our time have been committed by experts you may remember FDR's brain trust which according to later studies prolong the depression by several years the whiz kids in the pentagon under McNamara who managed to mess up through the Vietnam War you can run through an impressive list of things of disasters brought about by people with very high IQs all right segment one the species of the intellectual when you refer to intellectuals in intellectuals in society whom do you mean I mean people whose end products are ideas there are other people people with great intelligence whose end products are things like the Salk vaccine there are research scientist is not necessarily an intellect but right an engineer isn't necessarily intellectual that's right because the engineer is judged to by the end product which is not simply ideas if he builds a building that collapses it doesn't matter how brilliant his idea was or he's ruined conversely if an intellectual who's brilliant has an eyes an idea to for rearranging society and that ends in disaster he pays no price at all I see let me quote a intellectuals in society quote the fatal misstep of intellectuals is assuming that superior ability within a particular realm can be generalized as superior wisdom or morality overall chess grandmasters musical prodigies and others who are as remarkable within their respective specialties as intellectuals within theirs seldom make that mistake explain that why would it well let's take an example Noam Chomsky whom you write about in intellectuals in society whose work in linguistics in the first place I can't understand it but as best I can tell everyone be one what exactly everyone who understands his technical work within the field within his discipline of linguistics considers him one of the great figures of the 20th century and his work in politics absurdity the same could be said of Bertrand Russell and his and his lamb walk works on them on mathematics and other people in other fields but they step outside their field and when you step outside you're a level of specialty sometimes that's like stepping off a cliff and why is it that intellectuals that is to say people whose end product is ideas should succumb to that temptation more than to use your example a chess grandmaster because a chess grandmaster can be world famous for doing absolutely nothing more than winning chess tournaments and making displays as many of them do of playing five chess games simultaneously while blindfolded so Bobby Fischer had no need to opine on the politics of the day because he was getting rich and famous and making a brilliant career for himself within his narrow profession right that's right but intellectuals what they think well they light they languish in obscurity well well the whole question of when is someone well known or not came up during the visit of Jim Jim Flint from New Zealand here a few years ago he's one of the world's authorities on IQ tests mm-hmm uh people you know in India know about Jim Flynn people in England he's go he made world two uh but I doubt if the people in the next block from where he lives knows who we know who he is I see all right it is far easier to constant again I'm quoting from intellectuals in society it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge yes what bearing has that got on the influence that intellectuals have over society as a whole because they believe that since knowledge is concentrated people like themselves what needs to be done is a quote from them from President Obama is to put more power in the hands of the experts so the intellectual temptation is to say look we already know everything that's right if only we also had the power all the power yes everything would be just fine yes and what's wrong with that view why isn't that a sensible view one they don't know everything they don't have they don't know one-tenth of everything in fact I have argued that they did they probably don't know one percent of the consequential knowledge and a society consequential knowledge is a is it a concept that runs through this book explain that concept knowledge whose presence or absence has consequences serious consequences I mean I was once in a plane that was coming down for a landing in the Ithaca Airport and settlement a pilot gunned the motor and went up again because someone in the control tower and remind him that he had low at lowered his landing gear so that was consequential knowledge right yes I just delighted that that person that we had had his eyes open and as the mind on his work so the notion here is that the kind of knowledge the kind of consequential knowledge required to prove effective in governing a nation of such as the United States with the biggest economy in the world 300 million people you can put together quite a large group of professors and they're still not going to possess the knowledge that would enable them to run General Motors for example or to run the nation's healthcare system for example oh absolutely in fact one of the one of the things that has happened all around the world in the twentieth century was that all sorts of countries have tried central planning now the guys has run the central plan they usually have Vence degree from prestigious institutions they have mountains of Statistics uh sitting there and they have all the experts in the country at their beck and call and yet when you take the power out of their hands and return to the market that all the hundreds of millions of people who don't have any of those things usually end up with a higher rate of growth and a more rapidly rapid decline in poverty because consequential knowledge by its nature tends to be diffused widely diffused yes yeah segment two intellectuals in economics we were already touched on this two quotations number one Paul Krugman quote rising income inequality isn't new but what happened under Bush was something entirely unprecedented for the first time in our history so much growth was being siphoned off to a small wealthy minority that most Americans were failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth close quote second quotation dr. Thomas soul in intellectuals in society quote the statistics that the intelligentsia keeps citing are much more consistent with their vision of America than the statistics they keep ignoring close quote that's not that's a tough encapsulate but the basic confusion is between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood people it's true that if you look at the percentage of the income that went to the top 20% and some year a and then later on a decade later you'll find that that percentage is going up and you say well that shows the disparity between the people what if the rich are getting richer but you're getting richer right but when you when you follow statistics generated by the Internal Revenue Service which can follow particular individuals over time you find the people who are in the bottom 20% of taxpayers in the first year their income is nearly double about about this later period while the income of the people who are initially at the top is increased by last and you get down to the very top is actually going down so that people are simply moving between these brackets from year to year and the number of people who are in the bottom 20% let's say in 1975 who are still there in 1991 is 5% of them really 29% of them have already got all the way the top absolute majority are in the top half and so you're comparing what happens to these abstract categories rather than what's happening to actual flesh-and-blood people so there's an enormous amount of churn and dynamic nosh within the America and almost everybody's own own personal life I mean look at what what were you making when you were 20 years old compared to what you'll be when you were 40 negative I was spending my parents money when I was talking all right okay so why would the intellectuals what you've just made is an intellectually rigorous case why would an intellectual as you use the term below to look at that intellectually rigorous argument below the examine the data the way you did well he's happy with the data that he got while why would he examine why would he go further he looks at the numbers the numbers say what do you what he thinks it should say hey that's it we then he moves on to the next Great Crusade intellectuals in society once again the very phrase income distribution is tendentious wealth can be created only after capital and labor have reconciled their competing claims and agreed to terms on which they can operate together in the production of wealth close quote income distribution the very phrase is tendentious how come income is not distributed I mean not newspapers are just distributed Social Security checks are distributed and one-time milk was distributed income is not distributed people earn it directly but far from from those to whom they provide some good good good or service and the argument made by many people who see is that it's a question of capital and labor if cata have conflicting interests and in dividing up the income like no no there is no income to divide up before they first reconcile their conflicting interests and decide on what terms they're going to produce that income are there there is no pre-exists is no manna from heaven for them to fight over you make the point what I'm coming to is the economic crisis that we went through 18 months ago but we'll start with the Great Depression where all discussions of economic crises should start probably and you make the point that there are too large features of the Great Depression one was the stock market crash and the other was the enormous government intervention which began under Herbert Hoover and continued and expanded under FDR but began under began quickly in other words yes and so you said if you have two large facts here it's a very good question which actually caused or prolonged the Great Depression and it's a question that very few intellectuals actually examine well one way of examining it would be to just look at look at the time period how the stock market crash occurred in October 1929 now there's data on unemployment month by month two months after the stock market crash unemployment peaked at 9% it then began to decline irregularly until about six point three percent by June of 1930 indicating the economy was attempting to recover yeah I'm jealous right in June 1930 the government stepped in with his first massive intervention with a smoot-hawley Tariff pairs despite a public appeal by more than a thousand economists the leading universities saying don't do it they did it anyway shows how much influence economists have within six months after that unemployment hit double digits for the first time and it never came down for the remainder of the decade for even for one month and so the stock market crash brought you up to 9% and that was starting to fizzle out the government steps in to help and I had that his double digits and he eventually got got up to a peak of 25% and it didn't fizzle out until the end of the decade all right listen to a list and then I'll ask you a question chairman of the Fed Benjamin burr Matt Bernanke BA at Harvard PhD at MIT professor of economics at Princeton director of the National Economic Council Lawrence Summers undergraduate degree MIT doctor at Harvard youngers tenured professor of economics in harvard history eventually president of Harvard Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner a Dartmouth MA Johns Hopkins he's the under performer in the group how did this group of intellectuals acquit themselves in handling this the nation's economic crisis in 2008 well first of all they didn't handle it the politicians handle it ah and so even if you were to say that these guys really could a great job had they had the unbridled power and so forth they don't have the unbridled power one of the problems with experts is that experts are hired by other people and so you never know what the expert would have done in fact there was an article in The Wall Street Journal some time back that what the policies that are being followed in Washington are the direct opposite of the policies that summer was advocated when he published before he got to watch right right so so we should never assume that experts are just people spittin they're supplying information to politicians were trying to do good so surely though the intellectuals had some the notion that the government should step in is a hangover from the understanding of what took place during the New Deal right oh yes okay so in other words the intellectuals the politicians are acting within it within a world of options that intellectuals have created over the decades yeah right and are you impressed by that the intellectual framework though that no are all right segment three intellectuals and vision intellectuals in society the vision around which most contemporary intellectuals tend to coalesce has features that distinguish it from other visions privileged prevalent in other segments of contemporary society or among elites or masses in earlier times close quote what is the vision to which contemporary intellectuals subscribe that intellectuals should influence if not control the kinds of decisions in a bayesian society and more especially that they should promote the transfer of decisions from the from the masses to those who have quote more intellect and what am what I'm given how I conceive of knowledge being its distribution that would mean transferring decisions from where there's 99% of the knowledge to where there's 1% of the knowledge against that background is not at all surprising that things like central planning simply don't produce as good results as allowing all the millions of people to react in the marketplace all right let me ask you a question that came in from Twitter Travis ate one for all these questions are limited to 140 characters so get ready it's coming at you but it'll go fast why does the liberal progressive mindset have such a stranglehold within the intellectual academic world why should the vision that you just described be so prevalent among intellectuals well among the many reasons most academic intellectuals have no experience no serious experience outside the Academy I mean every night I remember I once I was once in the conference for a tea when it was the world's largest corporation and when I returned to the academic world they welcomed me as the prodigal son you see in return from the evils of corporate America to the true Nirvana of academia so and not only do they have no experience they have every incentive to believe that they are brighter than other people and no more than other people because they've been told that all their lives I mean you become a top intellectual because you pass through all these successive filters you got into the best colleges you've gotten into the best graduate schools or even from second grade on the teachers are responding to you as a kid who passes test yes yes and so you have all of that your background you write in intellectuals in society if you happen to believe in free markets judicial restraint traditional values and other features of what you call the tragic vision there's no personal exaltation arising from those beliefs but if but to be for social justice and saving the environment puts you on a higher moral plane yes so the question here is can it really be that simple that intellectuals across the American landscape tend to embrace the vision that you've described surely out of self flattery and self pleading this it is don't we as human beings have any no much power of rationalization think of all the absurd things have been believed throughout all of history and I guess the one common denominator is that those absurd things typically were very flattering to those who believe them they had the one true faith they were the vanguard of the proletariat you know you just run through the whole list of the things by the way I've been reading some marks I can't understand how anyone ever took that seriously I mean ever took it seriously well what do you read sentence by sentence it's oh well I actually began with the communist manifesto that he and angles always it's a magnificent oh if you want a model for propaganda it is it is it is the masterpiece but there's not there's no there's actually absolutely no contact with actual economic reality no there's no need for that as as many people are showing you can become president United States with no contact with economic reality all right two quotations intellectuals in society quote the intelligence you often divide people into those who are for change and those who are for the status quo yes candidate Barack Obama we are the change we have been waiting for yes Tom uh uh people who say things like this act as if they're saying simply do this is what was being said back in the 1790s and ever since they're you know that there's nothing older than the idea that this is new and it's Thomas Paine we have it in our power to make the world over there you are but in point of fact there's this dude again this is one of those totally unquestioned and unsubstantiated statements John Dewey you're saying you know that may the same thing some sixty years ago that those of us who are for change have to fight against those who for the status quo now the people he was talking about people like Adam Smith Adam Smith was not for the status quo of course as I mentioned in the book why would Adam Smith spend a whole decade writing a 900-page book to say how contented he was with the way things were I mean when you spend a decade writing a 900-page book something is bugging you know anyone who ever bought of the readout of Smith was seated here is pretty ticked off about a lot of once again two quotations you quote at a number of points in intellectuals in society you quote justice Oliver Wendell Holmes here's one of them as justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said the word right is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls and a constant solicitation to fallacy that's quotation one here's quotation to Barack Obama quote health care should be a right for every American close quote well it is the fallacy though it's a the word right it's amazing yeah and in one sense I can I can't simply cannot explain it people say we have a right to affordable housing decent health care they're right all kinds of stuff and the questions where did this right come from it's by the way I it is literally the case that I heard on the radio the other day one of the questions in health care is plastic surgery not whether it'll be taxed or but I literally heard someone say that women have a right to Botox treatments yeah you all just thought I'd mention that for you yes well but what is that's no more arbitrary than all the other things that are called rights right now we're going to have this trial of these terrorists in a court of law which is absolutely unprecedented absolutely absurd and questions way to that right come from well it's not in the Constitution it is certainly not the Geneva Convention uh-uh-uh it's just that by loose thinking people say well prisoners of war get treated that way yes they're not prisoners of war the Geneva Convention said what prisoners of war were people who were here to the Geneva Convention get the protections of it but during the Second World War when some German soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge put on American uniforms infiltrated the u.s. line and they were captured it was simply lined up against the wall and shot and killed right there and it was not something secret the army filmed it I've seen the films on the History Channel really there was no question if you don't play by the rules you don't get the protection the rules it's that simple right this leads us to segments for intellectuals in war if from intellectuals in society discussing the role intellectuals played between the two world wars quote one of the most remarkable developments of the 1920s was an international movement among intellectuals promoting the idea that nations could get together and publicly renounce war what were they thinking I guess they weren't thinking they were reacting they were reacting to the horrors of the first world war which most of those intellectuals had supported by the way and now and now they decide no that was so awful we just renounce war there's no thought that yes you can renounce war and does not stop your neighbor from building up the biggest army in the world and coming in and killing you it's this much much like this it's much like the thinking about gun control you know that you say well this is I I don't think people should have good hey I wish people didn't have guns but the fact is that passing a law does not stop them from having guns it just makes you defenseless one of the things I think I mentioned in there in passing is that in Britain the burglary rate is far higher than the United States and moreover British burglars do not case the place before they go in now if you're in the United States and you're gonna bust into someone's house at night you may be met by a hail of books in Britain they have made they have made burglary a safe occupation it's like it's like OSHA for burglars right vietnam intellectuals in society again among the many implications of the war in vietnam was that it once again illuminated the role of the intelligentsia in influencing the policies of a society and the course of history close quote we didn't lose the war the intellectuals surrendered on our behalf yes back to the Communists themselves in later years admitted that there was no way they could have defeated the United States on the battlefield that in fact that the Tet Offensive which was the turning point that the communist guerrilla movement was virtually wiped out in the south but the intellectuals saw that as a victory for the Communists and the war was unwinnable and once a democratic country decides that a war is unwinnable it becomes unwinnable right now Tom what's the Vietnam raises a point that just has to be addressed and that is that the special place of intellectuals in the Democratic Party isn't that fair point that the Democratic Party became at least as regards the Vietnam more became wholly influenced by the by intellectual opinion correct yes how long but but it's also true the 'true that Nixon was and not not your history because you know here's the thing Machiavelli thought of intellectuals as influencing events by influencing the rulers and changing their minds that now that isn't the role as we attempt clearly showed Nexen didn't care a damn for the intellectuals right but they created a climate of opinion and which if he continued that war he would pay too high a political price so he threw South Vietnam to the Wolves signed a negotiated agreement they love and they want negotiated agreements it doesn't matter what it says so long as you sign it and you win the Nobel Prize who cares if a few million people get killed in the aftermath what's the transmission mechanism from intellectual opinion to the larger climate of opinion this is where the media comes in oh there are many own a transmission belts I mean the schools all from from the elementary school right up through the graduate schools the media now increasingly the treasures even treasure that we think of as conservative are out there pushing on the liberal agenda intellectuals in the Cold War again intellectuals in society you're talking about Edward Kennedy Senator Edward Kennedy was a leading voice for the nuclear freeze joined by many other prominent political figures and by many in the media close quote now this nuclear freeze movement reaches its most potent moment just as Ronald Reagan is setting in place the policies that actually into the cold end the Cold War yes how come why why do they why do they that but that this goes way way back into at least the 20s the idea that an arms race is wrong and it not only wrong but is dangerous that that will lead to war and of course the the counter evidence again like like so many things that intellectuals believe it is not subjected to any kind of empirical test because we're between the two world wars you had all these arms agreements and renunciations of or and although that just encouraged the access power to feel they could win it win this war because the West was too gullible to arm themselves and defend themselves Tom we're talking about the Cold War what do you make of it that Harry Truman who puts in place the containment the fundamental structures of containment that remain in place for over four decades Harry Truman takes office was vice president for less than a year before taking office assumes the Soviet Union is our ally because that was the idea and has within a year he discovers that in fact they have aggressive intentions he changes and constructs America containment in my judgment he said he's a kind of heroic figure I would argue and I think you agree with it and then at the what so he begins our position in the Cold War he stands up to the Soviets and Ronald Reagan is the one who ends it now here's let me let me tell you about this the educational background Harry Truman finished high school yes Ronald Reagan's college degree comes not from some ancient Eastern University such as those where you studied but from little Eureka College set in the farming towns of central Illinois is that significant it may well be uh because then they didn't have to fight off all the nonsense that they would would have been taught at these very prestigious institutions intellectuals in Iraq you quote in intellectuals in society you quote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman quote to understand what's happening in Iraq follow the oil money which already knows that the surge has failed ah yes so the surge well the surge worked of course Paul Krugman was just plain wrong yeah so what did he think he was doing Oh trying to explain other people is very tough uh I mean it's in some senses I mean I am often baffled why why didn't Ares summers you know try to hang on at Harvard that man had millions he could have he could have stood up and said what he thought the whole notion of people being independently wealthy is very shaky for me because there are people out there with multi-millions who are afraid to speak thereby right and there are other people who could barely make the rent who'll say you know just just what they're thinking right all right segment 5 intellectuals and the rest of us again intellectuals in society there is a spontaneous demand from the larger society for the end products of engineering medical and scientific professions but the demand for public intellectuals is largely manufactured by the public intellectuals themselves yes explain that how do they manufacture demand for their own services well the one one thing is by US making alarming predictions offering solutions to our problems and they didn't do that if Nam Chomsky had just kept on stated in linguistics neither of us probably would have ever heard of nob Chomsky he would have been just as famous around the world among linguists but what nobody else would have heard of him what do you make of global warming I think it's a classic example of the need for Crusades now people have many people shocked by these emails that matter all shocked by them I read I read the original UN study years ago and I was just curious as to how they were going to deal with the question that the temperatures went up first and then there was the increase in cover not carbon dioxide right because you can't say that a causes B if B happened first and so I read this and I could see they what they were tiptoeing through the tulips and the way they phrased things and so forth they couldn't confront that and and now we're finding out that they they new dawn well they couldn't deal with all the evidence so it fits the pattern of a group of intellectuals science climate scientists who are have a very narrow competency suddenly proclaiming that there's a crisis scaring the rest of us thereby creating a demand for their services not as science climate scientists alone but as a kind of high priestly caste that can tell us all how to live and save the entire planet and in the meantime generate billions of dollars worth of government programs to fund their research initiatives and so are you it's a racket yes all right but but again you have to take account of the ability of human beings to rationalize I'm sure there are science out there who believe some are all much of what they're saying and their other sign in scientists who believe the opposite but the ones who are pushing global warming are doing their damnedest to make sure that those who believe the opposite don't get heard in that public so wouldn't there shouldn't there be a Sun large-ish body of climate scientists who say the data really does suggest that we're headed into trouble here but precisely because my saying so as a climate scientist will look like special pleading I we as a community of scientists should be even more careful about being completely transparent pushing the data out to the public they should overcome the hurdle that it looks like self pleading why isn't that taking place there's no payoff to that all right imagine yourself as an assistant professor in some department where the co where your senior colleagues we're going to vote on your pay among other things I have millions of dollars in grants hand it out to promote global warming and you say just watch what you've just now said and they'll say that's this guy is incorrigible all right Tom what explains the exceptions during the 1930s intellectual left intellectual after intellectual visits Russia and says this is the land of the future oh and Malcolm Muggeridge and a handful of others but a tiny number of other intellectuals say no it isn't Stalin as a barbarian after the Great Depression the entire economics did profession is dominated by John Maynard Keynes yes and then along comes Milton Friedman and he just won't have it what explains these these exceptions within among intellectuals who stand up that's for another book for somebody else to write in the end the premise I mentioned that I thought I'll have very little to say about Milton Friedman president nod not because he's not one of the most important people in the twentieth century but because he is such an exception to the general pattern that I'm trying to explain I will leave it someone else to figure out all right let me try to ask you to figure out one other one other exception I'm going to go at you one more time on this one listen to this Barack Obama holds degrees from Columbia and Harvard and taught at the University of Chicago Thomas soul who like Barack Obama emerges from the African American experience in this country BA from Harvard MA from Columbia PhD from Chicago and has taught at Howard Brandeis UCLA Cornell and Amherst what accounts for the difference in visions Barack Obama and Thomas soul oh my gosh you were ever this is like trying to account for every sparrows fall I will we under wings - pretty consequential sparrows well here--here's at least but uh no you can't it's it's hard enough to account for general patterns when you get down to the individual you would have to know so much more than any of us has ever known and we'll probably know for the next thousand years at least alright Bill Buckley quote I would rather be governed by the first four hundred names in the Boston telephone book than by the Faculty of Harvard close quote very nice encapsulation right of the impulse you'd hope that most Americans would show you're suspicious of the experts when Bill Buckley made that remark in the 1960s roughly 9% of Americans held college degrees today the figure is 29% and rising because roughly half of high school graduates go to college the first four hundred names in the Boston telephone book today are likely to include a large number of heart of Harvard graduates and Harvard professors the question here is simple are we becoming a nation of intellectuals I hadn't thought of that daily business it's a chilling thought because we're becoming a nation of people who are propagandize from elementary school right on through to the Graduate School in a certain vision of the world and only the ones who one reason or another either experience or insight or whatever leads them to say wait a minute only those are the ones we have to depend on last question if you had a sentence or two to say to the cabinet assembled around President Obama and this cabinet holds glittering degrees from one impressive institution after another if you could beseech them to be conduct themselves in one particular way between now and the time they all leave office what would you say actually I would say only one word goodbye because I know there's no point talking to them it's like it's like asking you how what would I say to the head of the Mafia to get him to give up crime it wouldn't be a thing I could say to him all right I give up crime I make a thousand times what you do why should I give up crime dr. Thomas sole author of intellectuals in society thank you very much and happy new year thank you and happy New Year to you I'm Peter Robinson for uncommon knowledge and the Hoover Institution thanks for joining us

Channel: Hoover Institution

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Length: 36min 33sec (2193 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2009